How Agritourism Operators Make Marketing and Promotion Decisions

Agritourism operators in Oklahoma were interviewed to determine how they make promotional decisions. Three themes were found from the interviews. The first was Educated Guessing. Participants were not formally trained in promoting agritourism operations, but they used their past experiences and the resources available to them to make decisions. The second theme was Facebook First. All 10 operations in this interview used Facebook as their primary marketing method based on positive experiences with the site as a promotional tool, followed by other options, such as websites. The third theme was More of the Same. The participants mostly intended to keep doing what they were already doing and were hesitant to make changes. Even those who wanted to make changes often just wanted to improve what they were already doing. It is recommended that new agritourism operations focus their initial marketing approach on Facebook due to low cost and high reach, while other options can be considered later to meet the operation’s needs. Organizations that help agritourism operators should be mindful of differing needs, so a one-size-fits-all approach is not appropriate

Agritourism operators' marketing preferences

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Exhaled nitric oxide during infancy as a risk factor for asthma and airway hyperreactivity

Childhood asthma is often characterised by elevated exhaled nitric oxide (eNO), decreased lung function, increased airway reactivity and atopy; however, our understanding of when these phenotypic airway characteristics develop remains unclear. This study evaluated whether eNO, lung function, airway reactivity and immune characteristics during infancy are risk factors of asthma at age 5 years. Infants with eczema, enrolled prior to wheezy illness (n=116), had eNO, spirometry, airway reactivity and allergen sensitisation assessed at entry to the study and repeated at age 5 years (n=90). Increasing eNO at entry was associated with an increased risk of asthma (p=0.037) and increasing airway reactivity (p=0.015) at age 5 years. Children with asthma at 5 years of age had a greater increase in eNO between infancy and age 5 years compared with those without asthma (p=0.002). Egg sensitisation at entry was also associated with an increased risk of asthma (p=0.020), increasing eNO (p = 0.002) and lower forced expiratory flows (p=0.029) as a 5 year-old. Our findings suggest that, among infants at high risk for developing asthma, eNO early in life may provide important insights into the subsequent risk of asthma and its airway characteristics

Identifying the Optimal Deep Learning Architecture and Parameters for Automatic Beam Aperture Definition in 3D Radiotherapy

PURPOSE: Two-dimensional radiotherapy is often used to treat cervical cancer in low- and middle-income countries, but treatment planning can be challenging and time-consuming. Neural networks offer the potential to greatly decrease planning time through automation, but the impact of the wide range of hyperparameters to be set during training on model accuracy has not been exhaustively investigated. In the current study, we evaluated the effect of several convolutional neural network architectures and hyperparameters on 2D radiotherapy treatment field delineation. METHODS: Six commonly used deep learning architectures were trained to delineate four-field box apertures on digitally reconstructed radiographs for cervical cancer radiotherapy. A comprehensive search of optimal hyperparameters for all models was conducted by varying the initial learning rate, image normalization methods, and (when appropriate) convolutional kernel size, the number of learnable parameters via network depth and the number of feature maps per convolution, and nonlinear activation functions. This yielded over 1700 unique models, which were all trained until performance converged and then tested on a separate dataset. RESULTS: Of all hyperparameters, the choice of initial learning rate was most consistently significant for improved performance on the test set, with all top-performing models using learning rates of 0.0001. The optimal image normalization was not consistent across architectures. High overlap (mean Dice similarity coefficient = 0.98) and surface distance agreement (mean surface distance \u3c 2 mm) were achieved between the treatment field apertures for all architectures using the identified best hyperparameters. Overlap Dice similarity coefficient (DSC) and distance metrics (mean surface distance and Hausdorff distance) indicated that DeepLabv3+ and D-LinkNet architectures were least sensitive to initial hyperparameter selection. CONCLUSION: DeepLabv3+ and D-LinkNet are most robust to initial hyperparameter selection. Learning rate, nonlinear activation function, and kernel size are also important hyperparameters for improving performance

The posthuman way of war

Recent interventions from a ‘posthumanist’ or ‘new materialist’ perspective have highlighted the embedded character of human systems within a ‘panarchy’ of human and non-human systems. This article brings attention to a very particular element of materiality, one with a profound significance for issues of security – relations between human and non-human animals in instances of conflict. It is an indication of the deeply human-centred character of both international relations and security studies that almost none of the central texts mention the very significant roles that non-human animals have in the conduct of war. We argue that the character of war would have been radically different but for the forced participation by an enormous range of non-human animals. Even though, with the improvements in transportation over the last century, non-human animals are less evident in the context of the movement of people and equipment, they still play a significant number of roles in the contemporary war-machines of wealthy countries. Drawing on literature from critical animal studies, sociology and memoirs, this article discusses the enormous variety of roles that non-human animals have played in the conduct of war, and examines the character of human–non-human animal relations in times of war