Milking procedures, milk flow curves and somatic cell count in dairy cows

Recent availability of electronic mobile milk flow meters allows to study in details milk flow patterns during milking. A normal milk flow profile is characterized by an incline phase, with increasing milk flow, a plateau phase, with steady milk flow, and a decline phase. In these phases milk flow is influenced by many factors: genetic characteristics of the cows, regulation of milking machine and milking routine

Distillery anaerobic digestion residues as fertilizers for field vegetable crops: Performance and efficiency in mid-term successions

Understanding nitrogen use efficiency (NUE) of crops plays an important role in achieving sustainable production. Intensive agriculture has adversely affected social and environmental issues worldwide over the past few decades. Anaerobic digested residues from the distillery industry (DADRs) can be used in agriculture, thereby recycling valuable organic materials that can supply organic N. An experiment using DADRs in horticulture was conducted to evaluate the performance of different treatments on yield and NUE. The experiment was conducted for five years, growing lettuce, cauliflower, chicory, potato, Swiss chard, catalogna chicory, tomato, pepper, and melon in two different succession schemes. Five fertilization treatments were designed, including a mineral fertilization control, in which nitrogen (N) was supplied according to standard recommendations in the area. The other treatments were an unfertilized control and three treatments in which 50%, 75%, and 100% of the N were supplied by DADRs and the remaining with common chemical fertilizer. Major findings were: (1) Spring\u2013summer crops showed the lowest N-uptake and N recovery, during this period high chemical fertilization can cause environmental problems such as N leaching, and fertilization with 100% DADRs is a viable alternative; (2) fall\u2013winter crops can be fertilized by combining 50% mineral N and 50% organic N, supplying the nutrients required by the crops during the growing cycle

Fotografia e interação: modos de apresentação do adolescente e da escola no ciberespaço

A tecnologia da informação abriu caminhos para o compartilhamento das imagens e informações, proporcionando novas formas de sociabilidade por meio das chamadas redes sociais digitais. Dentro desse contexto, este trabalho propõe compreender os sentidos presentes nas fotografias de adolescentes nos álbuns do Orkut e os modos como a escola é apresentada pelos adolescentes nesses álbuns e na própria rede social digital, considerando os álbuns do Orkut como portadores de significações a partir das articulações que apresentam, sincretizadas nas linguagens que o formam: verbal e visual. Apresenta como referencial teórico os estudos atinentes à análise do discurso que permeiam a Semiótica Discursiva e os estudos acerca do regime de visibilidade e os regimes de interação e sentido propostos por Eric Landowski, dentre outras reflexões pertinentes à sociossemiótica. Reflete sobre o poder da imagem fotográfica e seu caráter de veridicção, e sobre questões inerentes à construção da identidade/alteridade por meio das práticas sociais vividas no ciberespaço

A Corte Portuguesa e o Escravismo no Brasil Sob o Olhar de Debret

A imagem é uma fonte de investigação que traz em suas estruturas elementos valiosos para a compreensão do período histórico que apresenta. Compreender o caráter histórico imerso nas gravuras elaboradas pelo artista francês Jean Baptiste Debret, no período em que permaneceu no Brasil, que apresentam a corte portuguesa e o negro nas ruas do Rio de Janeiro na primeira metade do século XIX é o objetivo principal desse estudo que utiliza imagens como fonte primordial de análise do período pesquisado. Período marcado por grandes transformações políticas e sócio-culturais geradas pela transferência da Corte portuguesa para o Brasil possibilitando ao artista francês um contexto rico para representações da sociedade carioca. Convidado a compor a Missão Artista Francesa, Debret chega ao Brasil sob o título de pintor de histórica com a incumbência de elaborar a história visual da corte no Brasil e encontra nas ruas da cidade carioca um ambiente favorável para a representação da sociedade que se formara a partir da transferência da família real. Identificando o olhar do artista como narrador dos acontecimentos, através da leitura de imagens, pretende-se garantir à produção de Debret reconhecimento como objeto de comunicação e significação que contém em si elementos historiográficos do Brasil nas primeiras décadas do século XIX. Palavras-chave: Imagem Fonte de pesquisa, história, Semiótica, Debre

