Pork Quality Assurance Plus™ Program

Pork producers in the United States have developed a new food safety and animal care certification program that builds on the current Pork Quality Assurance (PQA\u27) program. Working with the pork industry\u27s customers, pork producers have created a workable, credible and affordable solution to assure food safety and animal care and at the same time meet the needs of customers including restaurants, food retailers and, ultimately, consumers. The industry\u27s solution is a continuous improvement system focused on producer education and premises assessment, which is called PQA Plus™

Essays in Applied Microeconomics

This thesis is made of three chapters. In Chapter 1 I investigate some of the potential effects of the interaction between minimum wages and job frictions on labour market outcomes in the UK. In a random search model with wage-posting and productivity dispersion across firms, under certain conditions, an increase in the minimum wage has stronger effects on separations between firms and workers facing relatively higher frictions than on separations between firms and workers facing relatively lower frictions. In this chapter, I test this prediction within two separate empirical settings, using two sources of UK data. I find some evidence that employment transitions of "high-friction" workers respond more strongly relative to the "low-friction" group’s. In Chapter 2 I analyse voting behaviour of US House Democrats on two separate bills aimed at permanently repealing or reforming the estate tax. Existing analyses of politicians’ voting behaviour are consistent with a framework in which voting decisions result from the competing influences of politicians’ own ideology and interests, special interests, and the interests of their constituents. Recent analyses of roll-call votes in the US Congress suggest that local interests are more likely to influence political decisions when the issues at hand are prominent and when the stakes associated with them are clear. Making use of data on representatives’ wealth and personal characteristics, I am able to assess whether their private interests influence their voting behaviour. Further, I use data on campaign contributions and advertising, characteristics of electoral constituents, and measures of politicians’ ideology. My results confirm the predictive power of ideology and campaign contributions found elsewhere in the literature. I am not able to find clear evidence that local interests had an influence on voting behaviour. Finally, I find no evidence that politicians’ own wealth had an influence on their voting behaviour. Chapter 3 is co-authored with Brian Bell and John Van Reenen. In this paper, we investigate whether moving to relative performance contracts has improved the alignment between CEO pay and performance. To address this, we use an original dataset on CEO contracts for almost 500 publicly listed UK companies. We find that pay responds more strongly to increases in firm performance than to decreases, and that this asymmetry is present only in weakly governed firms. Further, we find that CEO pay is still linked to positive random industry shocks. This result is due to the fact that failing awards in weakly governed firms are redesigned in ways that reduce the risks attached to them for the CEOs. These findings suggest that reforms to the formal structure of CEO pay contracts are unlikely to align incentives in the absence of strong shareholder governance.</p

Analysing multiparticle quantum states

The analysis of multiparticle quantum states is a central problem in quantum information processing. This task poses several challenges for experimenters and theoreticians. We give an overview over current problems and possible solutions concerning systematic errors of quantum devices, the reconstruction of quantum states, and the analysis of correlations and complexity in multiparticle density matrices.Comment: 20 pages, 4 figures, prepared for proceedings of the "Quantum [Un]speakables II" conference (Vienna, 2014

Pain Management in the Neonatal Piglet During Routine Management Procedures. Part 1: A Systematic Review of Randomized and Non-Randomized Intervention Studies

Routine procedures carried out on piglets (i.e. castration, tail docking, teeth clipping, and ear notching) are considered painful. Unfortunately the efficacy of current pain mitigation modalities is poorly understood. The aim of this systematic review was to synthesize the existing primary scientific literature regarding the effectiveness of pain management interventions used for routine procedures on piglets. The review question was, \u27In piglets under twenty-eight days old, undergoing castration, tail docking, teeth clipping, and/or methods of identification that involve cutting of the ear tissue, what is the effect of pain mitigation compared with no pain mitigation on behavioral and non-behavioral outcomes that indicate procedural pain and post-procedural pain?\u27 A review protocol was designed a priori. Data sources used were Agricola (EBSCO), CAB Abstracts (Thomson Reuters), PubMed, Web of Science (Thomson Reuters), BIOSIS Previews (Thomson Reuters), and ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Full Text. No restrictions on year of publication or language were placed on the search. Eligible studies assessed an intervention designed to mitigate the pain of the procedures of interest and included a comparison group that did not receive an intervention. Eligible non-English studies were translated using a translation service. Two reviewers independently screened titles and abstracts for relevance using pre-defined questions. Data were extracted from relevant articles onto pre-defined forms. From the 2203 retrieved citations forty publications, containing 52 studies met the eligibility criteria. In 40 studies, piglets underwent castration only. In seven studies, piglets underwent tail docking only. In one study, piglets underwent teeth clipping only, and in one study piglets underwent ear notching only. Three studies used multiple procedures. Thirty-two trial arms assessed general anesthesia protocols, 30 trial arms assessed local anesthetic protocols, and 28 trial arms assessed non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) protocols. Forty-one trial arms were controls where piglets received either placebo or no treatment. Forty-five outcomes were extracted from the studies, however only the results from studies that assessed cortisol (six studies), β-endorphins (one study), vocalisations (nine studies), and pain-related behaviors (nine studies) are reported. Other outcomes were reported in only one or two studies. Confident decision making will likely be difficult based on this body of work because lack of comprehensive reporting precludes calculation of the magnitude of pain mitigation for most outcomes

