20 research outputs found
Development of nature-oriented dairy farm systems with an optimization model: the case of ‘Farming for Nature’ in ‘de Langstraat’, the Netherlands
No full text‘Farming for Nature’, a relatively new policy instrument being tried out in the Netherlands, is evaluated. The concept has been designed to allow dairy farmers to improve nature conservation on their farms. Under the scheme, no manure, fertilizer, or feed – concentrates or roughage - may be imported into farm systems from external sources. The feasibility of such a self-sustaining system and the conditions required for it to deliver the desired results, are explored with a farm-based linear programming model known as FIONA (Farm based Integrated Optimization Model for Nature and Agriculture). The model is explained and applied to ‘de Langstraat’, a region in southern Netherlands. The results show that levels of production under the ‘Farming for Nature’ regime are dependent upon soil fertility and the proportion of land that is suitable for growing arable crops. If all available land on a dairy farm in the scheme is arable land, then high production levels of up to 7,500 kg milk per hectare can be realized. If only 30% of the farm area is suitable for arable crops, then only lower production levels, of about 6,600 kg milk per hectare can be realized. The scheme has positive ecological effects. Both nature and cultural landscape values may benefit significantly from the concept. Improvement in ecological terms however, carries a price in terms of agricultural income. An average dairy farm adopting the concept of ‘Farming for Nature’ experiences an income loss of approximately € 840 per hectare in the short-run (5-10 years). More important is the observation that the scale of such farms in the short-run might be too small to earn an attractive income for its workers, even when fully compensated according to European Union regulations.nature management, dairy farming system, linear programming, farm-economics, Farm Management, Land Economics/Use,
Business process improvement using multi-objective optimisation
No full textBusiness process redesign and improvement has become an increasingly attractive subject in the wider area of business process intelligence. Although there have been many attempts to establish a business process redesign framework, there is little work on the actual optimisation of business processes with given objectives. Furthermore, most of the attempts to optimise a business process are manual and do not involve a formal automated methodology. This paper proposes a process improvement approach for automated multi-objective optimisation of business processes. The proposed framework uses a generic business process model that is formally defined. The formal definition of business processes is necessary to ensure that the optimisation will take place in a clearly defined, repeatable and verifiable way. Multi-objectivity is expressed in terms of process cost and duration as two key objectives for any business process. The business process model is programmed and incorporated into a software optimisation platform where a selection of multi-objective optimisation algorithms can be applied to a business process design. This paper outlines a case study of business process design that is optimised by the state-of-the-art multi-objective optimisation algorithm NSGA2. The results indicate that, although business process optimisation is a highly constrained problem with fragmented search space, a number of alternative optimised business processes that meet the optimisation criteria can be produced. The paper also provides directions for future research in this area
Contact Pathway Factors as Potential Modifiers of Bleeding Related to Factor XI Deficiency
No full textFactor XI (FXI) deficiency, also known as Hemophilia C, is characterized by mild to moderate bleeding symptoms. However, the factors that modify bleeding severity in FXI deficiency are not fully understood. In this study, we investigated whether components of the contact activation pathway can act as modifiers of bleeding in the context of FXI deficiency. Using a tail vein transection (TVT) model in rats, we assessed bleeding in four experimental groups: wild-type Sprague-Dawley rats, Prekallikrein knockout (PKK-/-) rats, rats treated with a FXI-inhibiting antibody, and PKK-/- rats treated with the FXI antibody.
Under anesthesia, each rat underwent a standardized incision on the lateral tail vein. The procedure lasted 30 minutes and consisted of three 10-minute intervals, initiated either by the incision or by mechanical agitation (wiping) of the wound. Bleeding time was recorded during each interval, and total blood loss was collected. Following red blood cell lysis, hemoglobin concentration was measured spectrophotometrically to quantify blood loss. Hemoglobin levels were also confirmed via terminal inferior vena cava (IVC) collection and analysis using a Hemavet.
