Udder Health in Organic Dairy Herds in the US with a Strategy of Non-use of Antimicrobial Drugs - Evaluated on the basis of systematic clinical examinations, test day results, bulk tank milk samples, treatment protocols and interviews

Mastitis is often considered the most common production disease in organic and conventional dairy herds and most antibiotic treatnments in cattle are due to mastitis. Moreover, mastitis is of great importance for animal welfare. One of the main goals in organic livestock farmin is the promotion of health and welfare. Use of antimicrobial drugs to treat sick animals are considered to be in controversy with th organic aims of a production based on naturalness and the risk of antimicrobial resistance has been a major concern in recent years. However, one concern related to a non-antibiotic treatment strategy is the risk of reduced animal health and welfare. A discription of eighteen US organic dairy herds and an assessment of udder healt in these herds was conducted using the results from of a systematic clinical examination of 802 cows udders, treatment protocols filled in by the farmer during a two-month period, test day results from a twelve-month period, bulk tank milk samples and interviews with the farmers

The political economy of Ireland and its counterfactuals

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The potentials of a dialogical reframing of personality testing in hiring

Personality testing is highly disputed, yet, widely used as a personnel selection tool. In most research, it is taken for granted that personality tests are used with the purpose of achieving a more objective assessment of job candidates. However, in Danish organizations the personality test is often framed as a ‘dialogue tool’. This paper explores the potentials of a dialogical reframing of the use of personality testing in personnel selection by analyzing empirical material from an ethnographic study of the hiring processes in a Danish trade union that declaredly uses personality tests as a dialogue tool. Through an affirmative critique we identify five framings that interact during the test-based dialogue: The ‘meritocratic’, ‘disciplinary’, ‘dialogical’, ‘pastoral’, and ‘con-test’ framing. Our study suggests that being committed to a dialogical reframing nurtures the possibility of focusing on what we call the ‘con-test’: Either as exploring the meta-competences of the candidate or as co-creating embryos through joint reflections on organizational issues. We argue that the long-lasting debates in the field of selection-related personality testing should be much more interested in the question of how personality tests in hiring are used, rather than whether or not they should be used

Liberalism and republicanism, or wealth and virtue revisited

The unquestionable achievement of J. G. A. Pocock's The Machiavellian Moment was to describe the retention of pre-modern values in a modern society. Pocock was notoriously accused of decentring Locke and side-lining the Liberal Tradition. A more pertinent critique had it that he failed to articulate how civic humanism in the context of increasingly commercial societies produced more than Jeremiahs or Cassandras. This article explains how Pocock responded to his various critics by inventing the term “commercial humanism” in an effort to clarify the way in which classical virtue was modified in modern commercial contexts, especially by natural jurists and republicans. Commercial humanism proved controversial but stimulated one of the most original scholars working in the history of political thought, István Hont, to undertake a prolonged engagement with Pocock's revisionist ideas, which ultimately allowed him to answer Pocock's critics better than Pocock, whose voice remained too in tune with those whose view of modern political thought he had rejected. For Hont, Pocock's labours in the history of political thought remained less relevant to present politics than they might become, once the depth of eighteenth-century analyses of the relationship between wealth and virtue was recovered.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Resonant Scanning Design and Control for Fast Spatial Sampling

Two-dimensional, resonant scanners have been utilized in a large variety of imaging modules due to their compact form, low power consumption, large angular range, and high speed. However, resonant scanners have problems with non-optimal and inflexible scanning patterns and inherent phase uncertainty, which limit practical applications. Here we propose methods for optimized design and control of the scanning trajectory of two-dimensional resonant scanners under various physical constraints, including high frame-rate and limited actuation amplitude. First, we propose an analytical design rule for uniform spatial sampling. We demonstrate theoretically and experimentally that by including non-repeating scanning patterns, the proposed designs outperform previous designs in terms of scanning range and fill factor. Second, we show that we can create flexible scanning patterns that allow focusing on user-defined Regions-of-Interest (RoI) by modulation of the scanning parameters. The scanning parameters are found by an optimization algorithm. In simulations, we demonstrate the benefits of these designs with standard metrics and higher-level computer vision tasks (LiDAR odometry and 3D object detection). Finally, we experimentally implement and verify both unmodulated and modulated scanning modes using a two-dimensional, resonant MEMS scanner. Central to the implementations is high bandwidth monitoring of the phase of the angular scans in both dimensions. This task is carried out with a position-sensitive photodetector combined with high-bandwidth electronics, enabling fast spatial sampling at ~ 100Hz frame-rate.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figure

Optimizing spatial cache performance for mobile applications

Digital maps are available on a large range of devices, many of them mobile. Because of the size of map data, they are often stored on a central server. Mobile devices have limited network bandwidth, and the traffic costs may be high. Local caching is a way to reduce the amount of data transmitted between the server and the client. This thesis presents some theory related to digital map systems and caching in general and discusses some issues specific for caching spatial data. A prototype implementation of a spatial cache is used to study the effects of cache size and tile size on the performance of the cache. The results are not as significant as expected. This is assumed to be because the usage pattern in the tests is random and an efficient cache implementation depends on predictability in the usage pattern. However, the results indicate that careful selection of tile size is important to maximize the performance of the cache