A Bacteriological Study of Abscesses of Swine and Cattle

Condemnation of abscessed portions of swine and beef carcasses is an important economic problem to the meat packing industry and, consequently, to the individual stock producer. The Meat Inspection Division of the Agricultural Research Service of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, in its summary of activities from 1955 through 1969 (2), reported that the numbers of abscessed portions from cattle and swine have increased (Table 1 and Figure 1). In this 10-year period the number of abscessed parts condemned in swine increased from 1.4% (1,397,248) of the animals slaughtered to 3.9% (2,660,522). During the same period of time the number of abscessed beef livers condemned increased from 7.6% (1,432,505) to 8.8% (2,242,147), an increase of 1.2%. The entire head of a hog is condemned when it has a jowl abscess and the entire liver of a beef is condemned when it is abscessed. In addition to the loss from abscesses which can be calculated directly from packing house losses, the individual stock producer loses by forced premature sale of breeding stock and by reduced feed utilization by an infected animal. The total effect on the industry is in the millions of dollars

The Transition Portfolio: A Portfolio Project Designed to Facilitate Successful Transition for High School Special Education Students

A transition portfolio has been developed for high school students to aid them in preparing for life after graduation. The project focuses on strategies to increase the involvement of students in transition planning. Also emphasized are the Washington State Essential Academic Learning Requirements for Communication

Practitioner Profile: Deb Finnegan Biever

Practitioner Profile: Deb Finnegan Bieve

Social Satire in the Augustan Age

Satire and the satirist have been in evidence in well-nigh all the ages of the world\u27s history. It is part of man\u27s nature to seek entertainment, but often the object of his pleasure is the ridicule of an individual, the community at large, or some cause. When the human comedy of men and manners is out of gear through the tyranny of either over the other, and existence is become a travesty and a caricature of life, heavy and lumbering, then, when men can neither laugh or weep, comes satire and the satirist to break the congestion in them and make them laugh and weep together; upon the realization of the futility of their actions, as impressed upon them by the satirist, they begin to rebell against their sluggishness and to throw down the walls wherewith they have hemmed themselves in, and to admit the cleansing fires, the purge of pity and terror, that to them will mean new life

SentiBench - a benchmark comparison of state-of-the-practice sentiment analysis methods

In the last few years thousands of scientific papers have investigated sentiment analysis, several startups that measure opinions on real data have emerged and a number of innovative products related to this theme have been developed. There are multiple methods for measuring sentiments, including lexical-based and supervised machine learning methods. Despite the vast interest on the theme and wide popularity of some methods, it is unclear which one is better for identifying the polarity (i.e., positive or negative) of a message. Accordingly, there is a strong need to conduct a thorough apple-to-apple comparison of sentiment analysis methods, \textit{as they are used in practice}, across multiple datasets originated from different data sources. Such a comparison is key for understanding the potential limitations, advantages, and disadvantages of popular methods. This article aims at filling this gap by presenting a benchmark comparison of twenty-four popular sentiment analysis methods (which we call the state-of-the-practice methods). Our evaluation is based on a benchmark of eighteen labeled datasets, covering messages posted on social networks, movie and product reviews, as well as opinions and comments in news articles. Our results highlight the extent to which the prediction performance of these methods varies considerably across datasets. Aiming at boosting the development of this research area, we open the methods' codes and datasets used in this article, deploying them in a benchmark system, which provides an open API for accessing and comparing sentence-level sentiment analysis methods

A role for UV-B -induced DNA damage in photomorphogenic responses in etiolated Arabidopsis seedlings

University of Minnesota Ph.D. dissertation. January 2014. Major: Plant Biological Sciences. Advisor: Gary M. Gardner. 1 computer file (PDF); ix, 77 pages, appendices A-B.Ultraviolet (UV) radiation is a constituent of sunlight that influences plant morphology and growth. It induces photomorphogenic responses but also causes damage to DNA. Plant responses to DNA damage caused by UV-B light are often categorized as general mechanisms that get activated by other environmental stresses. Photodimers are formed through the direct absorption of UV-B light by DNA and are removed, in part, by nucleotide excision repair (NER). UV-B irradiation resulted in the accumulation of the two most common photodimers, cyclobutane pyrimidine dimers (CPDs) and pyrimidine-(6,4)-pyrimidinone dimers (6,4PPs), in etiolated wild type (wt) Arabidopsis seedlings. Arabidopsis mutants of the endonucleases that function in NER, xpf-3 and uvr1-1, show hypersensitivity to UV-B (280-320 nm) in terms of hypocotyl growth inhibition. I hypothesized that the accumulation of UV-B-induced photodimers was responsible for the hypocotyl growth phenotype of these NER mutants after UV-B irradiation. It was also predicted that the accumulation of photodimers could ultimately trigger signaling pathways that result in cell-cycle arrest through stalled replication sites or double-strand breaks. This was tested using the suppressor of gamma 1 (sog1-1) mutant, which lacks a transcription factor responsible for gene induction and cell-cycle arrest after gamma irradiation, and a Col-0 line containing a CYCB1;1-GUS reporter construct. CYCB1;1 encodes a cyclin that accumulates in response to cell-cycle arrest at the G2/M transition. The main conclusion from this work is that hypocotyl growth inhibition induced by UV-B light in etiolated Arabidopsis seedlings, which is a classic photomorphogenic response, is influenced by signals originating from UV-B light absorption by DNA that lead to cell-cycle arrest. Furthermore, this process is shown to occur independently of UVR8 and its signaling pathway responsible for CHS induction. This work also demonstrates that UV-B-induced DNA damage can be responsible for specific photomorphogenic responses, at least in etiolated Arabidopsis seedlings, and does not simply induce general stress responses

Alternate Methods for the Extraction and Measurement of Pore Solution in Fresh Concrete

Knowledge of the pore solution composition and pore solution resistivity can be helpful for determining the durability of concrete structures. Most notably, pore solution resistivity can be used in the calculation of the formation factor of concrete, which is a ratio of the electrical resistivities of concrete and its pore solution. Additionally, the formation factor is equal to the inverse of the product of porosity and pore connectivity, which are critical parameters for concrete durability assessment. This paper explores alternative experimental techniques to extract pore solution of fresh cement pastes to be used to measure its composition and resistivity. All test methods were statistically analyzed using t-tests with a significance level of 0.05. First, the centrifuge extraction method was compared to the gas (nitrogen) pressure technique. The results showed that these two methods yielded no statistically significant difference in measured resistivity of the extracted pore solutions. Second, a cell method of measuring resistivity was compared to a probe method. A statistically significant difference was found. Future experimentation will be required to determine the reason for the cell method’s higher recorded resistivities. Finally, 30-, 60-, and 90-minute time from initial mixing was compared to find a difference in the resistivity of extracted pore solutions. Pore solutions extracted between 30-90 minutes after initial mixing did not show any statistically significant difference in measured electrical resistivity.Key Words: Fresh Paste, Fresh Concrete, Pore Solution, Resistivity, Formation Facto