Results showed that total bleeding time was modestly prolonged in PKK-/- rats, FXI-inhibited rats, and in those with both PKK-/- and FXI inhibition. Notably, the combination of PKK-/- and FXI inhibition led to a significant increase in hemoglobin loss compared to controls. These findings suggest that Prekallikrein may serve as an alternative activator of downstream coagulation factor IX, thereby modifying hemostatic function in the absence of FXI of coagulation function
Total Factor Productivity Growth and Agricultural Research and Extension: An Analysis of Pakistan's Agriculture, 1960-1996
No full textPakistan’s agriculture has grown rapidly since the 1960s, with an average annual growth of about 4 percent over the four decades till the end of the century. Agricultural growth at this rate was sustained by the technological progress embodied in the high-yielding varieties of grains and cotton, with supporting public investment in irrigation, agricultural research and extension (R&E), and physical infrastructure. This rate of agricultural growth has significantly contributed to the overall economic growth of about 6 percent per year during this period. Sustaining this performance presents a considerable challenge for the public policy framework for agriculture, not the least for the agricultural research and extension system in Pakistan. This study analyses the impact of R&E investment on TFP growth in Pakistan’s agriculture within a distributed lag framework. The estimation of the productivity-R&E relationship with an Almon lag provided evidence of a strong relationship, explaining 96 percent of the variation in the TFP index. The marginal internal rate of return on R&E investment is estimated at 88 percent. This rate of return may look unusually high but it is well within the range of returns estimated in the context of developing and developed countries. The high rate of return is an indicator not only of under-investment in R&E but also of the constraints on research and extension services that prevent optimal performance
Researching strategy practices: a genealogical social theory perspective
No full textThis paper explores the meaning and significance of the term `social practice' and its relation to strategy-as-practice research from the perspective of social theory. Although our remarks are also applicable to other practice-based discussions in management, we discuss strategy practices as a case in point and thus contribute to the strategy-as-practice literature in three ways. First, instead of simply accepting the existence of a unified `practice theory', we outline a genealogical analysis revealing the historical-contingent conditions of its creation. This analysis shows that social practices in general and strategy practices in particular can be approached from either a neo-structuralist and/or neo-interpretative perspective. Second, based on this theoretical argument, we discuss different characteristics of strategy practices and emphasize those aspects not yet fully considered by strategy-as-practice research (e.g. the physical nature of practices). Third, we show that, when studying strategy practices, given an understanding of the alternative theoretical approaches available, the practice of strategy research itself needs to be adjusted so as to accommodate a stronger emphasis on an ethnographic approach that is directed towards uncovering the contextual and hidden characteristics of strategy-making
Transgressive femininity: gender in the Scandinavian Modern Breakthrough
No full textThis PhD thesis deals with how new discourses on femininity and gender developed in
Scandinavian literature during the Modern Breakthrough, 1880-1909. Political,
economic and demographic changes in the Scandinavian societies put pressures on the
existing, conventional gender roles, which literature reflects; however, literature also
created and introduced new discourses on gender.
The main focus has been on transgressive female characters in Danish, Swedish
and Norwegian novels, which I have seen as indicators of emerging new forms of
femininity. The study shows how the transgression of gender boundaries is used in the
novels, when presenting their views on what femininity is, should be or could be. In
addition to analysing the textual strategies in the representation of these ‘deviant’
literary characters, I have examined how the relevant texts were received by critics and
reviewers at the time, as reviews are in themselves discursive constructs.
The theoretical basis of this study has mainly been Michel Foucault’s discourse
theory, Judith Butler’s theory of performativity and Yvonne Hirdman’s theory of
gender binarism. I have also used concepts from several (mainly Anglo-American and
Scandinavian) literary gender theorists and historians in the analyses.
The four novels analysed in this study are as follows: 1) Danish author Herman
Bang’s early decadence novel Haabløse Slægter (1880), where I use a queer theory
perspective. 2) Norwegian author Ragnhild Jølsen’s Rikka Gan (1904), where the
strong elements of pre-psychoanalysis are analysed. 3) Swedish author August
Strindberg’s Le Plaidoyer d’un fou (1887-88), where I make a narratological
examination of the narrative voice from a gender perspective. 4) Swedish author Annie
Quiding’s Fru Fanny (1904), analysed as an example of ‘negative’ New Woman
literature.
