Partial Cooling of the Environment in Free Stalls for Sows During Farrowing and Lactation

Many of the technological advances in the swine industry have resulted in increased capital requirements for buildings and equipment. This has made multiple farrowing, including summer farrowing, a near necessity. Hog farmers recognize the problem of sow mortality due to severe heat stress during periods of high ambient temperatures, and hog producers utilizing the free stall farrowing system recognize yet another problem, that of poor stall occupancy. Sows in this type of system tend to seek relief by leaving their stalls and lying in moist or breezy areas. This decreased stall occupancy has resulted in pigs being severely neglected, reduced weight gains and starvation in extreme cases. A need to modify the thermal environment in the free stalls to provide sows with thermal relief is desired. Preliminary work has indicated that cooling the entire environment is very expensive. Therefore, an alternate system of partial modification of the environment using a stream of cooled air directed on sows was investigated. The objectives of this research were the following: 1. Determine the effects of cooled air directed toward the sow on swine performance as indicated by pig weight gain, mortality and weight change of the sow. 2. Evaluate sow response in terms of respiration rate and pen occupancy. 3. Describe the environmental conditions of temperature and relative humidity within the farrowing building. 4. Determine the electric energy use of the environmental control equipment

‘Lugger Language: isolation and collaboration’

Lugger Language celebrates the multicultural and multilingual nature of Broome’s pearling industry. Crews of the pearl luggers were of many ethnic groups: Japanese, Malay, Koepangers, Ambonese, Manilamen, Chinese, Aboriginal and more, who spoke a variety of languages. In this environment Broome Pearling Lugger pidgin developed. The isolation that men experienced on the luggers, and the tyranny of distance experienced by those on land back in port, brought people from all these backgrounds together in a variety of ways

Development of a data set of pesticide dissipation rates in/on various plant matrices for the Pesticide Properties Database

© 2017 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).Data relating to the rate at which pesticide active substances dissipate on or within various plant matrices are important for a range of different risk assessments including those related to occupational exposure and consumer safety. However, despite the importance of this data, dissipation rates, often expressed as the pesticide half-life, are not included in the most common online data resources. Databases have been collated in the past but these tend not to be maintained or regularly updated. The purpose of the exercise described herein was to collate a new database in a format compatible with the main online pesticide database resource (the Pesticide Properties Database, PPDB), to validate this database in line with the Pesticide Properties Database protocols and thus ensure that the data is maintained and updated in future. The outcome of the study is a database based on data collated from 1390 published articles covering over 400 pesticides and over 200 crops across a wide variety of different matrices (leaves, fruits, seeds etc.) for pesticide residues on the crop surface as well as residues absorbed within the plant material. This data is now fully incorporated into the PPDB.Peer reviewe

International hotel management internships: an interpretive phenomenological analysis of student experience

This research applied a phenomenological approach to investigate the experience of final year undergraduate students who had undertaken 48 week paid management internships within the luxury hotel sector outside of the United Kingdom. There is an emerging research base in respect to students' responses to work integrated learning and co-operative work experience and this study has added to the limited qualitative evidence that exists on students' experience of extended international internships within the hotel sector. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with 25 final year undergraduate students in a single British university. The interviews elicited information about how students made sense of their overseas work experience at a point when they were preparing to leave university and enter fulltime employment. Four superordinate themes emerged after the cross-analysis of individual participant's experience. Findings support previous studies into co-operative management education in identifying personal growth and confidence as important phenomena experienced by participants. Furthermore, participants indicated a sense of heightened human capital in the form of cosmopolitan human capital and expressed strong self-belief in their own employability as a consequence of their experience. This increased sense of employability remained true despite intention to work overseas again or to remain within the hotel sector. Original to this research are the phenomena of adversity and resilience coupled with the emergence of sub-themes clustering around positive psychological development that emerged through analysis of participants' internship experience. This study puts forward a theoretical model of international internships and positive psychological capital and contributes to practice in internship and employability mentoring and policy decision making regarding the internationalisation and employability agendas in higher education

Framework for the Analysis of the Adaptability, Extensibility, and Scalability of Semantic Information Integration and the Context Mediation Approach

Technological advances such as Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) have increased the feasibility and importance of effectively integrating information from an ever widening number of systems within and across enterprises. A key difficulty of achieving this goal comes from the pervasive heterogeneity in all levels of information systems. A robust solution to this problem needs to be adaptable, extensible, and scalable. In this paper, we identify the deficiencies of traditional semantic integration approaches. The COntext INterchange (COIN) approach overcomes these deficiencies by declaratively representing data semantics and using a mediator to create the necessary conversion programs from a small number of conversion rules. The capabilities of COIN is demonstrated using an example with 150 data sources, where COIN can automatically generate the over 22,000 conversion programs needed to enable semantic interoperability using only six parametizable conversion rules. This paper presents a framework for evaluating adaptability, extensibility, and scalability of semantic integration approaches. The application of the framework is demonstrated with a systematic evaluation of COIN and other commonly practiced approaches.This work has been supported, in part, by MITRE Corp., the MIT-MUST project, the Singapore-MIT Alliance, and Suruga Bank

Semantic Information Integration in the Large: Adaptability, Extensibility, and Scalability of the Context Mediation Approach

There is pressing need for effectively integrating information from an ever increasing number of available sources both on the web and in other existing systems. A key difficulty of achieving this goal comes from the pervasive heterogeneities in all levels of information systems. Existing and emerging technologies, such as the Web, ODBC, XML, and Web Services, provide essential capabilities in resolving heterogeneities in the hardware and software platforms, but they do not address the semantic heterogeneity of the data itself. A robust solution to this problem needs to be adaptable, extensible, and scalable. In this paper, we identify the deficiencies of traditional approaches that address this problem using hand-coded programs or require complete data standardization. The COntext INterchange (COIN) approach overcomes these deficiencies by declaratively representing data semantics and using a mediator to create the necessary conversion programs using a small number of conversion rules. The capabilities of COIN is demonstrated using an intelligence information integration example consisting of 150 data sources, where COIN can automatically generate the over 22,000 conversion programs needed to enable semantic integration using only six parametizable conversion rules. This paper makes a unique contribution by providing a systematic evaluation of COIN and other commonly practiced approaches

2011 Indiana Interstate Mobility Report—Summary Version

The 2011 Mobility Report—Summary Version introduces the use of crowd sourced probe data collected from vehicles and mobile devices to quantify the location and duration of congestion on Indiana interstates. The report presents a detailed case study of the I-65 corridor, as well as examples of travel time reliability information for sections of Interstates 65, 70, and 94. Summary monthly mobility statistics for all 943 centerline miles of Indiana Interstates 64, 65, 69, 70, 74, 94, and 465 are tabulated in a graphical format to facilitate comparison of mobility along those corridors

Historical Floods in New England

One or more of the great recent New England floods of 1927, 1936, 1938, and 1955 exceeded the greatest known historical floods on most of the major rivers. Locally, on tributary streams, the great floods of recent years probably exceeded historical floods, but the certainty diminishes for the floods that occurred prior to the observance of living witnesses. This report presents, by year, a condensation of the data on unusual historical floods (floods that occurred before establishment of gaging stations) and the sources of this evidence. This information will be helpful in the determination of the frequency of the highest flood or floods of record. Such determinations are necessary for studies of flood frequencies and magnitudes, which in turn are necessary for studies of relative costs and benefits of flood-control measures and of bridges, and for the evaluation of flood-plain insurance and zoning measures