Soybeans as a home-grown supplement for dairy cows

Soybeans, grown on the farm, give promise of providing many dairymen with a valuable protein supplement for their dairy herds which will make them independent of the purchase of high-priced protein feeds. Investigations at the Iowa Agricultural Experiment Station show that soybeans make a palatable dairy feed, that they give good results in milk production when fed in place of other protein supplements, and that pound for pound they are a third more valuable than oilmeal, with which direct comparison was made. A home-grown supplement of that kind would be especially valuable to Iowa dairy farms. These farms easily produce all of the roughages needed for the herds in both winter and summer, such as ensilage, clover, alfalfa hay and soiling crops. It is also relatively easy for them to provide the greater portion of the grain ration, as the home-grown corn and oats should form the basis of the concentrates fed. These two feeds, however, are relatively low in protein and so are the roughages, with the exception of the legume hays. It is necessary, therefore, to secure additional concentrates which will provide the extra protein needed, especially in the ration of heavy producing cows. This is one of the main problems of dairy farming today

E-Voting in an ubicomp world: trust, privacy, and social implications

The advances made in technology have unchained the user from the desktop into interactions where access is anywhere, anytime. In addition, the introduction of ubiquitous computing (ubicomp) will see further changes in how we interact with technology and also socially. Ubicomp evokes a near future in which humans will be surrounded by “always-on,” unobtrusive, interconnected intelligent objects where information is exchanged seamlessly. This seamless exchange of information has vast social implications, in particular the protection and management of personal information. This research project investigates the concepts of trust and privacy issues specifically related to the exchange of e-voting information when using a ubicomp type system

Hybrid nanoparticles based on sulfides, oxides, and carbides

The methods for synthesis of hybrid nanoparticles based on sulfides, oxides, and carbides of heavy and transition metals were considered. The problem of the influence of the method of synthesis of the hybrid nanoparticles on their atomic structure, morphology of the nanomaterials, and functional properties was analyzed. The areas of practical use of the hybrid nanoparticles were proposed. © 2013 Springer Science+Business Media New York

The interpretations and uses of fitness landscapes in the social sciences

__Abstract__ This working paper precedes our full article entitled “The evolution of Wright’s (1932) adaptive field to contemporary interpretations and uses of fitness landscapes in the social sciences” as published in the journal Biology & Philosophy (http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10539-014-9450-2). The working paper features an extended literature overview of the ways in which fitness landscapes have been interpreted and used in the social sciences, for which there was not enough space in the full article. The article features an in-depth philosophical discussion about the added value of the various ways in which fitness landscapes are used in the social sciences. This discussion is absent in the current working paper. Th

How individuals change language

Languages emerge and change over time at the population level though interactions between individual speakers. It is, however, hard to directly observe how a single speaker's linguistic innovation precipitates a population-wide change in the language, and many theoretical proposals exist. We introduce a very general mathematical model that encompasses a wide variety of individual-level linguistic behaviours and provides statistical predictions for the population-level changes that result from them. This model allows us to compare the likelihood of empirically-attested changes in definite and indefinite articles in multiple languages under different assumptions on the way in which individuals learn and use language. We find that accounts of language change that appeal primarily to errors in childhood language acquisition are very weakly supported by the historical data, whereas those that allow speakers to change incrementally across the lifespan are more plausible, particularly when combined with social network effects