The thesis shows how literature of the time represented and introduced new forms
of femininity, often in the form of ambiguous female characters, and often to the
disapproval of the critics. It also shows that gender discourses were much alike within
Scandinavia. Furthermore, my study lays bare the skeleton of normative Breakthrough femininity, what can be called the dominant discourse on femininity at the time: a nonexisting
sexual desire, feminine immobility/containment in the home and an imperative,
self-sacrificing motherliness
Towards Intercultural Documentary
No full text‘Towards Intercultural Documentary’ is a PhD by Published Work that is comprised of four documentary films, an exhibition catalogue essay and an academic book chapter to form a collective body of work in film and text focused on what Rughani proposes as ‘intercultural documentary practice’. This body of work configures ‘intercultural documentary practice’ as a space or arena in which people of radically different perspectives encounter the other.1 Intercultural documentary aspires to create pluralised spaces of exchange by engaging difference within and between communities. In this work, voices traditionally overlooked, excluded or edged to the cultural margins are re-framed to find a new centrality in a broader encounter, more accurately reflecting the diverse influences that comprise polyglot societies. In the United Kingdom (UK) context, three submitted films, broadcast to peak-time audiences on BBC 2 and Channel 4, stood in contradistinction to mainstream narratives that typically portrayed British experience as largely monocultural and homogeneous.
The contribution to knowledge of this thesis is in deepening and extending the dynamics of documentary practice to embrace intercultural communication and to weld this to the ethics of documentary making. In so doing, this body of work situates ethics as central to the documentary encounter and offers new practice-based insights into navigating tensions in the process of making such work and its methodologies.
‘Towards Intercultural Documentary’ presents a case for the coherence of the body of work that makes a contribution to knowledge at the inter-disciplinary confluence of: documentary studies and practice, ethics and intercultural communication. The submission comprises: Islam and the Temple of’ ‘Ilm’ (BBC 2, 1990); One of the Family (Channel 4, 2000); Playing Model Soldiers (Channel 4, 2000); Glass Houses (British Council, 2004); the exhibition catalogue essay British Homeland in Home (British Council, 2004) and the book chapter ‘Are You a Vulture? Reflecting on the ethics and aesthetics of coverage of atrocity and its aftermath, in Peace Journalism (Peter Lang, 2010)
Scalable Text Mining with Sparse Generative Models
No full textThe information age has brought a deluge of data. Much of this is in text form, insurmountable in scope for humans and incomprehensible in structure for computers. Text mining is an expanding field of research that seeks to utilize the information contained in vast document collections. General data mining methods based on machine learning face challenges with the scale of text data, posing a need for scalable text mining methods.
This thesis proposes a solution to scalable text mining: generative models combined with sparse computation. A unifying formalization for generative text models is defined, bringing together research traditions that have used formally equivalent models, but ignored parallel developments. This framework allows the use of methods developed in different processing tasks such as retrieval and classification, yielding effective solutions across different text mining tasks. Sparse computation using inverted indices is proposed for inference on probabilistic models. This reduces the computational complexity of the common text mining operations according to sparsity, yielding probabilistic models with the scalability of modern search engines.
