Evidence-based swine welfare: Where are we and where are we going?

Behavior, ethology and welfare Animal welfare is not a term that arose in science to express a scientific concept; rather, it arose in Western civilization to express ethical concern regarding the treatment of animals. There are three schools of welfare, and which school an individual subscribes to will often influence the philosophical definitions of welfare to which they subscribe. The first school is a feeling based school, which would include some reference to the importance of ascertaining what an animal feels in terms of pleasure, suffering, distress, and pain. The second school is a functioning-based school in which there is a focus on the fitness and health of animals. The third school is a nature-based school that values the natural behaviors of animals under natural conditions. The idea of feelings being important for welfare was developed by Duncan 1 and Duncan and Dawkins,2 and then the suggestion was made that, in fact, feelings were the only thing that mattered.3 ln turn, because of these various schools of thought, animal welfare researchers are still unable to agree on one animal welfare definition, but the measures that can be used to help assess how an animal is coping within defined parameters have been agreed upon. Animal welfare is an issue that involves several scientific disciplines that are part of the animal sciences, which include performance, physiology, anatomy, health, and behavior.4 Perhaps the discipline that has been most closely associated with welfare is the study of animal behavior, known as ethology.4 The term applied ethology is often used to designate the subdiscipline of studying the behavior of animals that are managed in some way by humans. Gonyou4 noted, Applied ethology involving agricultural species has become so closely associated with the scientifi,c study of animal welfare that some use the terms behavior, ethology and welfare as virtual synonyms. 4 The objective of this paper will be to discuss three case studies using pig behavior that may be used on farm by a swine practioner

The Binary Nature of PSR J2032+4127

PSR J2032+4127 is a gamma-ray and radio-emitting pulsar which has been regarded as a young luminous isolated neutron star. However, its recent spin-down rate has extraordinarily increased by a factor of two. We present evidence that this is due to its motion as a member of a highly-eccentric binary system with a 15-solar-mass Be star, MT91~213. Timing observations show that, not only are the positions of the two stars coincident within 0.4 arcsec, but timing models of binary motion of the pulsar fit the data much better than a model of a young isolated pulsar. MT91~213, and hence the pulsar, lie in the Cyg~OB2 stellar association, which is at a distance of only 1.4-1.7 kpc. The pulsar is currently on the near side of, and accelerating towards, the Be star, with an orbital period of 20-30 years. The next periastron is well-constrained to occur in early 2018, providing an opportunity to observe enhanced high-energy emission as seen in other Be-star binary systems.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for publication in MNRA

Accelerated Tensile-Tensile Fatigue Testing of Long Fiber Thermoplastic Materials

Fatigue characterization is one of the most time consuming and expensive tests that a material must undergo prior to adoption into critical industries and/or uses. Most fatigue testing is conducted by alternating between a low tensile load and a high tensile load until the material fails, which yields a cycle count to failure for a given loading scenario. Compiling a graph with multiple loading scenarios generates a failure threshold that is used to design a part for the number of loading cycles expected to witness during its service life. The studies presented attempted to determine testing methodology to reduce the required testing time from 3 weeks to 1 week by taking advantage of Cumulative Damage Theory. Several methods were examined, and it was concluded that there may be a path that could be used to generate such time savings

Light-curve modelling constraints on the obliquities and aspect angles of the young Fermi pulsars

In more than four years of observation the Large Area Telescope on board the Fermi satellite has identified pulsed $\gamma$-ray emission from more than 80 young pulsars, providing light curves with high statistics. Fitting the observations with geometrical models can provide estimates of the magnetic obliquity $\alpha$ and aspect angle $\zeta$, yielding estimates of the radiation beaming factor and luminosity. Using $\gamma$-ray emission geometries (Polar Cap, Slot Gap, Outer Gap, One Pole Caustic) and radio emission geometry, we fit $\gamma$-ray light curves for 76 young pulsars and we jointly fit their $\gamma$-ray plus radio light curves when possible. We find that a joint radio plus $\gamma$-ray fit strategy is important to obtain ($\alpha$, $\zeta$) estimates that can explain simultaneous radio and $\gamma$-ray emission. The intermediate-to-high altitude magnetosphere models, Slot Gap, Outer Gap, and One pole Caustic, are favoured in explaining the observations. We find no evolution of $\alpha$ on a time scale of a million years. For all emission geometries our derived $\gamma$-ray beaming factors are generally less than one and do not significantly evolve with the spin-down power. A more pronounced beaming factor vs. spin-down power correlation is observed for Slot Gap model and radio-quiet pulsars and for the Outer Gap model and radio-loud pulsars. For all models, the correlation between $\gamma$-ray luminosity and spin-down power is consistent with a square root dependence. The $\gamma$-ray luminosities obtained by using our beaming factors not exceed the spin-down power. This suggests that assuming a beaming factor of one for all objects, as done in other studies, likely overestimates the real values. The data show a relation between the pulsar spectral characteristics and the width of the accelerator gap that is consistent with the theoretical prediction for the Slot Gap model.Comment: 90 pages, 80 figures (63 in Appendices), accepted for publication in Astronomy and Astrophysic

