Sustainability and welfare of Podolian cattle

The aim of the present study was to evaluate the sustainability and welfare of extensively farmed Podolian cattle. A trained interviewer visited 50 farms and filled in a checklist which included four cards corresponding to the following animal categories: calves, replacements, feeders and adults. The analysis of the farming system showed that animals were able to express their main behavioural patterns. In addition, recorded animal-related variables indicated that Podolian cattle could benefit from high standards of welfare. Sustainability of the Podolian farming system in terms of human edible returns was evaluated for two production systems producing 10-month-old calves (10 month) and 18-month-old young bulls (18 month), respectively. Edible returns for humans were low when all animal intakes were considered for both production systems. However, if returns were computed using not only the amount of food used by the animals but also consumable by humans, yields were much higher for 18-month systems [103% crude protein (CP) and 37.1% gross energy (GE)] and so high that they could not be computed for 10-month systems. These results indicate either a low degree of competition (18-month system) or no competition (10-month system) between humans and Podolian cattle. Perceptions of sustainability and welfare of Podolian cattle may promote a favourable positioning of products in premium-price markets and help preserving this breed and the related traditional farming system

Influence of space allowance on the welfare of weaned buffalo (Bubalus Bubalis) calves

Twenty weaned female buffalo calves were used to evaluate the effect of space allowance in relation to their body surface area on a range of behavioural and physiological parameters. Body surface area in m2 was calculated as 0.12 body weight0.60. Ten calves received 50% of body surface as space allocation (Group 50), 10 others received 90% of body surface area (Group 90). Animals in Group 50 lay with a lower number of outstretched legs than calves in Group 90. Buffaloes from Group 50 were observed standing more frequently than animals from Group 90 ( P < 0.001). The proportions of idling ( P < 0.01) and lying idle observations ( P < 0.001) were higher for Group 90 than for Group 50. Group 90 performed a higher number of non-agonistic interactions than Group 50 ( P < 0.01), whereas the opposite was observed for the number of agonistic interactions ( P < 0.01). When exposed to open field testing, Group 50 animals displayed an increased duration of movement, number of galloping events and more vocalisation. Neither immune responses to phytohemagglutinin and ovalbumin nor the cortisol response to exogenous ACTH were affected by treatment. It was concluded that 50% of body surface area may be an inadequate space allowance for weaned calves

Eigenvalue estimates for submanifolds of warped product spaces

We give lower bounds for the fundamental tone of open sets in minimal submanifolds immersed into warped product spaces of type $N^n \times_f Q^q$, where $f \in C^\infty(N)$. We also study the essential spectrum of these minimal submanifolds.Comment: 17 page

Maximum principle for semi-elliptic trace operators and geometric applications

Based on ideas of L. Al\'ias, D. Impera and M. Rigoli developed in "Hypersurfaces of constant higher order mean curvature in warped products", we develope a fairly general weak/Omori-Yau maximum principle for trace operators. We apply this version of maximum principle to generalize several higher order mean curvature estimates and to give an extension of Alias-Impera-Rigoli Slice Theore

Mean exit times from submanifolds with bounded mean curvature

We show that submanifolds with infinite mean exit time can not be isometrically and minimally immersed into cylinders, horocylinders, cones, and wedges of some product spaces. Our approach is not based on the weak maximum principle at infinity, and thus it permits us to generalize previous results concerning non-immersibility of stochastically complete submanifolds. We also produce estimates for the complete tower of moments for submanifolds with small mean curvature immersed into cylinders.Comment: We fixed one misprint in Remark 2.

Universal mean-field upper bound for the generalization gap of deep neural networks

Modern deep neural networks (DNNs) represent a formidable challenge for theorists: according to the commonly accepted probabilistic framework that describes their performance, these architectures should overfit due to the huge number of parameters to train, but in practice they do not. Here we employ results from replica mean field theory to compute the generalization gap of machine learning models with quenched features, in the teacher-student scenario and for regression problems with quadratic loss function. Notably, this framework includes the case of DNNs where the last layer is optimized given a specific realization of the remaining weights. We show how these results-combined with ideas from statistical learning theory-provide a stringent asymptotic upper bound on the generalization gap of fully trained DNN as a function of the size of the dataset P. In particular, in the limit of large P and N-out (where N-out is the size of the last layer) and N-out &lt;&lt; P, the generalization gap approaches zero faster than 2N(out)/P, for any choice of both architecture and teacher function. Notably, this result greatly improves existing bounds from statistical learning theory. We test our predictions on a broad range of architectures, from toy fully connected neural networks with few hidden layers to state-of-the-art deep convolutional neural networks

The hidden costs of livestock environmental sustainability: The case of Podolian Cattle

Life cycle assessment (LCA) is currently one of the most widely used methods for assessing the environmental impacts and performance of livestock products. According to this procedure, intensification of animal production is generally advocated to mitigate greenhouse gas emissions compared with extensive grazing systems due to the use of selected breeds, with enhanced productivity, and the significant reductions in CH4 emissions consequent to the use of concentrates rather than forages. In addition, the impact of intensive systems on land use is much lower. However, free-ranging Podolian cattle show a number of positive environmental effects, such as increased climate stability, improved soil functionality, water quality and footprint and preservation from fires along with maintaining an economically active social community in otherwise unproductive, marginal areas. Other beneficial effects of extensive Podolian farming system include low competition with human nutrition and high level of animal health and welfare. An economic evaluation of these non-commodity outputs should be indirectly estimated by the avoided costs (e.g. reduced veterinary interventions and therapy treatments) or the lack of profits (e.g. direct payments for the enhancement of environmental performance) that would have incurred in their absence. These economic evaluations should be used in order to allocate them as further outputs to be included in the LCA in order to achieve a more accurate estimation of the impact of the Podolian farming system

Serum cholesterol levels in neutropenic patients with fever

Hypocholesterolemia, which often accompanies infectious diseases has been suggested to serve as a prognostic marker in hospitalized patients. Even though patients with chemotherapyinduced leukopenia are at high risk of infection and mortality, only limited information is available on serum cholesterol levels in these patients. We therefore measured serum cholesterol levels in 17 patients with hematological malignancies during chemotherapyinduced neutropenia and correlated it with clinical outcome. Patients with fever (&gt;38.5 degreesC) showed a significant decrease in serum cholesterol levels within 24 hours. Eight days after onset of the fever nonsurvivors had significantly lower serum cholesterol levels (median 2.09 mmol/l, range 0.492.79, n=6) compared to survivors (median 3.23 mmol/l, range 1.684.86, n=11). Cholesterol levels in survivors returned to baseline levels at the time of discharge from the hospital. At the onset of fever, serum levels of inflammatory cytokines interleukin-6, tumor necrosis factor (TNF) and soluble TNF receptors p55 and p75 were elevated in all patients, but only TNF and TNF receptor p75 levels were significantly different in survivors and nonsurvivors. Our data suggest that a decrease in serum cholesterol levels is a prognostic marker in neutropenic patients with fever. Release of inflammatory cytokines may in part be responsible for hypocholesterolemia in these patients