Evaluation of vaccine-induced maternal immunity against classical swine fever

The vaccine-induced maternal immunity against classical swine fever (CSF) was investigated in this study. Eight sows were vaccinated with the Chinese strain of classical swine fever virus (CSFV). The length of time between vaccination and farrowing was 167-217 days. Milk samples from the front, middle and back udder sections and blood samples were taken from the sows on days 3 and 14 after farrowing. Blood samples were obtained from the piglets at the age of 3, 6 and 10 weeks. The antibody level of the milk was examined by ELISA, and that of blood samples by the virus neutralization (VN) test as well. In all 3-week-old piglets and in 80% of the 6-week-old animals the neutralizing antibody level reached the titre of 1:40. In none of the 10-week-old piglets did the titre exceed the value of 1:20, but in about 25% of the piglets it reached 1:20; the half of these piglets came from two litters. In none of the piglets did the antibody level reach the negative threshold in the ELISA test during the study. No significant differences were found between the udder sections in milk antibody level by ELISA

Comparing the hierarchy of keywords in on-line news portals

The tagging of on-line content with informative keywords is a widespread phenomenon from scientific article repositories through blogs to on-line news portals. In most of the cases, the tags on a given item are free words chosen by the authors independently. Therefore, relations among keywords in a collection of news items is unknown. However, in most cases the topics and concepts described by these keywords are forming a latent hierarchy, with the more general topics and categories at the top, and more specialised ones at the bottom. Here we apply a recent, cooccurrence-based tag hierarchy extraction method to sets of keywords obtained from four different on-line news portals. The resulting hierarchies show substantial differences not just in the topics rendered as important (being at the top of the hierarchy) or of less interest (categorised low in the hierarchy), but also in the underlying network structure. This reveals discrepancies between the plausible keyword association frameworks in the studied news portals

Cultural Expertise and Socio-legal Studies: Introduction

International audienceEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services. Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation

"I’ve got a sheep with three legs if anybody wants it?’" - re-visioning the rural economy

This paper reports on a study of 4CG, a cooperative enterprise located in rural Wales. 4CG operates for the good of the local economy and seeks to diversify its commercial portfolio through the creation of an online shop retailing goods and services from local suppliers. The paper compliments prior field studies focusing on rural enterprise and the challenges posed by this category of business for IT support. The current study is motivated by 4CG’s interest in setting up a local online shop and explicates the organisational issues that this venture turns upon and elaborates for broader sustainability agendas

A New Method for Computing Topological Pressure

The topological pressure introduced by Ruelle and similar quantities describe dynamical multifractal properties of dynamical systems. These are important characteristics of mesoscopic systems in the classical regime. Original definition of these quantities are based on the symbolic description of the dynamics. It is hard or impossible to find symbolic description and generating partition to a general dynamical system, therefore these quantities are often not accessible for further studies. Here we present a new method by which the symbolic description can be omitted. We apply the method for a mixing and an intermittent system.Comment: 8 pages LaTeX with revtex.sty, the 4 postscript figures are included using psfig.tex to appear in PR

Tunable Lyapunov exponent in inverse magnetic billiards

The stability properties of the classical trajectories of charged particles are investigated in a two dimensional stadium-shaped inverse magnetic domain, where the magnetic field is zero inside the stadium domain and constant outside. In the case of infinite magnetic field the dynamics of the system is the same as in the Bunimovich billiard, i.e., ergodic and mixing. However, for weaker magnetic fields the phase space becomes mixed and the chaotic part gradually shrinks. The numerical measurements of the Lyapunov exponent (performed with a novel method) and the integrable/chaotic phase space volume ratio show that both quantities can be smoothly tuned by varying the external magnetic field. A possible experimental realization of the arrangement is also discussed.Comment: 4 pages, 6 figure

The influence of ‘topic and resource’ on some aspects of social theorising

Developments in sociological theory since the 1960s have been responses to disciplinary problems rather than changes in fashion. The problem of topic and resource—where sociology has to use everyday understandings and practices as study resources even though they are legitimate topics of enquiry—has been an important and sometimes neglected spur to many of these developments. The turn to discourse, conversation analysis and the rise of Bourdieu's reflexivity are all attempts to address the problem, but each is shown to be unsatisfactory in different ways. In summary, they seek to address the issue as requiring either a principled methodological or a principled theoretical solution, and neither approach is capable of comprehensively addressing the matter. It is argued that these ‘solutions’ depend, in turn, on one of two particular construals of what the ‘problem’ consists in, neither of which is necessary or coherent. Each, it is argued, depends on a philosophical trick: making language out to need formal improvement (the Bertrand Russell trick) or introducing inappropriate scepticism to everyday life (the René Descartes trick). It is suggested that treating topic and resource not as a problem but as something which opens up new areas of investigation successfully deflates the issue and avoids unnecessary theoretical and methodological contortions

For public (and recontextualized) sociology: The promises and perils of public engagement in an age of mediated communication

This article argues for the analysis of public engagement as an essentially mediated activity. Although recent studies note that academic knowledge is increasingly available for consumption by nonacademic audiences, they tell us little about how it gets recontextualized while passing through the hands of media professionals on its way toward such audiences. In Burawoy’s (2005) influential call for the rebirth of public sociology, as in the debates his work provoked, the media is treated solely as a means for the transportation of knowledge. But as this article demonstrates, the media does not simply transport knowledge; it also, and at the same time, translates that knowledge in various, rhetorically consequential ways. Focusing on the mediated trajectory of an attempt by a group of academics to connect with audiences beyond academia, their initial contribution is compared to its subsequent translation(s) across various British newspapers. A discursive analysis reveals the techniques via which a classic form of public sociology came to be recontextualized such that, remarkably, these authors were left appearing to voice nothing but their own petty prejudices. The article concludes by noting that where public engagement involves mediation, public sociology should pay more attention to the recontextualizing affordances of media discourse

Sensitive sexualities: dichotomized discourse in the erasure of bisexuality

A combination of Q methodology and a Think Aloud task explored how cultural knowledge about bisexuality is constructed and maintained. Q methodology revealed positive interpretations of bisexuality. Critical Discourse Analysis of the Think Aloud task however, exposed the maintenance of dualistic categories of sex, gender and sexuality acting as ‘operating systems’ and strategically guiding the social representation of bisexuality as ‘non-existent’, ‘deviant’, ‘abnormal’ and/or ‘promiscuous’. The findings of this study suggest that overt heterosexism is not becoming extinct; instead it has found rather subtle ways of incorporating itself into ‘liberal’ discourses