Citizen Complaints, Regulatory Violations, and their Implications for Swine Operations in Illinois

In this paper, statistical and economic analyses are used in identifying, analyzing, and modeling the relationships among citizen complaints, swine production and community characteristics, EPA inspections, and regulatory violations. The primary results of this research include assessments of factors that affect citizen complaints and factors that affect the probability of regulatory violations. In addition, the analyses also provide statistical results of a comparison of the efficiencies of different types of site inspections in regulatory violation detection. Our results provide information valuable for understanding issues surrounding the development of the swine production industry and local communities.Institutional and Behavioral Economics,

MANURE VALUE, PRICING SYSTEMS, AND SWINE PRODUCTION DECISIONS

Based on a swine producer's profit maximization model in which manure value and packers' live market weight pricing systems are considered, the optimal farm inventory and optimal hog market weight are simultaneously solved for scenarios generated from the combination of two crop rotations, two forms of manure storage, two levels of manure incorporation, and two nutrient application standards. First, our results suggest that manure value has a significant impact on the optimal farm inventory as well as on the profitability of an operation. The optimal size of operation identified is quite large and varies considerably among the scenarios. Our results indicate that shallow pit buildings with lagoons can support a larger operation scale and require less acreage for manure dispersion than systems with slurry basins. For slurry basin systems, manure applications with immediate incorporation are more profitable than applications with no incorporation. Second, our results show that the optimal hog market weight is insensitive to benefits and costs of manure handling and application, reflecting a dominant influence of the pricing system on a producer's hog marketing decision. Finally, our results show that though more acres are needed for manure application when a P standard is applied in a corn-soybean rotation, still a P standard is economically advantageous to swine farmers and this standard also makes better use of manure nutrients.Livestock Production/Industries,

EVALUATION OF SWINE ODOR MANAGEMENT STRATEGIES IN A FUZZY MULTI-CRITERIA DECISION ENVIRONMENT

The paper evaluates swine odor management strategies using the fuzzy extension of the Analytical Hierarchy Process (AHP), which is a multiple criteria decision making approach based on fuzzy scales. The evaluation is conducted using data from our cost effectiveness study of odor management strategies and our on farm studies relating odor to various management practices. These strategies include manual oil sprinkling, automatic oil sprinkling, wet scrubber, diffusion-coagulation-separation (DCS) deduster, pelleting feed, and draining shallow pit weekly. The criteria employed to evaluate the strategies are odor reduction efficiency, costs, nutrients in manure, and other benefits. Two producer profiles are considered: (a) producers who are pressured to achieve maximum reduction in odor emissions; and (b) producers who are constrained with limited financial resources. Both of these profiles are reflective of current situations for some producers. The results show that, as the scale fuzziness decreases, the preference of the first producer profile over the strategies from high to low is DCS deduster, pelleting feed, automatic oil sprinkling, manual oil sprinkling, draining pit weekly, and wet scrubber while the preference of the second producer profile is draining pit weekly, DCS dedusters, automatic oil sprinkling, wet scrubbers, pelleting feed, and manual oil sprinkling.Livestock Production/Industries,

VARIABILITY IN GROWTH, PIG WEIGHTS AND HOG MARKETING DECISIONS

Variability in pig growth is an intrinsic characteristic of swine production. The optimal marketing strategies are identified to minimize the negative economic impact of variability for a typical all-in-all-out swine finishing facility using a recent pricing matrix and data featuring swine production in the Midwestern region. Our results show that compared with marketing all pigs from a 1,020 head barn on the same day, marketing pigs in six truckloads on different dates as groups of pigs grow to more optimal size significantly improves the profitability of production as variability increases. This finding is in line with recent producer response to new pricing matrices that prove stronger price incentives for marketing more uniform pigs. We also find that studies on optimal marketing strategies without taking into account variability in pig weights can result in exaggerated optimal marketing weights and profits of production. Growth variability management and marketing strategies continue to be essential to the economic viability of the swine industry.Marketing,

