Hints for beginners in dairying

The first and most essential requirement is to teach the patrons how to take care of the milk. Everything about the dairy that the milk comes in contact with should be of tin. The milk should be thoroughly cooled and aereated immediately after it is drawn from the cow to prevent souring. In winter it should be kept in a cool room. In summer it should be set in cold water until the collector calls for it. The delivery cans should be washed out with warm water in which some sal soda has been dissolved, then scalded and rinsed in cold water, and placed out of doors to air. The milk should not be allowed to stand in these cans as it will sour more rapidly than in the common setting cans, but should be poured in just before sending to the creamery. The collector should live at the farther end of the route and start early enough to deliver the milk to the creamery by 9 o’ clock. The milk should not be allowed to freeze in winter, as it imparts a bitter taste to the butter, nor warm up in the summer above 75 degrees. Every collector should be provided with blankets to protect the milk in winter. By wetting the blankets in cold water in the summer and spreading over the cans they will keep the milk cool while on the road. The butter maker should examine every can separately to ascertain the condition of the milk before allowing it to be emptied into the weigh can, and if any defective milk is found it should be returned to the patron. One can of poor milk will injure a whole vat of good milk. In winter the milk should be partly warmed up in the receiving vat, and finished in the heating vat, as it will be easier to control the temperature that way. The milk should be at a temperature of 80 degrees never above when ready for separating. Regulate the cream outlet on the separator to take out nothing but the cream; for the thicker the cream the better the butter and less loss of butter fat in the butter milk. The skim milk should be tested every day to ascertain if the separators are doing good work; if they are not, decrease the feed and increase the speed until there is a perfect separation. The cream should be immediately cooled after separating. In winter the cooling can be done in the tempering vat, but in the summer it can be cooled to better advantage by using a cream cooler. In winter, if the milk is separated every day, the cream should be allowed to stand forty-eight hours at a temperature of 60 degrees, but if separated every other day it can be ripened in twenty-four hours, if one gallon of butter milk to one hundred gallons of cream is used as a starter

A farm creaming experiment

A short time ago we were asked whether any injustice would result to either creamery-man or patron, if the latter should set his evening’s milk, skim it in the morning, mix the cream with the morning’s milk and send the mixture to the creamery instead of sending the milk of both evening and morning, as is the usual custom. The most satisfactory way to answer all such queries is by practical demonstrations, and it was determined to conduct an experiment bearing on the point in question. A short time ago we were asked whether any injustice would result to either creamery-man or patron, if the latter should set his evening’s milk, skim it in the morning, mix the cream with the morning’s milk and send the mixture to the creamery instead of sending the milk of both evening and morning, as is the usual custom. The most satisfactory way to answer all such queries is by practical demonstrations, and it was determined to conduct an experiment bearing on the point in question

Feeding beets and potatoes for butter

The farmers of Iowa are growing sugar beets to learn the adaptation of the soils and climates of the state to sugar production. The feeding value of the beet entire without the sugar extracted, is a matter of interest to them. The crop of potatoes in 1891 was large, and where they were unsalable owing to remoteness from markets, or for other causes, it became interesting to ascertain feeding values for dairy products. In conformity with inquiries concerning these subjects, this station fed four cows during three months, beginning December 1st, 1891, and ending February 29, 1892

Contamination in complex healthcare trials:the falls in care homes (FinCH) study experience