The proposed combination provides sparse generative models: a solution for text mining that is general, effective, and scalable. Extensive experimentation on text classification and ranked retrieval datasets are conducted, showing that the proposed solution matches or outperforms the leading task-specific methods in effectiveness, with a order of magnitude decrease in classification times for Wikipedia article categorization with a million classes. The developed methods were further applied in two 2014 Kaggle data mining prize competitions with over a hundred competing teams, earning first and second places
Telling your story: autobiographical metadata and the semantic web
No full textGiven the current explosion of user-generated content driven by the ever-decreasing price of sensing and storage hardware the dream of capturing and archiving the entirety of a human life is slowly being realised. The Semantic Web, a discipline of Computer Science, aims to support the sharing and interoperation of knowledge using the Web’s infrastructure. This thesis aims to roadmap a framework utilising the principles and technologies underpinning the Semantic Web, enabling the vision of global knowledge sharing, in an open and policy aware manner, with the end aim of supporting a network for the exploitation of personal information. This sharing is facilitated through the adoption of a lingua franca, shared conceptualisations for domain knowledge, and some core design principles. The main focus of Semantic Web research has been the development of a web-scale knowledge-base whereby information is stored and exposed in a machine-readable format with the ultimate aim of aggregating information from disparate sources, allowing for statements to be contextualised with respect to others culminating in a web-scale knowledge resource accessible through standard protocols.The current popularity of social computing – Web 2.0 – where users post personal information to online communities is eluding to the fact that information, linked and shared within a social-context presents added value to the end-user. Given the sensitive nature of personal information, one may not wish to expose all of the information about them self to the World Wide Web, but may wish to benefit by linking to knowledge residing on this shared resource. This ability to store personal information privately, in ones own personal web-space and not on a third party server, whilst at the same time connecting to the publicly available information is presented as key challenge facing the Computer Science community today. Specific information pertaining to one aspect of a user’s activities, such as their picture taking habits or their geographic log, may not present a detailed account of a user’s actions, but as more information is pushed into the public domain and aggregation technologies mature individuals and their day-to-day activities will be easier to track. As more and more of our personal lives are pushed into the public domain, the notion of an online-persona is becoming more and more applicable to the average person.This thesis presents an infrastructure for the capturing and archival of autobiographical metadata, whereby information from multiple sensors is aggregated and stored in a personal Lifelog. The surrender of digital identity has become commonplace, for purposes ranging from commerce, marketing, social networking, government, receipt of services, travel or security, Lifelogging has the potential to reaffirm the individual’s control of his or her own digital identity. The Lifelog is a constructed identity that outweighs the others simply by weight of evidence, complexity and comprehensiveness. This thesis presents an infrastructure for the capture and exploitation of personal metadata to drive research into context aware systems. The aim is to expose ongoing research in the areas of capture of personal experiences, context aware systems, multimedia annotation systems, narrative generation, all set in the context of enabling and supporting the Semantic Web Vision. The thesis details the work underway towards the goal of creating a multi-domain contextual log, and is followed by a discussion of how such a log can be used to drive the development of detailed Lifelog and an investigation into the amount of personal information being pushed into the public domain.<br/
Replication and Comparison of the Newly Proposed ADOS-2, Module 4 Algorithm in ASD Without ID: A Multi-site Study.
No full textAuthor Accepted ManuscriptRecent updates have been proposed to the Autism Diagnostic Observation Schedule-2 Module 4
diagnostic algorithm. This new algorithm, however, has not yet been validated in an independent
sample without intellectual disability (ID). This multi-site study compared the original and revised
algorithms in individuals with ASD without ID. The revised algorithm demonstrated increased
sensitivity, but lower specificity in the overall sample. Estimates were highest for females,
individuals with a verbal IQ below 85 or above 115, and ages 16 and older. Best practice
diagnostic procedures should include the Module 4 in conjunction with other assessment tools.
Balancing needs for sensitivity and specificity depending on the purpose of assessment (e.g.,
clinical vs. research) and demographic characteristics mentioned above will enhance its utility.This work was supported in part by an award from the Isadore and Bertha Gudelsky Family Foundation and the Fredrick and Elizabeth Singer Foundation, and grants by the Organization for Autism Research, Autism Speaks (Dennis Weatherstone Predoctoral Fellowship), the Philadelphia Foundation, Pfizer, Shire Pharmaceuticals, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (#6672), the Pennsylvania Department of Health (SAP #4100042728, SAP # 4100047863), and the National Institutes of Health and the Intramural Research Program at NIMH (1-ZIA-MH002920-05, P30HD040677, T32 HD046388-01A2, 1K01MH079945-01, K23MH086111, R21MH092615, RC1MH088791, and P30HD026979). We gratefully acknowledge Catherine Lord, PhD for contributing data for comparative analyses; those data were funded by R01MH081873 to CL
