1,720,989 research outputs found
THE INTERPRETATION OF EMOTIONS IN SMALL RUMINANTS
No full textEnsuring that animals have a life worth living means not only reducing their exposure to stressful and/or negative situations, but above all ensuring that they can experience predominantly positive affective states and emotions. The aim of this thesis was to improve human knowledge of how small ruminants (goats, Capra hircus, and sheep, Ovis aries) express emotions, with a particular focus on the acoustic features of vocalisations that can be used as animal-based indicators of the affective states of these animals. To pursue this goal, a multidisciplinary approach was adopted in this thesis, ranging from the study of the direct perception and interpretation of vocalisations by humans to the use of traditional acoustic analysis to decipher the emotional content of vocalisations, through the extraction of acoustic features and the application of statistical models, and their practical application for the development of up-to-date Precision Livestock Farming (PLF) technologies.
The general introduction of the thesis provided an overview of the state of the art of research on small ruminant emotions and included a review paper on the topic of human-goat relationship. In fact, in farmed animals like sheep and goats, the quality of the human-animal relationship (HAR) depends on the emotional connotations of the interactions that occur between the two parties. The review focused on how humans and goats communicate, which factors influence this relationship, which methods are available to measure it, and how it can be improved. The review showed that certain interspecies communication channels, particularly the acoustic ones, have received little attention so far, and highlighted the importance of early, frequent and positive interactions with goats to improve HAR, and the role of some socio-demographic variables, such as gender, in influencing behaviour and attitude towards these animals. The review also highlighted the poor feasibility of the validated measures available for farmers to use for self-assessment of HAR, and suggested that farmers’ sense of commitment to goats could be improved by increasing their awareness of goats’ ability to express emotional states.
The first research chapter presented the development of a wireless acoustic sensor network for the continuous and non-invasive monitoring of goat vocalisations. The design, architecture and implementation of the system were presented, together with the hierarchical classification of goat vocalisations adopted for the manual annotation of these acoustic signals. In this context, the study also presented the development of a web-based annotation tool of goat vocalisations, to allow the association of labels, namely the context of emissions, to goat vocalisations. Finally, the study presented the development of a smartphone application to alert farmers and inform them of the emotional state of their goats.
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The second research chapter is an investigation of human perception of goat emotions based on their vocalisations. This human ability was investigated taking into account the respondents’ previous experience with goats, their level of empathy towards these animals, and other individual characteristics that may influence the recognition of animal emotions, and by considering the dimensional framework of animal emotions, which considers them as characterised by the dimensions of valence (positive vs negative) and arousal (low vs high). It was found that humans are able to recognise the emotional dimension of valence in goat vocalisations, as suggested by the consistency of the qualitative description of these vocalisations with their context of emission. The study also revealed a bias in the human ability to classify goat vocalisations emitted in negative contexts, presumably due to the fact that signals emitted in negative emergency situations carry more important and urgent information than those emitted in positive situations. The human ability to classify goat vocalisations was found to be influenced by the level of experience with these animals, with people with frequent direct contact with goats showing higher correct classification rates of the context of emission. Other individual characteristics, such as the level of empathy towards goats, seemed to improve the association of bleats to the correct emission contexts, although further studies are needed to clarify the role of empathy, attitudes and their underlying factors. Having children, gender and university education were not found to influence the human ability to interpret goat vocalisations.
In the third research chapter, acoustic, behavioural and physiological markers of negative arousal in lambs were investigated in a two-phases isolation test (partial vs full) designed to induce negative emotions, but characterised by different intensities of emotional arousal. Results showed that lambs produced more vocalizations per time unit and with higher frequencies (energy quartiles, formants, fundamental frequency) and Wiener entropy when experiencing negative arousal. These acoustic features were also found to increase with the bodily activation of the individual (namely the level of activity) as the arousal increased. Although the use of thermography as a method of detecting emotional states in animals seems promising, the results using temperature as a physiological indicator were inconsistent. Finally, the individual level of sociability did not affect the behavioural and physiological response of lambs to isolation, while an effect of the size of the lamb was found; both factors deserve further investigation.
Overall, the results of these studies advance the understanding of the expression of emotions in small ruminants, with practical implications for improving the quality of the human-animal relationship and the level of animal welfare, and highlight an important and potential role for PLF technologies in the automated collection and interpretation of emotions in sheep and goats
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
Author-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.
No full textAuthor-wise bibliometric analysis based on entropy.</p
Author Under Sail The Imagination of Jack London, 1893-1902
No full textIn Author Under Sail, Jay Williams offers the first complete literary biography of Jack London as a professional writer engaged in the labor of writing. It examines the authorial imagination in London's work, the use of imagination in both his fiction and nonfiction, and the ways he defined imagination in the creative process in his business dealings with his publishers, editors, and agents. In this first volume of a two-volume biography, Williams traverses the years 1893 to 1902, from London's "Story of a Typhoon" to The People of the Abyss. The Jack London who emerges in the pages of Author Under Sail is a writer whose partnership with publishers, most notably his productive alliance with George Brett of Macmillan, was one of the most formative in American literary history. London pioneered many author models during the heyday of realism and naturalism, blurring the boundaries of these popular genres by focusing on absorption and theatricality and the representation of the seen and unseen. London created an impassioned, sincere, and extremely personal realism unlike that of other American writers of the time. Author Under Sail is a literary tour de force that reveals the full range of London as writer, creative citizen, and entrepreneur at the same time it sheds light on the maverick side of machine-age literature.Intro -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Dedication -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction -- 1. Spirit Truth -- 2. From Absorption to Theatricality and Back Again -- 3. "I Will Build a New Present" -- 4. Sons as Authors -- 5. Fathers as Publishers -- 6. The Daughter as Author -- 7. Lovers as Authors -- 8. At Sea with the Family -- 9. Yellow News, Yellow Stories -- 10. The Return Home -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index -- About Jay WilliamsIn Author Under Sail, Jay Williams offers the first complete literary biography of Jack London as a professional writer engaged in the labor of writing. It examines the authorial imagination in London's work, the use of imagination in both his fiction and nonfiction, and the ways he defined imagination in the creative process in his business dealings with his publishers, editors, and agents. In this first volume of a two-volume biography, Williams traverses the years 1893 to 1902, from London's "Story of a Typhoon" to The People of the Abyss. The Jack London who emerges in the pages of Author Under Sail is a writer whose partnership with publishers, most notably his productive alliance with George Brett of Macmillan, was one of the most formative in American literary history. London pioneered many author models during the heyday of realism and naturalism, blurring the boundaries of these popular genres by focusing on absorption and theatricality and the representation of the seen and unseen. London created an impassioned, sincere, and extremely personal realism unlike that of other American writers of the time. Author Under Sail is a literary tour de force that reveals the full range of London as writer, creative citizen, and entrepreneur at the same time it sheds light on the maverick side of machine-age literature.Description based on publisher supplied metadata and other sources.Electronic reproduction. Ann Arbor, Michigan : ProQuest Ebook Central, YYYY. Available via World Wide Web. Access may be limited to ProQuest Ebook Central affiliated libraries
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