A MARKET OPPORTUNITY STUDY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW SPORT HORSE SERVICE AT THE MSU VETERINARY TEACHING HOSPITAL

The potential need for several new services within the Veterinary Teaching Hospital (VTH) is unknown. However, based on focus groups and practitioner surveys conducted over the last several years, potential new services were identified: overnight emergency, behavior medicine, equine sports medicine, dentistry, oncology and exotic animal medicine. Michigan State University's College of Veterinary Medicine (MSU-CVM) has recently expanded its equine research, diagnostic and therapy capabilities with the addition of the new Mary Anne McPhail Equine Performance Center. As a result of this expansion, a study was conducted to determine whether the VTH should also broaden its clinical offerings with a new complement of services targeted specifically toward sport horse care.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

PROJECT REPORT: A MARKET OPPORTUNITY STUDY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF A NEW ONCOLOGY SERVICE IN THE VETERINARY TEACHING HOSPITAL

Current trends in veterinary medicine indicate the potential need for several new services within the VTH. Based on focus groups and practitioner surveys conducted in late 1998 and early 1999, potential new services could include oncology, overnight emergency, behavior medicine, dentistry, equine sports medicine and exotic animal medicine. Of these, an oncology service is currently being considered based on internal staff recommendations coupled with survey and focus group information supporting demand for the service. Different from past new services, the oncology service was also earmarked to undergo a formal market study to determine the full potential of the opportunity and to more clearly establish the goals and objectives within the service.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Dynamics of myosin, microtubules, and Kinesin-6 at the cortex during cytokinesis in Drosophila S2 cells

© The Authors, 2009 . This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License. The definitive version was published in Journal of Cell Biology 186 (2009): 727-738, doi:10.1083/jcb.200902083.Signals from the mitotic spindle during anaphase specify the location of the actomyosin contractile ring during cytokinesis, but the detailed mechanism remains unresolved. Here, we have imaged the dynamics of green fluorescent protein–tagged myosin filaments, microtubules, and Kinesin-6 (which carries activators of Rho guanosine triphosphatase) at the cell cortex using total internal reflection fluorescence microscopy in flattened Drosophila S2 cells. At anaphase onset, Kinesin-6 relocalizes to microtubule plus ends that grow toward the cortex, but refines its localization over time so that it concentrates on a subset of stable microtubules and along a diffuse cortical band at the equator. The pattern of Kinesin-6 localization closely resembles where new myosin filaments appear at the cortex by de novo assembly. While accumulating at the equator, myosin filaments disappear from the poles of the cell, a process that also requires Kinesin-6 as well as possibly other signals that emanate from the elongating spindle. These results suggest models for how Kinesin-6 might define the position of cortical myosin during cytokinesis.This work was supported by a National Institutes of Health grant NIH 38499 to R.D. Vale

Fiscal Paradise: Foreign Tax Havens and American Business

The offshore tax haven affiliates of American corporations account for more than a quarter of US foreign investment, an nearly a third of the foreign profits of US firms. This paper analyzes the origins of this tax haven activity and its implications for the US and foreign governments. Based on the behavior of US fins in 1982, it appears that American companies report extraordinarily high profit rates on both their real and their financial investments in tax havens. We calculate from this behavior that the tax rate that maximizes tax revenue for a typical haven is around 6%. The revenue implications for the US are more complicated, since tax havens may ultimately enhance the ability of the US government to tax the foreign earnings of American companies.

Intrinsic Fluctuations and Driven Response of Insect Swarms

Animals of all sizes form groups, as acting together can convey advantages over acting alone; thus, collective animal behavior has been identified as a promising template for designing engineered systems. However, models and observations have focused predominantly on characterizing the overall group morphology, and often focus on highly ordered groups such as bird flocks. We instead study a disorganized aggregation (an insect mating swarm), and compare its natural fluctuations with the group-level response to an external stimulus. We quantify the swarm’s frequency-dependent linear response and its spectrum of intrinsic fluctuations, and show that the ratio of these two quantities has a simple scaling with frequency. Our results provide a new way of comparing models of collective behavior with experimental data