Bounding the Probability of Error for High Precision Recognition

We consider models for which it is important, early in processing, to estimate some variables with high precision, but perhaps at relatively low rates of recall. If some variables can be identified with near certainty, then they can be conditioned upon, allowing further inference to be done efficiently. Specifically, we consider optical character recognition (OCR) systems that can be bootstrapped by identifying a subset of correctly translated document words with very high precision. This "clean set" is subsequently used as document-specific training data. While many current OCR systems produce measures of confidence for the identity of each letter or word, thresholding these confidence values, even at very high values, still produces some errors. We introduce a novel technique for identifying a set of correct words with very high precision. Rather than estimating posterior probabilities, we bound the probability that any given word is incorrect under very general assumptions, using an approximate worst case analysis. As a result, the parameters of the model are nearly irrelevant, and we are able to identify a subset of words, even in noisy documents, of which we are highly confident. On our set of 10 documents, we are able to identify about 6% of the words on average without making a single error. This ability to produce word lists with very high precision allows us to use a family of models which depends upon such clean word lists

Comparison of software models for energy savings from cool roofs

A web-based Roof Savings Calculator (RSC) has been deployed for the United States Department of Energy as an industry-consensus tool to help building owners, manufacturers, distributors, contractors and researchers easily run complex roof and attic simulations. RSC simulates multiple roof and attic technologies for side-by-side comparison including reflective roofs, different roof slopes, above sheathing ventilation, radiant barriers, low-emittance roof surfaces, duct location, duct leakage rates, multiple substrate types, and insulation levels. Annual simulations of hour-by-hour, whole-building performance are used to provide estimated annual energy and cost savings from reduced HVAC use. While RSC reported similar cooling savings to other simulation engines, heating penalty varied significantly. RSC results show reduced cool roofing cost-effectiveness, thus mitigating expected economic incentives for this countermeasure to the urban heat island effect. This paper consolidates comparison of RSC's projected energy savings to other simulation engines including DOE-2.1E, AtticSim, Micropas, and EnergyPlus. Also included are comparisons to previous simulation-based studies, analysis of RSC cooling savings and heating penalties, the role of radiative heat exchange in an attic assembly, and changes made for increased accuracy of the duct model. Radiant heat transfer and duct interaction not previously modeled is considered a major contributor to heating penalties

Solvent coarse-graining and the string method applied to the hydrophobic collapse of a hydrated chain

Using computer simulations of over 100,000 atoms, the mechanism for the hydrophobic collapse of an idealized hydrated chain is obtained. This is done by coarse-graining the atomistic water molecule positions over 129,000 collective variables that represent the water density field and then using the string method in these variables to compute the minimum free energy pathway (MFEP) for the collapsing chain. The dynamical relevance of the MFEP (i.e. its coincidence with the mechanism of collapse) is validated a posteriori using conventional molecular dynamics trajectories. Analysis of the MFEP provides atomistic confirmation for the mechanism of hydrophobic collapse proposed by ten Wolde and Chandler. In particular, it is shown that lengthscale-dependent hydrophobic dewetting is the rate-limiting step in the hydrophobic collapse of the considered chain.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figures, including supporting informatio

I Know Why You Went to the Clinic: Risks and Realization of HTTPS Traffic Analysis

Revelations of large scale electronic surveillance and data mining by governments and corporations have fueled increased adoption of HTTPS. We present a traffic analysis attack against over 6000 webpages spanning the HTTPS deployments of 10 widely used, industry-leading websites in areas such as healthcare, finance, legal services and streaming video. Our attack identifies individual pages in the same website with 89% accuracy, exposing personal details including medical conditions, financial and legal affairs and sexual orientation. We examine evaluation methodology and reveal accuracy variations as large as 18% caused by assumptions affecting caching and cookies. We present a novel defense reducing attack accuracy to 27% with a 9% traffic increase, and demonstrate significantly increased effectiveness of prior defenses in our evaluation context, inclusive of enabled caching, user-specific cookies and pages within the same website