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Net energy: the precision path to sustainability
No full textAdaptation of the net energy system in broiler diets will increase least cost formulation flexibility. These proceedings outline a net energy system developed and implemented in practice. In addition to lower carbon and nitrogen inputs in dietary formulation, the net energy system reduced feed costs
Genotypic Variation and Wilting Speed Affect Soybean (Glycine max) Germination and Growth
No full textSoybean (Glycine max) is one of the most important agricultural crops in the world due to its value as a major source of protein and oilseed production. Soybean is extremely sensitive to drought and experiences severe reductions in yield when there is a reduction in water availability. Canopy wilting speed is a trait linked with water use efficiency (WUE) in soybeans. Slower wilting canopies indicate greater WUE, while faster wilting canopies indicate lower WUE. Previous studies have explored the variation of plant physiological traits across wilting speeds on a smaller scale, but ultimately, a more extensive assessment is needed. The aim of this study was to examine how plant growth traits vary across 30 soybean genotypes that vary in wilting speeds across two different stages in soybean development. There was variation in physiological traits across soybean genotypes (P \u3c 0.0001). Fast-wilting plants tended to germinate faster than slow-wilting plants early on, but ultimately, there was no difference in total germination (P = 0.9612). In the early-vegetative stage of soybean plants, slow-wilting plants were taller (P = 0.0082) and had a greater chlorophyll content compared to fast-wilting plants (P \u3c 0.0001). Physiological differences between the wilting speeds were clearer in early developmental stages compared to mid-stage plants. Across all plant traits examined, there were differences among all soybean genotypes. While there are differences in physiological traits between wilting speeds, the extreme variation across soybean genotypes can overshadow these interactions, highlighting the importance of continued screening across more genotypes
Pediatric Occupational Therapists\u27 Perception of How Nature-Based Play Affects Fine Motor Development
No full textThis study explored the benefits of nature-based pediatric occupational therapy (OT) and the influence of nature and nature-based play on fine motor development. It was hypothesized that nature and nature-based play would positively impact a child’s fine motor skills (FMS) and that nature-based OT would offer unique benefits to a child’s therapeutic experience. To examine these relationships, a survey was distributed to pediatric occupational therapists (OTs) across the United States. The survey was designed to gather insights into how OT supports fine motor development, how nature-based play/therapy enhances these skills, and the perceived benefits of incorporating nature into therapeutic practices. There was a profound influence of nature-based therapy (NBT) on various aspects of child development. Pediatric OTs noted NBT’s positive effects on a child’s FMS as well as their physical, social, cognitive, and emotional development. It was also found that there is a lack of clarity surrounding NBT within the OT field, which may contribute to misunderstandings about its purpose and application
Humanitarian Intervention and Just War Theory
No full textSince the end of World War II, the United States has engaged in a new type of warfare. No longer fighting conventional wars, the United States has begun to enter into an intervention style of warfare. Often, intervention occurs on humanitarian grounds, rather than for reasons of conquest, which can often lead to unwanted destruction and alienate local populations. At the same time America’s military tactics shifted the world saw the resurgence of universal human rights. Increasingly included within these rights was the right to protection, or R2P. Just war theory becomes joined with humanitarianism when the action of intervening is looked at from the perspective of right to protection
Erotic Dream and Governmental Nightmare: Use and Censorship of Pillow Books in Edo Culture and the Influence of the Floating World
No full textThe “floating world” of Yoshiwara 吉原, the pleasure district of Edo, capital city of Japan during the Edo period (1600–1868), was a fantasy itself, one that fired the imaginations of the many artists who took it as their subject. Like the licensed red-light district of the capital, which contained both theater and many brothels, the art of the “floating world” was often erotic in nature. This eroticism ranged from the subtly arousing to the pornographic. It is the latter, known as shunga 春画(translated literally as “spring pictures”, but commonly called pillow books in the west) which is especially intriguing. These pictures, which were both tightly restricted by the government and prolifically produced, which were used by the wealthy and the middle class alike, and which are tied closely to the erotic fantasy of the “floating world” can perhaps provide a lens for how sexuality was viewed in the “city of bachelors,” Edo
Impact of Retail Display Case on Shelf-Life, Palatability, and Color-Stability of Fresh Beef Steaks
