Attributes Preferred and Premiums Offered for Naturally Produced Beef Cattle

A growing number of beef cattle producers in the US are using limited information to determine whether or not it would be economical for them to grow naturally produced cattle. The objective was to discover the attributes that marketing companies prefer for the naturally produced cattle they purchase, and to elicit the price premiums being offered for cattle that possess these attributes. Results of a phone survey of companies that purchase natural cattle show that 27 out of 32 companies report their willingness to pay a premium of $5.95/cwt for cattle that have never received antibiotics, ionophores, hormones or animal by-products.Key words: attributes, beef, cattle, naturally produced, premiums, Agribusiness, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Livestock Production/Industries, Marketing,

Propagating the fear of witchcraft: Pentecostal prophecies in the new prophetic churches in South Africa

Pentecostal prophecy is one of the major themes of the theology and practice of religion among the prophets of New Prophetic Churches in South Africa and a major factor to the growth and expansion of Pentecostalism in Southern Africa. This paper offers a reflection on the role of prophecy in relation to the fear of witchcraft in the region. The contribution is that Pentecostal prophecy is not always in confrontation but sometime propels the fear of witchcraft. Through media analysis, the paper illustrates with some examples of Pentecostal prophecies on witchcraft how Pentecostal prophecy can aid rather than dispel fear of witchcraft. These prophecies raise several challenges to the discernment of Pentecostal prophetic ministry.Christian Spirituality, Church History and Missiolog

A generic and adaptive aggregation service for large-scale decentralized networks

Aggregation functions are used in distributed environments to make system-wide information locally available in the nodes of a network. The computation of different aggregation functions, e.g., SUMMATION, AVERAGE, MAXIMUM etc., in large-scale distributed systems is challenging and crucial for a wide range of applications. This is especially the case when the input values of these functions dynamically change during system runtime. Related approaches of decentralized aggregation are function-dependent, interaction-dependent, assume static values or cannot always tolerate duplicates and continuously changing information.Intelligent SystemsElectrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Scienc