Two generalizations of Kohonen clustering

The relationship between the sequential hard c-means (SHCM), learning vector quantization (LVQ), and fuzzy c-means (FCM) clustering algorithms is discussed. LVQ and SHCM suffer from several major problems. For example, they depend heavily on initialization. If the initial values of the cluster centers are outside the convex hull of the input data, such algorithms, even if they terminate, may not produce meaningful results in terms of prototypes for cluster representation. This is due in part to the fact that they update only the winning prototype for every input vector. The impact and interaction of these two families with Kohonen's self-organizing feature mapping (SOFM), which is not a clustering method, but which often leads ideas to clustering algorithms is discussed. Then two generalizations of LVQ that are explicitly designed as clustering algorithms are presented; these algorithms are referred to as generalized LVQ = GLVQ; and fuzzy LVQ = FLVQ. Learning rules are derived to optimize an objective function whose goal is to produce 'good clusters'. GLVQ/FLVQ (may) update every node in the clustering net for each input vector. Neither GLVQ nor FLVQ depends upon a choice for the update neighborhood or learning rate distribution - these are taken care of automatically. Segmentation of a gray tone image is used as a typical application of these algorithms to illustrate the performance of GLVQ/FLVQ

Image segmentation using fuzzy LVQ clustering networks

In this note we formulate image segmentation as a clustering problem. Feature vectors extracted from a raw image are clustered into subregions, thereby segmenting the image. A fuzzy generalization of a Kohonen learning vector quantization (LVQ) which integrates the Fuzzy c-Means (FCM) model with the learning rate and updating strategies of the LVQ is used for this task. This network, which segments images in an unsupervised manner, is thus related to the FCM optimization problem. Numerical examples on photographic and magnetic resonance images are given to illustrate this approach to image segmentation

Earthquake Slip Between Dissimilar Poroelastic Materials

A mismatch of elastic properties across a fault induces normal stress changes during spatially nonuniform in-plane slip. Recently, Rudnicki and Rice showed that similar effects follow from a mismatch of poroelastic properties (e.g., permeability) within fluid-saturated fringes of damaged material along the fault walls; in this case, it is pore pressure on the slip plane and hence effective normal stress that is altered during slip. The sign of both changes can be either positive or negative, and they need not agree. Both signs reverse when rupture propagates in the opposite direction. When both elastic and poroelastic properties are discontinuous across the fault, steady sliding at a constant friction coefficient, f, is unstable for arbitrarily small f if the elastic mismatch permits the existence of a generalized Rayleigh wave. Spontaneous earthquake rupture simulations on regularized slip-weakening faults confirm that the two effects have comparable magnitudes and that the sign of the effective normal stress change cannot always be predicted solely from the contrast in elastic properties across the fault. For opposing effects, the sign of effective normal stress change reverses from that predicted by the poroelastic mismatch to that predicted by the elastic mismatch as the rupture accelerates, provided that the wave speed contrast exceeds about 5–10% (the precise value depends on the poroelastic contrast and Skempton's coefficient). For faults separating more elastically similar materials, there exists a minimum poroelastic contrast above which the poroelastic effect always determines the sign of the effective normal stress change, no matter the rupture speed.Earth and Planetary SciencesEngineering and Applied Science

Farm-to-Market (FM) 116 Improvements from US 84 to Cactus Lane, Coryell County, Waco

On March 17 and 25, 2015, archeologists from the Texas Department of Transportation Archeological Studies Branch conducted an archeological survey that included mechanical trenching along FM 116. The project Area of Potential Effects (APE) begins at United States Highway (US) 84 in Gatesville to the north and continues southward approximately 18.8 miles to Cactus Lane. All construction would occur in the existing right of way which is typically 100-feet-wide. The project would add sections of passing lanes and turn lanes at select locations and would replace the existing bridge at Cowhouse Creek with a new structure. The typical depth of impact is from 1 to 3 feet along the passing lane and approaches and up to 60 feet deep where shafts would be drilled for support columns. The potential impacts from the proposed project were greatest and Cowhouse Creek and field investigations and records research determined that this crossing at Cowhouse Creek was the only location in the APE with potential to contain intact archeological deposits. Mechanical Trenching was conducted at Cowhouse Creek along the west side of FM 116 with James T. Abbott, TxDOT staff geoarcheologist and Eric Oksanen, TxDOT District Archeologist conducting excavations. Four trenches were excavated and no archeological deposits were observed