Modernization of meat inspection

Current pig meat inspection still has significant value in detecting and controlling hazards related to animal welfare, animal health and meat quality, but public health-relevant hazards detected largely include those that are transmitted to humans primarily via routes other than eating pork or lack evidence of causing human disease via pork consumption. On the other hand, the main pork safety hazards presently causing the majority of human foodborne illness (e.g. enteric pathogens Salmonella, Campylobacter, Yersinia), or causing serious concerns (e.g. protozoan parasite Toxoplasma gondii) do not cause any lesions observable by the current meat inspection

The e!ects of a non-intervention HACCP implementation on process hygiene indicators on bovine and porcine carcasses

Four sites on each of 720 dressed carcasses (360 bovine and 360 porcine) were sampled (2,880 samples in total) in a single commercial abattoir slaughtering cattle and pigs using two separate slaughterlines. The carcasses were sampled before HACCP (pre-HACCP; 960 samples) and after HACCP implementation (post-HACCP; 1,920 samples) and Total Viable Count (TVC), Enterobacteriaceae count (EC) and Salmonella spp. prevalence were determined. During the pre-HACCP period, mean TVC levels on four tested sites varied on bovine carcasses between 3.03 and 4.19 log10 cfu/cm2 and on porcine carcasses between 3.73 and 3.99 log10 cfu/cm2. During the post-HACCP period, TVC levels on all tested sites on carcasses were further signicantly reduced, by 0.33-1.64 log and 1.13-2.04 log on bovine and porcine carcasses, respectively, compared to the pre-HACCP period. Both the EC occurrence in samples and EC levels in EC-positive samples somewhat decreased during post-HACCP as compared to pre-HACCP period, but the reductions were not statistically signicant due to large proportion of EC-negative samples and very low counts in EC-positive samples. Salmonella spp. was not detected in any of bovine or porcine carcass samples, regardless of whether they were taken pre- or post-HACCP. Overall, the processhygiene- improving eects of non-intervention HACCP have been proven through reduction of TVC on carcasses, but could not be veried in the present study through similar reductions in EC and/or Salmonella, because of their low levels and/or absence

A risk assessment for visual only meat inspection of both indoor and outdoor pigs within the UK

The current system of post-mortem inspection using the typical macroscopic inspection techniques is ineffective identifying the most common foodborne illenss risks, e.g. Salmonella or Campylobacter. Therefore, there is a need to adopt a more appropriate, risk-based approach to meat inspection

AliEn - EDG Interoperability in ALICE

AliEn (ALICE Environment) is a GRID-like system for large scale job submission and distributed data management developed and used in the context of ALICE, the CERN LHC heavy-ion experiment. With the aim of exploiting upcoming Grid resources to run AliEn-managed jobs and store the produced data, the problem of AliEn-EDG interoperability was addressed and an in-terface was designed. One or more EDG (European Data Grid) User Interface machines run the AliEn software suite (Cluster Monitor, Storage Element and Computing Element), and act as interface nodes between the systems. An EDG Resource Broker is seen by the AliEn server as a single Computing Element, while the EDG storage is seen by AliEn as a single, large Storage Element; files produced in EDG sites are registered in both the EDG Replica Catalogue and in the AliEn Data Catalogue, thus ensuring accessibility from both worlds. In fact, both registrations are required: the AliEn one is used for the data management, the EDG one to guarantee the integrity and access to EDG produced data. A prototype interface has been successfully deployed using the ALICE AliEn Server and the EDG and DataTAG Testbeds.Comment: Talk from the 2003 Computing in High Energy and Nuclear Physics (CHEP03), La Jolla, Ca, USA, March 2003,4 pages, PDF, 2 figures. PSN TUCP00

A qualitative risk assessment for visual-only post-mortem meat inspection of cattle, sheep, goats and farmed/wild deer

The UK Food Standards Agency is currently funding research to build the evidence base for the modernisation of meat inspection. This includes an assessment of the risks to public health and animal health/welfare of moving to a visual-only post-mortem meat inspection (PMMI), where routine mandatory palpation and incision procedures are omitted. In this paper we present the results of a risk assessment for a change from current to visual-only PMMI for cattle, sheep/goats and farmed/wild deer. A large list of hazard/species pairings were assessed and prioritised by a process of hazard identification. Twelve hazard/species pairings were selected for full consideration within the final risk assessment. The results of the public health risk assessment indicated that all hazard/species pairings were Negligible with the exception of Cysticercus bovis in cattle, which was judged to be of low-medium increased risk for systems not conforming to criteria as laid down by EC Regulation 1244/2007, compared to systems that do conform to Regulations for visual-only PMMI. Most hazard/species pairings were concluded to pose a potential increased risk to animal health/welfare, including Mycobacterium bovis (very low – low increase in risk, but with considerable uncertainty), Fasciola hepatica (negligible – very low) and Cysticercus bovis (very low – low). Due to low feedback rates to farmers, the real risk to animal health/welfare for F. hepatica and C. bovis, including animals in non-conforming systems under visual-only PMMI, is probably negligible. That then leaves M. bovis as the only confirmed non-negligible animal health and welfare risk

