Environmental Enrichment of Calves Using Stationary and Mechanical Brushes

While there is research on enrichment and brush use in adult cows, there is limited research addressing brush use in calves. The objectives were to substantiate brushes as enrichment devices for calves and determine if exposure to stationary brushes pre-weaning affects brush use post-weaning. Calves were randomly grouped into treatment group B (with brush, n = 10) or treatment group N (no brush, n = 10). During pre-weaning, calves were housed individually in hutches from birth until at least 8 weeks of age, and group B had access to stationary brushes. During post-weaning, calves entered group housing and had access to a mechanical and stationary brush until at least 11 weeks of age. Physical performance characteristics were recorded throughout the trial, and behavior was recorded using video cameras for 12 h/d twice a week. During pre-weaning, treatments had similar ADG (0.610 kg/d), weight (41.8 kg), hip height (75.8 cm), and wither height (72.4 cm). During post-weaning, treatments had similar ADG (0.747 kg/day), changes in hip height (0.212 cm/day), and changes in wither height (0.204 cm/day). This suggests exposure to stationary brushes pre-weaning did not affect growth. In preliminary analysis for 16 calves pre-weaning, group B (n = 8) used stationary brushes for 133.8 s/12 hr, demonstrating that calves utilized stationary brushes as enrichment tools during pre-weaning. The treatments spent similar durations interacting with pen fixtures pre-weaning (434.9 vs. 419.0 ± 98.41 s/12 hr for B and N respectively). In preliminary analysis of 11 calves post-weaning, there was a treatment by week trend for mechanical brush use, indicating that calves exposed to brushes pre-weaning used the mechanical brush quicker post-weaning. The use of the stationary brush post-weaning was minimal, thus we conclude calves preferred the mechanical brush. We expect further analysis to show behavioral differences between treatments, indicating that exposure to a brush pre-weaning affects behavior post-weaning.The Ohio State University, College of Food, Agricultural, and Environmental Sciences, Ohio Agricultural Research and Development CenterWill C. Hauk Endowment fundNo embargoAcademic Major: Animal Science

Mining web data for competency management

We present CORDER (COmmunity Relation Discovery by named Entity Recognition) an un-supervised machine learning algorithm that exploits named entity recognition and co-occurrence data to associate individuals in an organization with their expertise and associates. We discuss the problems associated with evaluating unsupervised learners and report our initial evaluation experiments

Relation Discovery from Web Data for Competency Management

This paper describes a technique for automatically discovering associations between people and expertise from an analysis of very large data sources (including web pages, blogs and emails), using a family of algorithms that perform accurate named-entity recognition, assign different weights to terms according to an analysis of document structure, and access distances between terms in a document. My contribution is to add a social networking approach called BuddyFinder which relies on associations within a large enterprise-wide "buddy list" to help delimit the search space and also to provide a form of 'social triangulation' whereby the system can discover documents from your colleagues that contain pertinent information about you. This work has been influential in the information retrieval community generally, as it is the basis of a landmark system that achieved overall first place in every category in the Enterprise Search Track of TREC2006

ClaiMaker: weaving a semantic web of research papers

The usability of research papers on the Web would be enhanced by a system that explicitly modelled the rhetorical relations between claims in related papers. We describe ClaiMaker, a system for modelling readers’ interpretations of the core content of papers. ClaiMaker provides tools to build a Semantic Web representation of the claims in research papers using an ontology of relations. We demonstrate how the system can be used to make inter-document queries

A low-dose comprehensive cardiac CT protocol assessing anatomy, function, perfusion, and viability

AbstractRadiation exposure in cardiac imaging is a major healthcare concern and low-dose cardiac imaging has important implications for patients. We describe the application of a low-dose comprehensive cardiac computed tomography protocol that assesses anatomy, function, perfusion and viability with correlations to invasive coronary angiography and magnetic resonance imaging

Measuring hadron properties at finite temperature

We estimate the numbers and mass spectra of observed lepton and kaon pairs produced from $\phi$ meson decays in the central rapidity region of an Au+Au collision at lab energy 11.6 GeV/nucleon. The following effects are considered: possible mass shifts, thermal broadening due to collisions with hadronic resonances, and superheating of the resonance gas. Changes in the dilepton mass spectrum may be seen, but changes in the dikaon spectrum are too small to be detectable.Comment: 9 pages (revtex), 3 figures (uuencoded postscript

Back gating of a two-dimensional hole gas in a SiGe quantum well

A device comprising a low-resistivity, n-type, Si substrate as a back gate to a p-type (boron), remote-doped, SiGe quantum well has been fabricated and characterized. Reverse and forward voltage biasing of the gate with respect to the two-dimensional hole gas in the quantum well allows the density of holes to be varied from 8 × 1011 cm–2 down to a measurement-limited value of 4 × 1011 cm–2. This device is used to demonstrate the evolution with decreasing carrier density of a re-entrant insulator state between the integer quantum Hall effect states with filling factors 1 and 3

Weak localisation, hole-hole interactions and the "metal"-insulator transition in two dimensions

A detailed investigation of the metallic behaviour in high quality GaAs-AlGaAs two dimensional hole systems reveals the presence of quantum corrections to the resistivity at low temperatures. Despite the low density ($r_{s}>10$) and high quality of these systems, both weak localisation (observed via negative magnetoresistance) and weak hole-hole interactions (giving a correction to the Hall constant) are present in the so-called metallic phase where the resistivity decreases with decreasing temperature. The results suggest that even at high $r_{s}$ there is no metallic phase at T=0 in two dimensions.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure