Two Year Summary of the Performance of Finishing Pigs in Hoop Structures and Confinement During Winter and Summer

Finishing pigs were fed for two years in bedded hoop structures and a confinement building with slotted floors in central Iowa. When summer and winter feeding periods for two years were combined, the trials showed that the finishing pigs in hoops ate more feed, grew faster, and required more feed per unit of liveweight gain than confinement pigs. The mortality rate was similar and percentage of culls was higher for hoops compared with confinement. Also, the hoop pigs were fatter with smaller loin muscle area and a lower percentage of carcass lean and carcass yield compared with confinement pigs. The efficiency of lean gain was also poorer for the hoop pigs. Because the hoops are cold structures, there were seasonal effects. The hoop pigs ate more feed, particularly in the winter, grew faster in the summer, and were less efficient particularly in the winter than the confinement pigs. The hoop pigs were fatter in the summer only and less efficient in converting feed to lean in the winter only. Also the hoop pigs had a greater incidence of roundworm infestations particularly in the later trials, in spite of a thorough deworming regimen. Therefore, hoop pigs may need to be fed diets somewhat differently than the diets fed to confinement pigs to optimize lean growth, and the control of internal parasites in hoop pigs may need to be more aggressive than in confinement. Bedding use was approximately 220 lb per pig on a year round basis. Approximately 204 lb of bedding was used in summer and approximately 236 lb of bedding was used in winter

Distributed Management of Massive Data: an Efficient Fine-Grain Data Access Scheme

This paper addresses the problem of efficiently storing and accessing massive data blocks in a large-scale distributed environment, while providing efficient fine-grain access to data subsets. This issue is crucial in the context of applications in the field of databases, data mining and multimedia. We propose a data sharing service based on distributed, RAM-based storage of data, while leveraging a DHT-based, natively parallel metadata management scheme. As opposed to the most commonly used grid storage infrastructures that provide mechanisms for explicit data localization and transfer, we provide a transparent access model, where data are accessed through global identifiers. Our proposal has been validated through a prototype implementation whose preliminary evaluation provides promising results

'Surely the most natural scenario in the world’: Representations of ‘Family’ in BBC Pre-school Television

Historically, the majority of work on British children’s television has adopted either an institutional or an audience focus, with the texts themselves often overlooked. This neglect has meant that questions of representation in British children’s television – including issues such as family, gender, class or ethnicity - have been infrequently analysed in the UK context. In this article, we adopt a primarily qualitative methodology and analyse the various textual manifestations of ‘family’, group, or community as represented in a selected number of BBC pre-school programmes. In doing so, we question the (limited amount of) international work that has examined representations of the family in children’s television, and argue that nuclear family structures do not predominate in this sphere

Oxalate-Induced Damage to Renal Tubular Cells

Our own studies and those of others have shown that the incidence of calcium oxalate stones and plaques is markedly increased by nephrotoxins. The possible role of oxalate as a nephrotoxin has not been fully appreciated. However, recent studies in experimental animals and in cultured cells support this possibility. The results of these studies led us to hypothesize that hyperoxaluria promotes stone formation in several ways: by providing a substrate for the formation of the most common form of renal stones, calcium oxalate stones, and by inducing damage to renal epithelial cells. Damaged cells in turn would produce an environment favorable for crystal retention and provide membranous debris that promotes crystal nucleation, aggregation and adherence. The present report summarizes evidence for oxalate nephrotoxicity and discusses the potential importance of oxalate toxicity in the pathogenesis of stone disease

Gad65 is recognized by t-cells, but not by antibodies from nod-mice

Since the 64kDa-protein glutamic acid decarboxylase (GAD) is one of the major autoantigens in T-cell mediated Type 1 diabetes, its relevance as a T-cell antigen needs to be clarified. After isolation of splenic T-cells from non-obese diabetic (NOD) mice, a useful model for human Type 1 diabetes, we found that these T-cells proliferate spontaneously when incubated with human GAD65, but only marginally after incubation with GAD67, both recombinated in the baculovirus system. No effect was observed with non-diabetic NOD mice or with T-cells from H-2 identical NON-NOD-H-2g7 control mice. It has been published previously that NOD mice develop autoantibodies against a 64kDa protein detected with mouse beta cells. In immunoprecipitation experiments with sera from the same NOD mice and 33S-methionine-labelled GAD, no autoantibody binding could be detected. We conclude firstly that GAD65 is an important T-cell antigen which is relevant early in the development of Type 1 diabetes and secondly that there is an antigenic epitope in the human GAD65 molecule recognized by NOD T-cells, but not by NOD autoantibodies precipitating conformational epitopes. Our results therefore provide further evidence that GAD65 is a T-cell antigen in NOD mice, being possibly also involved in very early processes leading to the development of human Type 1 diabetes

Upscaling of Long-Term U(VI) Desorption from Pore Scale Kinetics to Field-Scale Reactive Transport Models

The focus of the project is the development of scientifically defensible approaches for upscaling reactive transport models (RTM) through a detailed understanding of U(VI) desorption across several spatial scales: bench-, intermediate-, and field-scales. The central hypothesis of the project is that the development of this methodology will lead to a scientifically defensible approach for conceptual model development for multicomponent RTM at contaminated DOE sites, leading to predictive transport simulations with reduced uncertainty