The Simple Economics of Hog Marketing Reforms in Quebec

Hogs, marketing, vertical coordination, auctions, Industrial Organization, Livestock Production/Industries, Marketing,

Cerebral asymmetries in sleep-dependent processes of memory consolidation

peer reviewedPreference for previously seen, unfamiliar objects reflects a memory bias on affective judgment, known as the "mere exposure effect" (MEE). Here, we investigated the effect of time, post-exposure sleep, and the brain hemisphere solicited on preference generalization toward objects viewed in different perspectives. When presented in the right visual field (RVF), which promotes preferential processing in the left hemisphere, same and mirrored exemplars were preferred immediately after exposure. MEE generalized to much dissimilar views after three nights of sleep. Conversely, object presentation in the left visual field (LVF), promoting right hemisphere processing, elicited a MEE for same views immediately after exposure, then for mirror views after sleep. Most importantly, sleep deprivation during the first post-exposure night, although followed by two recovery nights, extinguished MEE for all views in the LVF but not in the RVF. Besides demonstrating that post-exposure time and sleep facilitate the generalization process by which we integrate various representations of an object, our results suggest that mostly in the right hemisphere, sleep may be mandatory to consolidate the memory bias underlying affective preference. These interhemispheric differences tentatively call for a reappraisal of the role of cerebral asymmetries in wake- and sleep-dependent processes of memory consolidation

Assessment of field rolling resistance of manual wheelchairs

This article proposes a simple and convenient method for assessing the subject-specific rolling resistance acting on a manual wheelchair, which could be used during the provision of clinical service. This method, based on a simple mathematical equation, is sensitive to both the total mass and its fore-aft distribution, which changes with the subject, wheelchair properties, and adjustments. The rolling resistance properties of three types of front casters and four types of rear wheels were determined for two indoor surfaces commonly encountered by wheelchair users (a hard smooth surface and carpet) from measurements of a three-dimensional accelerometer during field deceleration tests performed with artificial load. The average results provided by these experiments were then used as input data to assess the rolling resistance from the mathematical equation with an acceptable accuracy on hard smooth and carpet surfaces (standard errors of the estimates were 4.4 and 3.9 N, respectively). Thus, this method can be confidently used by clinicians to help users make trade-offs between front and rear wheel types and sizes when choosing and adjusting their manual wheelchair.This material was based on work supported by the SACR-FRM project, French National Research Agency (ANR-06-TecSan-020) and the Centre d’Etudeset de Recherche sur l’Appareillage des Handicapés (loaned all MWCs required to fulfill this work

Ruminal degradability of leaves of Morus alba and Fraxinus excelsior managed as pollards or high stem trees

Ruminal degradability of leaves of [i]Morus alba[/i] and [i]Fraxinus excelsior[/i] managed as pollards or high stem trees. 4. World Congress on Agroforestr

Predictors of subjective wellbeing at work for regular employees in Japan

Japan has been experiencing a long decline in its workforce. Companies in Japan are eager to retain their existing employees and diversify their recruitment. Employees with long-term and open-ended employment are also switching companies at a greater rate. Consequently, Japanese firms have started paying attention to employee subjective wellbeing, now recognized as a source of higher job performance. This study empirically explores the predictors of subjective wellbeing at work for Japanese regular employees beyond those already identified in Europe and U.S.-centric research. We applied a two-stage design, consisting of interviews and a questionnaire survey to identify those factors that promote subjective wellbeing in Japanese corporations where long-time employment and group cohesiveness and achievement are valued over individual achievement. We identified eight factors affecting subjective wellbeing at work for Japanese regular employees: meaningful work, relationships, culture, workspace, evaluation, time off, financial benefits, and diversity at work. Consequent regression analyses highlighted the discriminant importance of work relationships, evaluation, diversity, workspace, and meaningful work. Eudaimonic and hedonic happiness were found to be caused by different factors. As expected, meaningful work led to eudaimonic satisfaction of life at work in Japan. In contrast hedonic happiness was affected by factors external to work itself, such as work relationships, work evaluation and diversity. Interestingly, diversity at work was found to have an ambivalent effect as it was related to both positive and negative affects at work. These findings will help Japanese companies create a work environment that can maximize regular employees’ wellbeing, job performance, and retention

Recurrent boosting effects of short inactivity delays on performance: an ERPs study

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Recent studies investigating off-line processes of consolidation in motor learning have demonstrated a sudden, short-lived improvement in performance after 5–30 minutes of post-training inactivity. Here, we investigated further this behavioral boost in the context of the probabilistic serial reaction time task, a paradigm of implicit sequence learning. We looked both at the electrophysiological correlates of the boost effect and whether this phenomenon occurs at the initial training session only.</p> <p>Findings</p> <p>Reaction times consistently improved after a 30-minute break within two sessions spaced four days apart, revealing the reproducibility of the boost effect. Importantly, this improvement was unrelated to the acquisition of the sequential regularities in the material. At both sessions, event-related potentials (ERPs) analyses disclosed a boost-associated increased amplitude of a first negative component, and shorter latencies for a second positive component.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>Behavioral and ERP data suggest increased processing fluency after short delays, which may support transitory improvements in attentional and/or motor performance and participate in the final setting up of the neural networks involved in the acquisition of novel skills.</p

