Exploring the potential of precision dairy tools

Take Home Messages Precision Dairy Farming is the use of technologies to measure physiological, behavioral, and production indicators on individual animals to improve management strategies and farm performance. Many Precision Dairy Farming technologies, including daily milk yield recording, milk component monitoring, pedometers, automatic temperature recording devices, milk conductivity indicators, automatic estrus detection monitors, and daily body weight measurements, are already being utilized by dairy producers. Other theoretical Precision Dairy Farming technologies have been proposed to measure jaw movements, ruminal pH, reticular contractions, heart rate, animal positioning and activity, vaginal mucus electrical resistance, feeding behavior, lying behavior, odor, glucose, acoustics, progesterone, individual milk components, color (as an indicator of cleanliness), infrared udder surface temperatures, and respiration rates. The main objectives of Precision Dairy Farming are maximizing individual animal potential, early detection of disease, and minimizing the use of medication through preventive health measures. Perceived benefits of Precision Dairy Farming technologies include increased efficiency, reduced costs, improved product quality, minimized adverse environmental impacts, and improved animal health and well-being. Real time data used for monitoring animals may be incorporated into decision support systems designed to facilitate decision making for issues that require compilation of multiple sources of data. Technologies for physiological monitoring of dairy cows have great potential to supplement the observational activities of skilled herdspersons, which is especially critical as more cows are managed by fewer skilled workers. The economic implications of technology adoption must be explored further to increase adoption rates of Precision Dairy Farming technologies

Control of long-range correlations in turbulence

The character of turbulence depends on where it develops. Turbulence near boundaries, for instance, is different than in a free stream. To elucidate the differences between flows, it is instructive to vary the structure of turbulence systematically, but there are few ways of stirring turbulence that make this possible. In other words, an experiment typically examines either a boundary layer or a free stream, say, and the structure of the turbulence is fixed by the geometry of the experiment. We introduce a new active grid with many more degrees of freedom than previous active grids. The additional degrees of freedom make it possible to control various properties of the turbulence. We show how long-range correlations in the turbulent velocity fluctuations can be shaped by changing the way the active grid moves. Specifically, we show how not only the correlation length but also the detailed shape of the correlation function depends on the correlations imposed in the motions of the grid. Until now, large-scale structure had not been adjustable in experiments. This new capability makes possible new systematic investigations into turbulence dissipation and dispersion, for example, and perhaps in flows that mimic features of boundary layers, free streams, and flows of intermediate character.Comment: This paper has been accepted to Experiments in Fluids. 25 pages, 10 figure

Employers’ Attitudes and Likely Reactions to the Workplace Pension Reforms 2009

This report presents findings of a quantitative survey carried out in 2009 to explore employer’s attitudes and likely reactions to the workplace pension reforms. It involved telephone interviews with 2,550 private sector employers across Great Britain, selected to reflect diversity in terms of employer’s size, current level of provision and likely future contribution levels. The research was carried out by TNS-BMRB and NIESR on behalf of the Department for Work and Pensions. The study was commissioned as part of a programme of research and analysis to inform policy development, implementation and estimation of the likely impacts of the workplace pension reforms

On a self-sustained process at large scale in the turbulent channel flow

Large-scale motions, important in turbulent shear flows, are frequently attributed to the interaction of structures at smaller scale. Here we show that, in a turbulent channel at Re_{\tau} \approx 550, large-scale motions can self-sustain even when smaller-scale structures populating the near-wall and logarithmic regions are artificially quenched. This large-scale self-sustained mechanism is not active in periodic boxes of width smaller than Lz ~ 1.5h or length shorter than Lx ~ 3h which correspond well to the most energetic large scales observed in the turbulent channel

Evaluation Methodology: Measurement of Drivers of Business Success and Failure

Report for BIS from the National Institute of Economic and Social Research (NIESR) that seeks to identify the key drivers of business success and failure through a review of existing literature. Looks at the extent to which these drivers can be measured, aiming to enhance the validity of evaluations of economic impact of projects, programmes and policies on businesses. Aims to inform future work undertaken by the department to evaluate the impact of government interventions on the business community, helping to identify a set of business characteristics that would ideally be employed as matching variables or control variables within future evaluations