Universal measurability and the Hochschild class of the Chern character

We study notions of measurability for singular traces, and characterise universal measurability for operators in Dixmier ideals. This measurability result is then applied to improve on the various proofs of Connes\u27 identification of the Hochschild class of the Chern character of Dixmier summable spectral triples. The measurability results show that the identification of the Hochschild class is independent of the choice of singular trace. As a corollary we obtain strong information on the asymptotics of the eigenvalues of operators naturally associated to spectral triples (A, H, D) and Hochschild cycles for A

Development of innovative materials and thermal treatments for DEMO water cooled blanket

One of the options currently taken into account for the realization of the first DEMO reactor is the "water-cooled lanket". This option implies an irradiation temperature for the blanket material in the range of 280–350 °C. Therefore, in light of the under irradiation behaviour of EUROFER, namely of the DBTT shift toward high temperature due to the low irradiation temperature embrittlement, the target of the hereby reported activities is the development of much tougher alloys, to try to tolerate the embrittlement due to the low irradiation temperature. We report in this paper the work done to optimize the toughness of Eurofer 97, increasing the normalizing temperature and maintaining a small grain size using multiple normalizing treatments. We report also the mechanical behaviour of two 9Cr1WTa type alloys, produced and tested with the same aim to find alloys more resistant to embrittlement at low irradiation temperature. Keywords: EUROFER 97, RAFM steels, Microstructure, Heat treatment, Tensile, Charpy, KLS

Humic substances contribute to plant iron nutrition acting as chelators and biostimulants

Improvement of plant iron nutrition as a consequence of metal complexation by humic substances (HS) extracted from different sources has been widely reported. The presence of humified fractions of the organic matter in soil sediments and solutions would contribute, depending on the solubility and the molecular size of HS, to build up a reservoir of Fe available for plants which exude metal ligands and to provide Fe-HS complexes directly usable by plant Fe uptake mechanisms. It has also been shown that HS can promote the physiological mechanisms involved in Fe acquisition acting at the transcriptional and post-transcriptional level. Furthermore, the distribution and allocation of Fe within the plant could be modified when plants were supplied with water soluble Fe-HS complexes as compared with other natural or synthetic chelates. These effects are in line with previous observations showing that treatments with HS were able to induce changes in root morphology and modulate plant membrane activities related to nutrient acquisition, pathways of primary and secondary metabolism, hormonal and reactive oxygen balance. The multifaceted action of HS indicates that soluble Fe-HS complexes, either naturally present in the soil or exogenously supplied to the plants, can promote Fe acquisition in a complex way by providing a readily available iron form in the rhizosphere and by directly affecting plant physiology. Furthermore, the possibility to use Fe-HS of different sources, size and solubility may be considered as an environmental-friendly tool for Fe fertilization of crops

Modeling the evolution of item rating networks using time-domain preferential attachment

The understanding of the structure and dynamics of the intricate network of connections among people that consumes products through Internet appears as an extremely useful asset in order to study emergent properties related to social behavior. This knowledge could be useful, for example, to improve the performance of personal recommendation algorithms. In this contribution, we analyzed five-year records of movie-rating transactions provided by Netflix, a movie rental platform where users rate movies from an online catalog. This dataset can be studied as a bipartite user-item network whose structure evolves in time. Even though several topological properties from subsets of this bipartite network have been reported with a model that combines random and preferential attachment mechanisms [Beguerisse Díaz et al., 2010], there are still many aspects worth to be explored, as they are connected to relevant phenomena underlying the evolution of the network. In this work, we test the hypothesis that bursty human behavior is essential in order to describe how a bipartite user-item network evolves in time. To that end, we propose a novel model that combines, for user nodes, a network growth prescription based on a preferential attachment mechanism acting not only in the topological domain (i.e. based on node degrees) but also in time domain. In the case of items, the model mixes degree preferential attachment and random selection. With these ingredients, the model is not only able to reproduce the asymptotic degree distribution, but also shows an excellent agreement with the Netflix data in several time-dependent topological properties