Freeze Up Cheap Spring Eggs

When eggs are about a penny apiece, it takes a lot of them to pay the family grocery bill. And this spring they have skidded down to about that price in many Iowa communities. Next fall and early winter, prices are pretty likely to be much higher if they follow their usual trend

Bulletin No. 222 - A Quarter Century of Dry-Farm Experiments at Nephi, Utah

Utah is naturally an arid state with precipitation varying from 3.71 inches at Wendover, located in the vast desert region on the western border, to more than 40 inches on some of the mountain ranges. Desert and mountain areas and other untillable land combined total about 95 per cent of Utah\u27s land area. The remaining 5 per cent constitutes all the land which will yield to cultivation either by irrigation or by dry-farming. Durinog the 76 years that dry-farming has been practiced in Utah, many change in tillage practices, cropping systems, crops, and crop varieties have taken place in keeping with early experience, and later as experimental evidence coupled with experience directed. This progressive improvement has now resulted in a nearly complete standardization of crops and cropping methods. Wheat is the dominant crop on Utah dry-lands. Turkey wheat with its strains and related varieties was grown on 48 per cent of the total wheat area in 1924 including irrigated land. On the dry-lands, Turkey together with Kanred winter wheat produces more than 95 per cent. Cropping and tillage methods now consist of alternate crop and fallow, fall or early spring plowing, rigid weed control, and seeding of 5 to 6 pecks of clean treated seed to the acre on clay loams with somewhat less on sandy soils

Stock assessment of the Australian east coast tailor (Pomatomus saltatrix) fishery

Tailor is a highly migratory fish with an iconic, mainly beach-based fishery on the Australian east coast. There is a pronounced annual, close-inshore run of large schools of tailor from New South Wales, where the fishery peaks in April–June, to Queensland where the Fraser Island fishery at the northern end of the run peaks in August–September. The commercial sector of the fishery developed over the first half of the 20th century while the recreational beach line sector grew strongly from the late 1940s, facilitated by rapid developments in recreational beach-fishing gear. The recreational sector appeared to have had a pronounced peak in both harvest size and fishing effort in the mid-1990s, after which both the recreational and commercial sectors experienced big falls driven largely by cultural change. Recreational participation rates and fishing effort fell sharply while fishery management implemented measures such as bag limits on the recreational sector and harvest limits and spatial restrictions on the commercial sector. Information on the tailor fishery is relatively rich in fish length-frequency and ageing data, although data quality greatly improved from the mid-1990s with the introduction of scientific sampling methods. Prior to that time there were no reliable fish ageing data and most length-frequency data came from tagging experiments. The eastern Australian stock of tailor mainly consists of young fish with not many surviving beyond four years of age. The oldest fish aged by Fisheries Queensland’s monitoring team were just under seven years of age

Poultry for the Locker

How\u27s the best way to prepare poultry for freezing? We\u27ve been working on this problem for about 10 years at the Iowa Station. Other states have been studying it too. This story will tell you some of the things we have learned about getting the birds ready for freezing and storing

Holonomy in the Schwarzschild-Droste Geometry

Parallel transport of vectors in curved spacetimes generally results in a deficit angle between the directions of the initial and final vectors. We examine such holonomy in the Schwarzschild-Droste geometry and find a number of interesting features that are not widely known. For example, parallel transport around circular orbits results in a quantized band structure of holonomy invariance. We also examine radial holonomy and extend the analysis to spinors and to the Reissner-Nordstr\"om metric, where we find qualitatively different behavior for the extremal ($Q = M$) case. Our calculations provide a toolbox that will hopefully be useful in the investigation of quantum parallel transport in Hilbert-fibered spacetimes.Comment: 18 Latex pages, 3 figures. Second replacement. This version as published in CQG with some misprints correcte

Optimal Design of Low-Density SNP Arrays for Genomic Prediction: Algorithm and Applications

Low-density (LD) single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP) arrays provide a cost-effective solution for genomic prediction and selection, but algorithms and computational tools are needed for the optimal design of LD SNP chips. A multiple-objective, local optimization (MOLO) algorithm was developed for design of optimal LD SNP chips that can be imputed accurately to medium-density (MD) or high-density (HD) SNP genotypes for genomic prediction. The objective function facilitates maximization of non-gap map length and system information for the SNP chip, and the latter is computed either as locus-averaged (LASE) or haplotype-averaged Shannon entropy (HASE) and adjusted for uniformity of the SNP distribution. HASE performed better than LASE with more computing time. Nevertheless, the differences diminished when \u3e5,000 SNPs were selected. Optimization was accomplished conditionally on the presence of SNPs that were obligated to each chromosome. The frame location of SNPs on a chip can be either uniform (evenly spaced) or non-uniform. For the latter design, a tunable empirical Beta distribution was used to guide location distribution of frame SNPs such that both ends of each chromosome were enriched with SNPs. The SNP distribution on each chromosome was finalized through the objective function that was locally and empirically maximized. This MOLO algorithm was capable of selecting a set of approximately evenly-spaced and highly-informative SNPs, which in turn led to increased imputation accuracy compared with selection solely of evenly-spaced SNPs. Imputation accuracy increased with LD chip size, and imputation error rate was extremely low for chips with \u3e3,000 SNPs. Assuming that genotyping or imputation error occurs at random, imputation error rate can be viewed as the upper limit for genomic prediction error. Our results show that about 25% of imputation error rate was propagated to genomic prediction in an Angus population. The utility of this MOLO algorithm was also demonstrated in a real application, in which a 6K SNP panel was optimized conditional on 5,260 obligatory SNP selected based on SNP-trait association in U.S. Holstein animals. With this MOLO algorithm, both imputation error rate and genomic prediction error rate were minimal