BACKGROUND: Trials are at risk of contamination bias which can occur when participants in the control group are inadvertently exposed to the intervention. This is a particular risk in rehabilitation studies where it is easy for trial interventions to be either intentionally or inadvertently adopted in control settings. The Falls in Care Homes (FinCH) trial is used in this paper as an example of a large randomised controlled trial of a complex intervention to explore the potential risks of contamination bias. We outline the FinCH trial design, present the potential risks from contamination bias, and the strategies used in the design of the trial to minimise or mitigate against this. The FinCH trial was a multi-centre randomised controlled trial, with embedded process evaluation, which evaluated whether systematic training in the use of the Guide to Action Tool for Care Homes reduced falls in care home residents. Data were collected from a number of sources to explore contamination in the FinCH trial. Where specific procedures were adopted to reduce risk of, or mitigate against, contamination, this was recorded. Data were collected from study e-mails, meetings with clinicians, research assistant and clinician network communications, and an embedded process evaluation in six intervention care homes. During the FinCH trial, there were six new falls prevention initiatives implemented outside the study which could have contaminated our intervention and findings. Methods used to minimise contamination were: cluster randomisation at the level of care home; engagement with the clinical community to highlight the risks of early adoption; establishing local collaborators in each site familiar with the local context; signing agreements with NHS falls specialists that they would maintain confidentiality regarding details of the intervention; opening additional research sites; and by raising awareness about the importance of contamination in research among participants. CONCLUSION: Complex rehabilitation trials are at risk of contamination bias. The potential for contamination bias in studies can be minimized by strengthening collaboration and dialogue with the clinical community. Researchers should recognise that clinicians may contaminate a study through lack of research expertise

Sweet versus sour cream butter

The objects of the work herein described were to compare the sweet-cream and the sour-cream methods of butter-making, with reference to the following points: 1. Relative losses of butter fat. 2. Relative amounts of butter produced. 3. Relative keeping qualities of the butter. 4. Relative amounts of casein in the butter. The work was done between January 13 and April 8, 1892

Sweet versus ripened cream butter

The experiments here described are similar to those described in Bulletin No. 18, but differ from them in that the cream is here ripened for a shorter time. Ia each trial a quantity of thoroughly mixed cream, fresh from the separator, was divided into two parts, one of which was churned within a few hours, while still sweet; the other the next day after ripening (at about 60° F.) for 17 to 21 hours. Salt and color were proportionately the same in all cases

Some Results On Convex Greedy Embedding Conjecture for 3-Connected Planar Graphs

A greedy embedding of a graph $G = (V,E)$ into a metric space $(X,d)$ is a function $x : V(G) \to X$ such that in the embedding for every pair of non-adjacent vertices $x(s), x(t)$ there exists another vertex $x(u)$ adjacent to $x(s)$ which is closer to $x(t)$ than $x(s)$. This notion of greedy embedding was defined by Papadimitriou and Ratajczak (Theor. Comput. Sci. 2005), where authors conjectured that every 3-connected planar graph has a greedy embedding (possibly planar and convex) in the Euclidean plane. Recently, greedy embedding conjecture has been proved by Leighton and Moitra (FOCS 2008). However, their algorithm do not result in a drawing that is planar and convex for all 3-connected planar graph in the Euclidean plane. In this work we consider the planar convex greedy embedding conjecture and make some progress. We derive a new characterization of planar convex greedy embedding that given a 3-connected planar graph $G = (V,E)$, an embedding x: V \to \bbbr^2 of $G$ is a planar convex greedy embedding if and only if, in the embedding $x$, weight of the maximum weight spanning tree ($T$) and weight of the minimum weight spanning tree (\func{MST}) satisfies \WT(T)/\WT(\func{MST}) \leq (\card{V}-1)^{1 - \delta}, for some $0 < \delta \leq 1$.Comment: 19 pages, A short version of this paper has been accepted for presentation in FCT 2009 - 17th International Symposium on Fundamentals of Computation Theor

On the Number of Iterations for Dantzig-Wolfe Optimization and Packing-Covering Approximation Algorithms

We give a lower bound on the iteration complexity of a natural class of Lagrangean-relaxation algorithms for approximately solving packing/covering linear programs. We show that, given an input with $m$ random 0/1-constraints on $n$ variables, with high probability, any such algorithm requires $\Omega(\rho \log(m)/\epsilon^2)$ iterations to compute a $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate solution, where $\rho$ is the width of the input. The bound is tight for a range of the parameters $(m,n,\rho,\epsilon)$. The algorithms in the class include Dantzig-Wolfe decomposition, Benders' decomposition, Lagrangean relaxation as developed by Held and Karp [1971] for lower-bounding TSP, and many others (e.g. by Plotkin, Shmoys, and Tardos [1988] and Grigoriadis and Khachiyan [1996]). To prove the bound, we use a discrepancy argument to show an analogous lower bound on the support size of $(1+\epsilon)$-approximate mixed strategies for random two-player zero-sum 0/1-matrix games