No full textThe objective of the study was to determine: the impact of two retail display cases, three beef muscles, and three packaging schemes on palatability traits, flavor development, lipid oxidation, objective and subjective evaluation of color stability, and microbial shelf-life. No muscle × package × case × day interactions were observed for any instrumental or panelist color evaluation (P \u3e 0.851). No retail case effect was observed for TBARS, consumer sensory evaluation, or cook loss (P \u3e0.05). A muscle × case × package interaction was observed for L* and b* (P\u3c 0.05). No muscle × case × package observations were observed for shelf-life or palatability analyses (P \u3e 0.05). No significant two-way or three-way interactions were observed for evaluation or acceptability of palatability traits analyzed. Tenderness, juiciness, flavor, and overall liking scores were all significantly influenced by muscle effects (P \u3c 0.0001). Lipid oxidation, cook loss, volatile compound analysis, and consumer sensory evaluation were predominantly influenced by muscle and packaging scheme (P \u3c 0.05). Biochemical and structural properties are primary influencers in determining rate of lipid oxidation, tenderness, juiciness, flavor, and cook loss within fresh beef steaks. Retail display case can influence environmental temperature regulation and airflow steaks are subjected to retail display. These factors provide improvements in color stability while maintaining shelf-life and palatability attributes in fresh beef steaks. Muscle type and packaging scheme play a more significant role in quality and shelf-life attributes than retail display case
Advancing Social Sustainability in Operations and Supply Chain Management: A Multi-Theoretical Exploration of Technology, Task Familiarity, and Sustainability Interactions
No full textSocial sustainability in operations and supply chain management (OSCM) centers on generating economic value through practices that safeguard people, communities, and broader societal systems impacted by the supply chain. While the importance of such practices is increasingly recognized, firms face persistent challenges in embedding social sustainability into formal management systems. This dissertation tackles three such challenges, with a particular focus on safety in trucking—a vital yet underexamined aspect from the lens of social sustainability. Safety performance in this context is influenced by the complexities of using advanced safety technologies, the demanding and solitary nature of truck driving, and the temporal nature of managerial interventions such as feedback and incentives. Further, firms often struggle to align environmental and social sustainability initiatives, risking inefficiencies when these dimensions are combined under Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) umbrella without strategic coherence. To address these issues, this dissertation comprises three essays, each examining a distinct facet of sustainability at the manager, worker and firm levels. The first essay uses narrative inquiry to qualitatively explore how safety technology influences driver behavior in the trucking industry from a managerial perspective. Drawing on the Theory of Technology Dominance (TTD), the findings highlight that while advanced safety technologies can promote compliance when supported by effective managerial communication, they can also undermine safety if cognitive misalignment occurs between drivers, managers, and the technology—or if drivers become overly reliant on automation. The second essay draws from self-efficacy theory to investigate how task familiarity impacts driver safety performance on a driver level. It further examines how the recency of managerial feedback and incentives moderates this relationship. Using a proprietary dataset from a Fortune 500 logistics provider, this essay empirically tests key hypotheses and finds that task familiarity is positively associated with safety performance. However, the analysis also reveals that the positive impact of task familiarity is weakened when managerial feedback or incentives are more recent. The third essay shifts focus to the firm level, examining how environmental and social sustainability commitments affect operational efficiency. Grounded in the resource-based view (RBV), this study tests whether the two dimensions act as complements or substitutes and how the sustainability practices of a firm’s supply base moderate these effects. This essay responds to earlier findings that firms often bundle environmental and social efforts under a general CSR umbrella without strategic alignment—potentially diluting their impact. Together, these three essays contribute to advancing social sustainability in OSCM by demonstrating how technology, routines, management interventions, and strategic alignment of sustainability goals can be integrated into formal organizational systems. The findings offer both theoretical insights and practical implications for improving safety, efficiency, and overall performance in supply chains
Strange Things, Moving Things, Wild Animals: Attentional Capture and Suppression of Threat in Social Anxiety
No full textSocial anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with significant functional impairment and low remission rates, even at subclinical levels. Selective attention to social threat, or attentional bias, has been proposed as a cognitive mechanism contributing to the development and maintenance of SAD. However, decades of research have produced mixed findings, and attempts to modify attentional bias have yielded modest treatment effects. One reason for these inconsistencies may be that traditional models of attentional bias have focused primarily on early, automatic capture of threat. In contrast, emerging work in visual cognition emphasizes the role of proactive attentional suppression, such as the signal suppression hypothesis, according to which even salient stimuli may be inhibited in early stages of visual processing, before they capture attention. The current study extends the signal suppression hypothesis to socially threatening stimuli and tests whether anxiety symptoms disrupt this form of proactive attentional control. 