Designing Jobs to Make Employees Happy? Focus on Job Satisfaction First

This article examines the effects of job task characteristics and job satisfaction on subjective well-being, often referred to as happiness, among Japanese employees. Because past research has recognized happiness as a source of greater performance, and on account of recent events related to karōshi (death by overwork), conditions in the workplace are of great interest for both research and practice. This research, using conditional process analysis with data gathered from Japanese managers and front-line workers within Japanese firms in Japan, found that job satisfaction fully mediates the relationship between job task characteristics and subjective well-being. Among job satisfaction factors, self-accomplishment and ‘relatedness’ (mutual respect and reliance with others) displayed the strongest mediating influences between job task characteristics and positive well-being. First, these findings suggest that companies cannot rely on job design alone to directly foster employee well-being but must ensure that task characteristics translate into work-related outcomes, such as job satisfaction. Second, at least for Japanese employees, careful attention must be paid to designing jobs that foster feelings of self-accomplishment and relatedness in order to enhance subjective well-being. These results indicate that job satisfaction plays a central role in the relationship between job design and well-being

Audio-based Musical Artificial Intelligence and Audio-Reactive Visual Agents in Revive

Revive is an live audio-visual performance project that brings together a musical artificial intelligence architecture, human electronic musicians, and audio-reactive visual agents in a complex multimedia environment of a dome view with multichannel 3D audio. The context of the project is live audio-visual performance of experimental electronic music through structured improvisation. Revive applies structured improvisation using cues and automatized parameter changes within these cues. Performers have different roles within the musical structures initiated by the cues. These roles change as the performance temporally evolves. Sonic actions of performers are further emphasized by audio-reactive visual agents. The behaviours and 1contents of sonic and visual agents change as the performance unfolds

Développement d'une nouvelle algorithmie de localisation adaptée à l'ensemble des mobiles suivis par le système ARGOS

Depuis 1978, le système ARGOS assure à l échelle mondiale la collecte de données et la localisation de plateformes pour des applications liées au suivi d animaux, à l océanographie et à la sécurité maritime. La localisation exploite le décalage Doppler affectant la fréquence de porteuse des messages émis par les plateformes et réceptionnés par des satellites dédiés. Au cours des vingt dernières années, les puissances d émission des plateformes se sont réduites pour des conditions d utilisation toujours plus extrêmes, augmentant le nombre de localisations de moindre qualité. Paradoxalement, les utilisateurs ont cherché à identifier des comportements à des échelles de plus en plus petites. L objectif de ce projet est de développer un algorithme de localisation plus performant dans le contexte actuel afin de remplacer le traitement temps réel historique basé sur un ajustement par moindres carrés. Un service hors ligne, permettant de déterminer des localisations encore plus précises, est proposé dans un second temps.Le problème est reformulé comme l estimation de l état d un système dynamique stochastique, tenant compte d un ensemble de modèles de déplacement admissibles pour les plateformes. La détermination exacte de la loi a posteriori de l état présente alors une complexité exponentiellement croissante avec le temps. Le filtre Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) est devenu l outil standard pour approximer en temps réel la loi a posteriori avec un coût de calcul constant. Pour des applications hors ligne, de nombreuses solutions sous-optimales de lissage multi-modèle ont aussi été proposées. La première contribution méthodologique de ce travail présente l extension du cadre initial de l IMM à un ensemble de modèles hétérogènes, c.-à-d. dont les vecteurs d état sont de tailles et de sémantiques différentes. En outre, nous proposons une nouvelle méthode pour le lissage multi-modèle qui offre une complexité réduite et de meilleures performances que les solutions existantes. L algorithme de localisation ARGOS a été réécrit en y incorporant le filtre IMM en tant que traitement temps réel et le lisseur multi-modèle comme service hors ligne. Une étude, menée sur un panel de 200 plateformes munies d un récepteur GPS utilisé comme vérité terrain, montre que ces stratégies améliorent significativement la précision de localisation quand peu de messages sont reçus. En outre, elles délivrent en moyenne 30% de localisations supplémentaires et permettent de caractériser systématiquement l erreur de positionnementThe ARGOS service was launched in 1978 to serve environmental applications including oceanography, wildlife tracking and maritime safety. The system allows for worldwide positioning and data collection of Platform Terminal Transmitters (PTTs). The positioning is achieved by exploiting the Doppler shift in the carrier frequency of the messages transmitted by the PTTs and recorded by dedicated satellite-borne receivers. Over the last twenty years, the transmission power has decreased significantly and platforms have been used in increasingly harsh environments. This led to deliver a greater number of low quality locations while users sought to identify finer platform behavior. This work first focuses on the implementation of a more efficient location processing to replace the historical real time processing relying on a Least Squares adjustment. Secondly, an offline service to infer locations with even higher accuracy is proposed.The location problem is formulated as the estimation of the state vector of a dynamical system, accounting for a set of admissible movement models of the platform. The exact determination of the state posterior pdf displays a complexity growing exponentially with time. The Interacting Multiple Model (IMM) algorithm has become a standard online approach to derive an approximated solution with a constant computational complexity. For offline applications, many sub-optimal multiple model schemes have also been proposed. Our methodological contributions first focused on extending the framework of the IMM filter so as to handle a bank of models with state vectors of heterogeneous size and meaning. Second, we investigated a new sub-optimal solution for multiple model smoothing which proves to be less computationally expensive and displays markedly better performance than equivalent algorithms. The ARGOS location processing was rewritten to include the IMM filter as real time processing and the IMM smoother as offline service. We eventually analyzed their performances using a large dataset obtained from over 200 mobiles carrying both an ARGOS transmitter and a GPS receiver used as ground truth. The results show that the new approaches significantly improve the positioning accuracy, especially when few messages are received. Moreover, the algorithms deliver 30% more positions and give a systematic estimation of the location errorTOULOUSE-INSA-Bib. electronique (315559905) / SudocSudocFranceF