Charged Particle Production in Proton-, Deuteron-, Oxygen- and Sulphur-Nucleus Collisions at 200 GeV per Nucleon

The transverse momentum and rapidity distributions of net protons and negatively charged hadrons have been measured for minimum bias proton-nucleus and deuteron-gold interactions, as well as central oxygen-gold and sulphur-nucleus collisions at 200 GeV per nucleon. The rapidity density of net protons at midrapidity in central nucleus-nucleus collisions increases both with target mass for sulphur projectiles and with the projectile mass for a gold target. The shape of the rapidity distributions of net protons forward of midrapidity for d+Au and central S+Au collisions is similar. The average rapidity loss is larger than 2 units of rapidity for reactions with the gold target. The transverse momentum spectra of net protons for all reactions can be described by a thermal distribution with `temperatures' between 145 +- 11 MeV (p+S interactions) and 244 +- 43 MeV (central S+Au collisions). The multiplicity of negatively charged hadrons increases with the mass of the colliding system. The shape of the transverse momentum spectra of negatively charged hadrons changes from minimum bias p+p and p+S interactions to p+Au and central nucleus-nucleus collisions. The mean transverse momentum is almost constant in the vicinity of midrapidity and shows little variation with the target and projectile masses. The average number of produced negatively charged hadrons per participant baryon increases slightly from p+p, p+A to central S+S,Ag collisions.Comment: 47 pages, submitted to Z. Phys.

Offloading electromagnetic shower transport to GPUs

Making general particle transport simulation for high-energy physics (HEP) single-instruction-multiple-thread (SIMT) friendly, to take advantage of accelerator hardware, is an important alternative for boosting the throughput of simulation applications. To date, this challenge is not yet resolved, due to difficulties in mapping the complexity of Geant4 components and workflow to the massive parallelism features exposed by graphics processing units (GPU). The AdePT project is one of the R\&D initiatives tackling this limitation and exploring GPUs as potential accelerators for offloading some part of the CPU simulation workload. Our main target is to implement a complete electromagnetic shower demonstrator working on the GPU. The project is the first to create a full prototype of a realistic electron, positron, and gamma electromagnetic shower simulation on GPU, implemented as either a standalone application or as an extension of the standard Geant4 CPU workflow. Our prototype currently provides a platform to explore many optimisations and different approaches. We present the most recent results and initial conclusions of our work, using both a standalone GPU performance analysis and a first implementation of a hybrid workflow based on Geant4 on the CPU and AdePT on the GPU.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, 20th International Workshop on Advanced Computing and Analysis Techniques in Physics Research (ACAT 2021), to be published in Journal of Physics: Conference Series, editor Andrei Gheat

Experimental Study of the Shortest Reset Word of Random Automata

In this paper we describe an approach to finding the shortest reset word of a finite synchronizing automaton by using a SAT solver. We use this approach to perform an experimental study of the length of the shortest reset word of a finite synchronizing automaton. The largest automata we considered had 100 states. The results of the experiments allow us to formulate a hypothesis that the length of the shortest reset word of a random finite automaton with $n$ states and 2 input letters with high probability is sublinear with respect to $n$ and can be estimated as $1.95 n^{0.55}.

Measurement of event-by-event transverse momentum and multiplicity fluctuations using strongly intensive measures Δ[PT,N]\Delta[P_T, N] and Σ[PT,N]\Sigma[P_T, N] in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the CERN Super Proton Synchrotron

Results from the NA49 experiment at the CERN SPS are presented on event-by-event transverse momentum and multiplicity fluctuations of charged particles, produced at forward rapidities in central Pb+Pb interactions at beam momenta 20$A$, 30$A$, 40$A$, 80$A$, and 158$A$ GeV/c, as well as in systems of different size ($p+p$, C+C, Si+Si, and Pb+Pb) at 158$A$ GeV/c. This publication extends the previous NA49 measurements of the strongly intensive measure $\Phi_{p_T}$ by a study of the recently proposed strongly intensive measures of fluctuations $\Delta[P_T, N]$ and $\Sigma[P_T, N]$. In the explored kinematic region transverse momentum and multiplicity fluctuations show no significant energy dependence in the SPS energy range. However, a remarkable system size dependence is observed for both $\Delta[P_T, N]$ and $\Sigma[P_T, N]$, with the largest values measured in peripheral Pb+Pb interactions. The results are compared with NA61/SHINE measurements in $p+p$ collisions, as well as with predictions of the UrQMD and EPOS models.Comment: 12 pages, 14 figures, to be submitted to PR