The Effect of Diet and Oral Antibiotic Therapy on Immune Function and Productivity in Young Pigs

Medicated early weaning programs have been shown to be an excellent method to control disease incidence in the young pig. Additional research by Dritz, et al1, showed that early weaning at 7-10 days without medication resulted in significant weight gains over conventional weaning at 14-17 days. We were interested in the effects of low levels of conventional water and feed grade antibiotic tratments on performance and immunological parameters of the young pig in a commercial operation. Previously, we had tested this treatment at a research facility and had shown increased production and a decreased polyclonal immunological response in the reated animals23. The use of such a program would be a benefit to producers who do not have the production facilities that allowing for early weaning (7-10 days) and/or multisite production. A study was conducted to determine the effect of AureomycinTM and Aureo-SulmetTM on production. The study was a 2X2 factorial experiment to determine the effect of weaning treatment and nutrition level on immune response

Biodiversity loss underlies the dilution effect of biodiversity

The dilution effect predicts increasing biodiversity to reduce the risk of infection, but the generality of this effect remains unresolved. Because biodiversity loss generates predictable changes in host community competence, we hypothesised that biodiversity loss might drive the dilution effect. We tested this hypothesis by reanalysing four previously published meta-analyses that came to contradictory conclusions regarding generality of the dilution effect. In the context of biodiversity loss, our analyses revealed a unifying pattern: dilution effects were inconsistently observed for natural biodiversity gradients, but were commonly observed for biodiversity gradients generated by disturbances causing losses of biodiversity. Incorporating biodiversity loss into tests of generality of the dilution effect further indicated that scale-dependency may strengthen the dilution effect only when biodiversity gradients are driven by biodiversity loss. Together, these results help to resolve one of the most contentious issues in disease ecology: the generality of the dilution effect.Non peer reviewe

Sign Language Recognition

This chapter covers the key aspects of sign-language recognition (SLR), starting with a brief introduction to the motivations and requirements, followed by a précis of sign linguistics and their impact on the field. The types of data available and the relative merits are explored allowing examination of the features which can be extracted. Classifying the manual aspects of sign (similar to gestures) is then discussed from a tracking and non-tracking viewpoint before summarising some of the approaches to the non-manual aspects of sign languages. Methods for combining the sign classification results into full SLR are given showing the progression towards speech recognition techniques and the further adaptations required for the sign specific case. Finally the current frontiers are discussed and the recent research presented. This covers the task of continuous sign recognition, the work towards true signer independence, how to effectively combine the different modalities of sign, making use of the current linguistic research and adapting to larger more noisy data set