Air pollution and livestock production

The air in a livestock farming environment contains high concentrations of dust particles and gaseous pollutants. The total inhalable dust can enter the nose and mouth during normal breathing and the thoracic dust can reach into the lungs. However, it is the respirable dust particles that can penetrate further into the gas-exchange region, making it the most hazardous dust component. Prolonged exposure to high concentrations of dust particles can lead to respiratory health issues for both livestock and farming staff. Ammonia, an example of a gaseous pollutant, is derived from the decomposition of nitrous compounds. Increased exposure to ammonia may also have an effect on the health of humans and livestock. There are a number of technologies available to ensure exposure to these pollutants is minimised. Through proactive means, (the optimal design and management of livestock buildings) air quality can be improved to reduce the likelihood of risks associated with sub-optimal air quality. Once air problems have taken hold, other reduction methods need to be applied utilising a more reactive approach. A key requirement for the control of concentration and exposure of airborne pollutants to an acceptable level is to be able to conduct real-time measurements of these pollutants. This paper provides a review of airborne pollution including methods to both measure and control the concentration of pollutants in livestock buildings

Quantitative Analysis of DoS Attacks and Client Puzzles in IoT Systems

Denial of Service (DoS) attacks constitute a major security threat to today's Internet. This challenge is especially pertinent to the Internet of Things (IoT) as devices have less computing power, memory and security mechanisms to mitigate DoS attacks. This paper presents a model that mimics the unique characteristics of a network of IoT devices, including components of the system implementing `Crypto Puzzles' - a DoS mitigation technique. We created an imitation of a DoS attack on the system, and conducted a quantitative analysis to simulate the impact such an attack may potentially exert upon the system, assessing the trade off between security and throughput in the IoT system. We model this through stochastic model checking in PRISM and provide evidence that supports this as a valuable method to compare the efficiency of different implementations of IoT systems, exemplified by a case study

Iron(III)-catalyzed chlorination of activated arenes

A general and regioselective method for the chlorination of activated arenes has been developed. The transformation uses iron(III) triflimide as a powerful Lewis acid for the activation of N-chlorosuccinimide and the subsequent chlorination of a wide range of anisole, aniline, acetanilide and phenol derivatives. The reaction was utilized for the late-stage mono- and di-chlorination of a range of target compounds such as the natural product nitrofungin, the antibacterial agent chloroxylenol and the herbicide chloroxynil. The facile nature of this transformation was demonstrated with the development of one-pot tandem iron-catalyzed dihalogenation processes allowing highly regioselective formation of different carbon-halogen bonds. The synthetic utility of the resulting dihalogenated aryl compounds as building blocks was established with the synthesis of natural products and pharmaceutically relevant targets

Surface Modification of an Experimental Silicone Rubber Maxillofacial Material to Improve Wettability

OBJECTIVES: Good wettability of maxillofacial prosthetic materials is important so hat a lubricating layer is formed with supporting tissues thus reducing patient discomfort. The purpose of the study was to surface modify an experimental silicone rubber material in order to improve wettability. METHODS : Samples of experimental silicone rubber were surface modified by first argon plasma treatment followed by chemisorption of ethyleneoxy functional silanes. These were compared with the same silicone rubber which had ethyleneoxy functional surfactants incorporated into the polymer matrix. In all cases contact angles, tear strength and water uptake were measured. RESULTS: Surface modified materials had comparable contact angles to surfactant modified silicone rubber, all being significantly lower than the unmodified material. Surface modified materials however had a significantly higher tear strength and lower water uptake in comparison to surfactant modified materials. CONCLUSION: Argon plasma treatment followed by chemisorption of ethyleneoxy functional silanes proved an effective way of improving the wettability of an experimental silicone rubber maxillofacial prosthetic material without altering bulk properties

Exact harmonic coefficients for a magnetic ring head

©1999 IEEE. Personal use of this material is permitted. However, permission to reprint/republish this material for advertising or promotional purposes or for creating new collective works for resale or redistribution to servers or lists, or to reuse any copyrighted component of this work in other works must be obtained from the IEEE.The magnetic field of a ring head has been analyzed by Westmijze [1953], using a conformal mapping, and by Fan [1961], using Fourier techniques. Here these methods are reexamined and combined to give, for the first time, an explicit analytic expression for the harmonic coefficients in the Fan solution

The effect of thermal anisotropies during crystallization in phase-change recording media

types: ArticleCopyright © 2008 American Institute of Physics. This article may be downloaded for personal use only. Any other use requires prior permission of the author and the American Institute of Physics. The following article appeared in Journal of Applied Physics 104 (2008) and may be found at http://dx.doi.org/10.1063/1.2968447The problem discussed is the significance of anisotropies in the thermal parameters of different phases of phase-change materials as used for data storage purposes during recording. The particular phase change in interest is from the amorphous-to-crystalline state. Applying the method of correlation moment analysis produced upper estimators for the time dependence of the width of the crystalline mark and the time at which phase change ceases based on the heat flow process alone. These upper estimators are closed-form analytical expressions that can be used to estimate the recording resolution for any general spatial profile of initial temperature in the medium. This analysis showed that, up to a first order, the specific heat anisotropies have considerably less influence on the heat flow than the thermal conductivity differences. In general, for the material parameters used in phase-change data storage applications, the theory showed that the anisotropy in thermal parameters can be neglected. (C) 2008 American Institute of Physics

Fixing Collinearity Instability Using Principal Component and Ridge Regression Analyses in the Relationship Between Body Measurements and Body Weight in Japanese Black Cattle

Monthly measurements of withers height (WHT), hip height (HIPHT), body length (BL), chest width (CHWD), shoulder width (SHWD), chest depth (CHDP), hip width (HIPWD), lumbar vertebrae width (LUVWD), thurl width (THWD), pin bone width (PINWD), rump length (RUMPLN), cannon circumference (CANNCIR) and chest circumference (CHCIR) from birth to yearling age, were utilised in principal component and ridge regression analyses to study their relationship with body weight in Japanese Black cattle with an objective of fixing the problem of collinearity instability. The data comprised of a total of 10,543 records on calves born between 1937 and 2002 within the same herd under the same management. Simple pair wise correlation coefficients between the body measurements revealed positive, highly significant (P<0.001) values of 0.98 between WHT and HIPHT, HIPWD and LUVWD, while the lowest correlation of 0.50 was between CHDP and SHWD. Severe collinearity problems as portrayed by variance inflation factors (VIF) above 10 were evident in all body measurements ranging from 11.25 in PINWD to 46.94 in LUVWD except for SHWD (1.80), CHDP (3.70), CHWD (7.11) and CANNCIR (7.33). Principal component and ridge regression analyses allowed the derivation of new and more stable regression coefficients that overcame the problem of collinearity. Of all the body measurements studied, hip height was shown to be the least important for predicting the body weight of Japanese Black cattle, while SHWD and CHWD were the most important