Beef Cattle Feeding

PDF pages: 3

Raising Beef Calves

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The Programmable City

AbstractThe worldwide proliferation of mobile connected devices has brought about a revolution in the way we live, and will inevitably guide the way in which we design the cities of the future. However, designing city-wide systems poses a new set of challenges in terms of scale, manageability and citizen involvement. Solving these challenges is crucial to making sure that the vision of a programmable Internet of Things (IoT) becomes reality. In this article we will analyse these issues and present a novel programming approach to designing scalable systems for the Internet of Things, with an emphasis on smart city applications, that addresses these issues

LIFE3: A predictive costing tool for digital collections

Predicting the costs of long-term digital preservation is a crucial yet complex task for even the largest repositories and institutions. For smaller projects and individual researchers faced with preservation requirements, the problem is even more overwhelming, as they lack the accumulated experience of the former. Yet being able to estimate future preservation costs is vital to answering a range of important questions for each. The LIFE (Life Cycle Information for E-Literature) project, which has just completed its third phase, helps institutions and researchers address these concerns, reducing the financial and preservation risks, and allowing decision makers to assess a range of options in order to achieve effective preservation while operating within financial restraints. The project is a collaboration between University College London (UCL), The British Library and the Humanities Advanced Technology and Information Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow. Funding has been supplied in the UK by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the Research Information Network (RIN)

ESTIMATING DETERMINANTS OF STUDENT EVALUATION SCORES TO IMPROVE TEACHING

Student evaluations are used for both formative and summative assessment of teachers. This paper provides a method to make more effective use of these student evaluations by individual teachers. Data on three years of evaluations in two courses were used to develop regression models to explain overall effectiveness of teaching. The relative importance of explanatory variables changed with the course taught.Teaching/Communication/Extension/Profession,

Digital curation and the cloud

Digital curation involves a wide range of activities, many of which could benefit from cloud deployment to a greater or lesser extent. These range from infrequent, resource-intensive tasks which benefit from the ability to rapidly provision resources to day-to-day collaborative activities which can be facilitated by networked cloud services. Associated benefits are offset by risks such as loss of data or service level, legal and governance incompatibilities and transfer bottlenecks. There is considerable variability across both risks and benefits according to the service and deployment models being adopted and the context in which activities are performed. Some risks, such as legal liabilities, are mitigated by the use of alternative, e.g., private cloud models, but this is typically at the expense of benefits such as resource elasticity and economies of scale. Infrastructure as a Service model may provide a basis on which more specialised software services may be provided. There is considerable work to be done in helping institutions understand the cloud and its associated costs, risks and benefits, and how these compare to their current working methods, in order that the most beneficial uses of cloud technologies may be identified. Specific proposals, echoing recent work coordinated by EPSRC and JISC are the development of advisory, costing and brokering services to facilitate appropriate cloud deployments, the exploration of opportunities for certifying or accrediting cloud preservation providers, and the targeted publicity of outputs from pilot studies to the full range of stakeholders within the curation lifecycle, including data creators and owners, repositories, institutional IT support professionals and senior manager

Quantum Hall Effect on the Hyperbolic Plane

In this paper, we study both the continuous model and the discrete model of the Quantum Hall Effect (QHE) on the hyperbolic plane. The Hall conductivity is identified as a geometric invariant associated to an imprimitivity algebra of observables. We define a twisted analogue of the Kasparov map, which enables us to use the pairing between $K$-theory and cyclic cohomology theory, to identify this geometric invariant with a topological index, thereby proving the integrality of the Hall conductivity in this case.Comment: AMS-LaTeX, 28 page

Vincentian Pioneers of the Mississippi Valley (1818–1900)

This article pertains to an exhibit at DePaul University’s library that was meant to educate people about DePaul’s Vincentian identity. Dennis McCann discusses the history of the Congregation and of the Daughters of Charity in the United States and explains what the items in the exhibit reveal about that history. There are twelve groups of objects with themes that include: the Congregation’s early mission in the United States, the linkage of the American mission with its French Vincentian Heritage, Vincentian iconography, life at Saint Mary of the Barrens, the history of the Basilica of Saint Louis (Old Cathedral), the institutions and mission of the Daughters of Charity, perspectives on community life in the Congregation and the Daughters of Charity, and the history of DePaul University. There is also an appendix which gives a Daughter of Charity’s eyewitness account of the Chicago fire

Ecological factors influencing incidence and severity of beech bark disease

American beech have long been observed to escape both signs and symptoms of beech bark disease (BBD). Some may be resistant to Cryptococcus fagisuga (beech scale), a primary component of the BBD complex; research indicates about 1-2% of American beech inherit resistance to beech scale. At the landscape level a variety of environmental factors may induce ecological resistance, a transient condition allowing potentially susceptible individuals to remain disease-free. This project investigated factors that may contribute to ecological resistance, focusing on biotic and abiotic stand characteristics and their relation to BBD incidence and severity. Plots were established at fifteen sites in the Appalachian region; overall, 3,142 beech were evaluated for disease incidence and severity on 102 plots. Over 100 parameters were generated from sampling and compared with Cryptococcus infestation or Neonectria infection. Correlation was used to characterize relationships between recorded parameters and scale infestation or Neonectria infection. Principal Component Analysis identified four important Principal Components (latent variables) composed of recorded parameters. Principal Component 1 (PC1) explained 9.39% of variation in the data; PC2 explained 6.40% of variation; PC3 explained 5.51% of variation; PC4 explained 4.58% of variation. Stepwise multiple regression analyses used Cryptococcus infestation, Neonectria infection, and Principal Components (latent variables) as predictors for the responses Cryptococcus infestation or Neonectria infection. Principal Component 1 (p = 0.0014) and PC4 (p = 0.0015) were significant for Cryptococcus infestation. The interactions of Cryptococcus infestation, PC1, and PC4 (p = 0.0147) and Cryptococcus infestation, PC1, PC3, and PC4 (p = 0.006) were significant for Neonectria infection. Spatial analyses indicate there is spatial dependence for infestation at Blackwater Falls, WV (variability explained = 79.2%) and Great Smoky Mountains National Park, TN (variability explained = 52.9%); and for infection at Allegheny National Forest, PA (variability explained = 68.6%) and Cranberry Wilderness, WV (variability explained = 60.9%). This spatial dependence can partially be explained by inherited resistance and parameters composing significant latent variables. Finally, unusual blocky cankers regularly observed on beech but lacking viable Neonectria perithecia were sampled. Fusarium spp. were isolated from 85% of blocky cankers sampled; Fusarium colonies easily outcompeted and grew over Neonectria colonies when paired in culture and were statistically larger (p \u3c 0.005). Overall, this investigation supports observations that some beech trees remain disease-free by some mechanism other than inherited resistance, and numerous factors were identified that potentially influence dispersal and survival of BBD causal agents