Costs of Health IT: Beginning to Understand the Financial Impact of a Dental School EHR

Health Information Technology (Health IT) constitutes an integral component of the operations of most academic dental institutions nowadays. However, the expenses associated with the acquisition and the ongoing maintenance of these complex systems have often been buried among costs for other electronic infrastructure systems, distributed across various cost centers including unmeasured central campus support, covered centrally and therefore difficult to quantify, and spread over years, denying school administrators a clear understanding of the resources that have been dedicated to Health IT. The aim of this study was to understand the financial impact of Health IT at four similar U.S. dental schools: two schools using a purchased Electronic Health Record (EHR), and two schools that developed their own EHR. For these schools, the costs of creating ($2.5 million) and sustaining ($174,000) custom EHR software were significantly higher than acquiring ($500,000) and sustaining ($121,000) purchased software. These results are based on historical data and should not be regarded as a gold standard for what a complete Health IT suite should cost. The presented data are intended to inform school administrators about the myriad of costs associated with Health IT and give them a point of reference when comparing costs or making estimates for implementation projects

Going against the Grain: Overturning the received wisdom of a field takes not just strong evidence, but a strong personality. For one reproductive biologist, only time will tell whether such challenges are worth the risks in today's pressurized research climate.

A reproductive biologist's research at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston has stoked a controversy about whether female mammals can renew egg cells

Patient and nurse preferences for nurse handover - using preferences to inform policy: a discrete choice experiment protocol

Introduction Nursing bedside handover in hospital has been identified as an opportunity to involve patients and promote patient-centred care. It is important to consider the preferences of both patients and nurses when implementing bedside handover to maximise the successful uptake of this policy. We outline a study which aims to (1) identify, compare and contrast the preferences for various aspects of handover common to nurses and patients while accounting for other factors, such as the time constraints of nurses that may influence these preferences.; (2) identify opportunities for nurses to better involve patients in bedside handover and (3) identify patient and nurse preferences that may challenge the full implementation of bedside handover in the acute medical setting. Methods and analysis We outline the protocol for a discrete choice experiment (DCE) which uses a survey design common to both patients and nurses. We describe the qualitative and pilot work undertaken to design the DCE. We use a D-efficient design which is informed by prior coefficients collected during the pilot phase. We also discuss the face-to-face administration of this survey in a population of acutely unwell, hospitalised patients and describe how data collection challenges have been informed by our pilot phase. Mixed multinomial logit regression analysis will be used to estimate the final results. Ethics and dissemination This study has been approved by a university ethics committee as well as two participating hospital ethics committees. Results will be used within a knowledge translation framework to inform any strategies that can be used by nursing staff to improve the uptake of bedside handover. Results will also be disseminated via peer-reviewed journal articles and will be presented at national and international conferences

Winning versus losing during gambling and its neural correlates

Humans often make decisions which maximize an internal utility function. For example, humans often maximize their expected reward when gambling and this is considered as a "rational" decision. However, humans tend to change their betting strategies depending on how they "feel". If someone has experienced a losing streak, they may "feel" that they are more likely to win on the next hand even though the odds of the game have not changed. That is, their decisions are driven by their emotional state. In this paper, we investigate how the human brain responds to wins and losses during gambling. Using a combination of local field potential recordings in human subjects performing a financial decision-making task, spectral analyses, and non-parametric cluster statistics, we investigated whether neural responses in different cognitive and limbic brain areas differ between wins and losses after decisions are made. In eleven subjects, the neural activity modulated significantly between win and loss trials in one brain region: the anterior insula ($p=0.01$). In particular, gamma activity (30-70 Hz) increased in the anterior insula when subjects just realized that they won. Modulation of metabolic activity in the anterior insula has been observed previously in functional magnetic resonance imaging studies during decision making and when emotions are elicited. However, our study is able to characterize temporal dynamics of electrical activity in this brain region at the millisecond resolution while decisions are made and after outcomes are revealed