Non-diagonal open spin-1/2 XXZ quantum chains by separation of variables: Complete spectrum and matrix elements of some quasi-local operators

The integrable quantum models, associated to the transfer matrices of the 6-vertex reflection algebra for spin 1/2 representations, are studied in this paper. In the framework of Sklyanin's quantum separation of variables (SOV), we provide the complete characterization of the eigenvalues and eigenstates of the transfer matrix and the proof of the simplicity of the transfer matrix spectrum. Moreover, we use these integrable quantum models as further key examples for which to develop a method in the SOV framework to compute matrix elements of local operators. This method has been introduced first in [1] and then used also in [2], it is based on the resolution of the quantum inverse problem (i.e. the reconstruction of all local operators in terms of the quantum separate variables) plus the computation of the action of separate covectors on separate vectors. In particular, for these integrable quantum models, which in the homogeneous limit reproduce the open spin-1/2 XXZ quantum chains with non-diagonal boundary conditions, we have obtained the SOV-reconstructions for a class of quasi-local operators and determinant formulae for the covector-vector actions. As consequence of these findings we provide one determinant formulae for the matrix elements of this class of reconstructed quasi-local operators on transfer matrix eigenstates.Comment: 40 pages. Minor modifications in the text and some notations and some more reference adde

Pain management in the neonatal piglet during routine management procedures. Part 2:Grading the quality of evidence and the strength of recommendations

Piglets reared in swine production in the USA undergo painful procedures that include castration, tail docking, teeth clipping, and identification with ear notching or tagging. These procedures are usually performed without pain mitigation. The objective of this project was to develop recommendations for pain mitigation in 1- to 28-day-old piglets undergoing these procedures. The National Pork Board funded project to develop recommendations for pain mitigation in piglets. Recommendation development followed a defined multi-step process that included an evidence summary and estimates of the efficacies of interventions. The results of a systematic review of the interventions were reported in a companion paper. This manuscript describes the recommendation development process and the final recommendations. Recommendations were developed for three interventions (CO2/O2 general anesthesia, non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), and lidocaine) for use during castration. The ability to make strong recommendations was limited by low-quality evidence and strong certainty about variation in stakeholder values and preferences. The panel strongly recommended against the use of a CO2/O2 general anesthesia mixture, weakly recommended for the use of NSAIDs and weakly recommended against the use of lidocaine for pain mitigation during castration of 1- to 28-day-old piglets

Review: Transport Losses in Market Weight Pigs: I. A Review of Definitions, Incidence, and Economic Impact

Transport losses (dead and nonambulatory pigs) present animal welfare, legal, and economic challenges to the US swine industry. The objectives of this review are to explore 1) the historical perspective of transport losses; 2) the incidence and economic implications of transport losses; and 3) the symptoms and metabolic characteristics of fatigued pigs. In 1933 and 1934, the incidence of dead and nonambulatory pigs was reported to be 0.08 and 0.16%, respectively. More recently, 23 commercial field trials (n = 6,660,569 pigs) were summarized and the frequency of dead pigs, nonambulatory pigs, and total transport losses at the processing plant were 0.25, 0.44, and 0.69% respectively. In 2006, total economic losses associated with these transport losses were estimated to cost the US pork industry approximately $46 million. Furthermore, 0.37 and 0.05% of the nonambulatory pigs were classified as either fatigued (nonambulatory, noninjured) or injured, respectively, in 18 of these trials (n = 4,966,419 pigs). Fatigued pigs display signs of acute stress (open-mouth breathing, skin discoloration, muscle tremors) and are in a metabolic state of acidosis, characterized by low blood pH and high blood lactate concentrations; however, the majority of fatigued pigs will recover with rest. Transport losses are a multifactorial problem consisting of people, pig, facility design, management, transportation, processing plant, and environmental factors, and, because of these multiple factors, continued research efforts are needed to understand how each of the factors and the relationships among factors affect the well-being of the pig during the marketing process

Prosumers in a digital multiverse: An investigation of how WeChat is affecting Chinese citizen journalism

WeChat is China’s most popular multi-purpose messaging and social media application and has been gaining popularity globally since its first release in 2011. In this article, we examine how the use of WeChat is affecting digitally-enabled citizen journalism in China. To achieve that purpose, we gathered data from 3 focus-group interviews with Chinese WeChat users. The findings suggest that WeChat’s integration of multiple communicative networks renders it a multiversal space where citizen journalistic practice can transverse across public, semi-public, and private spheres. The diverse communicative affordances of WeChat could facilitate ‘metavoicing’ practice as a form of citizen journalism, and enable news production and consumption to converge. Consequently, users’ experiences of news and news story lifecycles have been affected. WeChat offers both opportunities and challenges to the practice of citizen journalism: it is a space where information exchange could be constantly monitored, where the tone of current affairs coverage is often sensationalized, and where the reliability of content can be difficult to discern