48 undergraduate participants completed an eye-tracking task involving an adaptation of the additional singleton paradigm, in which either an angry or a neutral face appeared as a singleton distractor in an array of otherwise all-angry or all-neutral faces. Participants were instructed to report the orientation of a gradient inside a predefined target shape. First saccade destination and manual reaction time were recorded as indices of attentional capture or suppression. At the group level, results provided strong support for the signal suppression hypothesis. First saccades were significantly more likely to land on nonsingleton distractors than singleton distractors, and response times were faster on singleton-present trials, suggesting that salient, task-irrelevant stimuli were proactively suppressed regardless of emotional context. However, linear mixed-effects models, which are more sensitive to individual differences, revealed that anxiety symptoms moderated these effects. Contrary to hypotheses, social anxiety symptoms did not significantly predict oculomotor capture, although a trend-level interaction was observed. Trait cognitive anxiety emerged as the strongest and only significant predictor of increased oculomotor capture of angry distractors, indicating reduced suppression efficiency under conditions of emotional salience. In contrast, reaction time analyses were largely nonsignificant. These findings advance mechanistic accounts of attentional bias by demonstrating that proactive suppression, and not just stimulus-driven capture, plays a central role in visual attention to social threat. The specific effect of trait cognitive anxiety underscores the importance of anticipatory processing and goal-directed inhibition as targets for future theoretical models. Moreover, the discrepancy between oculomotor and reaction time findings suggests that early-stage attentional disruptions may go undetected in traditional behavioral tasks, highlighting the value of eye-tracking methods. Taken together, this study contributes to a more nuanced framework for understanding anxiety-related attentional control and offers a foundation for future work integrating the study of anxiety with contemporary theories of visual cognition
The Determinants and Consequences of Rounded Estimated Annual Effective Tax Rates
No full textI document a novel empirical observation: firms’ estimated annual effective tax rates (ETRs), which are used to record tax expense each quarter, occur unexpectedly often at rounded decimal values of .00% and .50%. I argue that these rounded values—which occur in 32% of firms—appear less consistent with the detailed tax estimation processes illustrated in accounting guidance. I assess the extent to which the tax information for these firms is less relevant or remains materially sufficient by examining whether rounded rates reflect management opportunism, the difficulty of the estimation process, and firm-specific resources and procedures. I do not find that these rounded rates are used opportunistically, but rather that they are used when tax calculations are relatively simpler and that they reflect a subgroup of firms that likely routinely rely on rounding heuristics or less detailed internal tax calculations. Consistent with this proposed simplicity, I also find that these firms’ estimated annual ETRs more accurately predict their year-end ETRs and that this predictability is reflected in analysts’ tax forecasts, which have lower dispersion and greater accuracy for these firms. While the frequency of rounded estimated annual ETRs is unexpected, I generally do not find that rounded rates are associated with adverse consequences, but rather reflect sufficient tax estimates for firms with relatively simpler tax situations
Truth, Justice, and the American Way: Negotiating Identity among Superhero Cosplayers at International Comic Book Conventions
No full textCosplay performances in convention spaces, and the increasing commercialization and commodification of both, remain largely unexplored domains that are rapidly expanding into global phenomena. The influx of capital internationally and the growing popularity of cosplay and conventions offers the opportunity to document and describe processes of performance, identity construction, and negotiation of the global phenomena within local contexts (“glocalization”) in non-Western spaces. I conducted ethnographic research at more than half a dozen research sites throughout Europe, the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and South and Central America, photographing convention spaces and cosplayers and conducting interviews with cosplayers. By focusing on the performances through which people negotiate individual identity utilizing embodied visualization to resist, reify, or parody the American hegemonic cultural exports, I explore the dichotomies of individual and collective, self and character, and global and local. Each of these constitute the emergent spatiotemporal self in separate ways, including along national, racial, and gender lines, and explores the impact of mass media and global culture on cultural expressions outside America. My analysis offers insight into the process by which latent ideologies encoded into narratives and symbols are enacted into material reality through embodied visualization, and the “glocalizing” activities through which mass-produced Western properties are modified to resonate with local cultural contexts