Comparison of milk production from clover-based and fertilizer-N-based grassland

peer-reviewedFunding for this study was provided by the Irish National Development Plan and the Irish Dairy Levy.This study, conducted over four years (2003–2006), compared herbage production, nutritive value of herbage, the length of the grazing season and milk production per cow and per hectare from grassland systems based on (i) white clover (average 219 g/kg of herbage DM) (WC) receiving on average N application of 90 kg/ha (s.d. 6.4) in spring and successive 0.2 of the area over-seeded annually with white clover seed and (ii) fertilizer N (FN) input of 226 kg/ha (s.d. 9.7). The stocking density of Holstein- Friesian dairy cows on both systems was 2.0/ha 2003 and 2.2/ha in each of the following three years. There were 22 cows per system in 2003 and 24 cows per system in each of the following three years. Cows calved within a 12 week interval in spring with mean calving date in mid-February. Milk was produced until mid-December each year. Total annual herbage DM production was lower (P 0.05) differences in the in vitro organic matter digestibilities of pre-grazing herbage. The crude protein concentration in pre-grazing herbage DM was higher (P 0.05) differences in annual production of milk per cow (mean 6524 kg; s.e. 83.9 kg), live-weight or body condition score between the two systems. There were no (P < 0.05) differences in the lengths of the grazing season, which averaged 254 days (s.e. 0.9). Although there was no difference in performance per cow, the higher herbage production indicates that a higher stocking rate and milk output per hectare was possible from FN than WC. Nevertheless, the WC swards supported an annual stocking density of 2.15/ha and a milk output of 14 t/ha.National Development PlanIrish Dairy Levy Research Fun

Christine de Pizan: A Publisher's Progress

In recent years there has been a welcome revival of interest in Christine de Pizan, both as author and as 'publisher', to use a deliberate anachronism. Thanks to the work of a number of scholars, we now have a clearer understanding of the part played by Christine herself in planning and preparing the presentation copies of her works which were intended for patrons in France and abroad. The suggestion made by Charity Cannon Willard in 1965 that Christine might herself have copied the text of the Epistre a la reine Isabelle in Paris, Bibliothcque Nationale, f. fr. 580, has recently been re-examined by Gilbert Ouy and Christine M. Reno who, in an important article, show that three scribes, P, R, and X, were responsible for a large number of the manuscripts thought to have been prepared under Christine's supervision. They argue further that the scribe X is to be identified with Christine herself

Imperfect Accomplishment: The Fo Guang Shan Short-Term Monastic Retreat and Ethical Pedagogy in Humanistic Buddhism

Fo Guang Shan (佛光山, Buddha’s Light Mountain), an international Buddhist movement headquartered in Taiwan, runs a regular ‘Short-Term Monastic Cultivation Retreat’, a week-long residential program designed to provide lay members with an opportunity for intensive cultivation (修養, xiuyang). Contributions to the anthropology of ethics have recently drawn sharp distinctions between ordered, systematic ethics associated especially with religious traditions, and the compromise and accommodation that result from the exigencies of everyday life. This retreat, we argue, shows instead that the experience of ethical shortcoming can be a positive instrument and aspect of religious striving. While much debate in the anthropology of ethics assumes on all sides an a priori conceptual framework that opposes ‘ordinary’ or ‘everyday’ exigency to ordered transcendence, exigency and order in the Fo Guang Shan Retreat are instead mutually constitutive and dynamically related. And failing and being corrected are not imperfections in, but central and indeed ritually scripted elements of its ethical pedagogy

Designing a Digital Version of British Library, Harley MS 4431

Discusses design for the electronic transcription of MS BL Harley 4431 aims first of all to create a diplomatic corpus made up of the thirty works which Christine de Pizan included in the Queen’s MS. The generally accepted mark-up language which will enable us to achieve these aims is XML (eXtensible Markup Language), supported by a transformation language called XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet Language for Transformation)

Semantic Attention Flow Fields for Monocular Dynamic Scene Decomposition

From video, we reconstruct a neural volume that captures time-varying color, density, scene flow, semantics, and attention information. The semantics and attention let us identify salient foreground objects separately from the background across spacetime. To mitigate low resolution semantic and attention features, we compute pyramids that trade detail with whole-image context. After optimization, we perform a saliency-aware clustering to decompose the scene. To evaluate real-world scenes, we annotate object masks in the NVIDIA Dynamic Scene and DyCheck datasets. We demonstrate that this method can decompose dynamic scenes in an unsupervised way with competitive performance to a supervised method, and that it improves foreground/background segmentation over recent static/dynamic split methods. Project Webpage: https://visual.cs.brown.edu/saffComment: International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV) 2023; 10 pages, 8 figures, 3 table

Are All Particles Real?

In Bohmian mechanics elementary particles exist objectively, as point particles moving according to a law determined by a wavefunction. In this context, questions as to whether the particles of a certain species are real--questions such as, Do photons exist? Electrons? Or just the quarks?--have a clear meaning. We explain that, whatever the answer, there is a corresponding Bohm-type theory, and no experiment can ever decide between these theories. Another question that has a clear meaning is whether particles are intrinsically distinguishable, i.e., whether particle world lines have labels indicating the species. We discuss the intriguing possibility that the answer is no, and particles are points--just points.Comment: 11 pages LaTeX, no figures; v2 minor change

Manuscrits copiés en série

This article makes a detailed comparison of the four surviving copies of the Livre desfais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V that were prepared under Christine de Pizan’s supervision: Paris, BnF fr. 5025 and 10153, Modena, Biblioteca Estense α.N.8.7 and Vatican City, Vat. Reg. lat. 920. The similarities and differences among the copies allow one to draw some conclusions about work practices in the author’s atelier.Cet article présente une comparaison détaillée des quatre exemplaires survivants du Livre des fais et bonnes meurs du sage roy Charles V préparés sous la direction de l’auteur: Paris, BnF fr. 5025 et 10153, Modena, Biblioteca Estense α.N.8.7 et Città del Vaticano, Vat. Reg. lat. 920. Les similitudes et divergences qu’on observe dans ces quatre témoins permettent de formuler quelques conclusions concernant les pratiques de travail dans l’atelier de Christine de Pizan

TöRF: Time-of-Flight Radiance Fields for Dynamic Scene View Synthesis

Neural networks can represent and accurately reconstruct radiance fields for static 3D scenes (e.g., NeRF). Several works extend these to dynamic scenes captured with monocular video, with promising performance. However, the monocular setting is known to be an under-constrained problem, and so methods rely on data-driven priors for reconstructing dynamic content. We replace these priors with measurements from a time-of-flight (ToF) camera, and introduce a neural representation based on an image formation model for continuous-wave ToF cameras. Instead of working with processed depth maps, we model the raw ToF sensor measurements to improve reconstruction quality and avoid issues with low reflectance regions, multi-path interference, and a sensor's limited unambiguous depth range. We show that this approach improves robustness of dynamic scene reconstruction to erroneous calibration and large motions, and discuss the benefits and limitations of integrating RGB+ToF sensors that are now available on modern smartphones.Comment: Accepted to NeurIPS 2021. Web page: https://imaging.cs.cmu.edu/torf/ NeurIPS camera ready updates -- added quantitative comparisons to new methods, visual side-by-side comparisons performed on larger baseline camera sequence