culling

Singapore the ‘garden city’ has been a longstanding trope used by government officials to promote tourism and actively entice the world’s cosmopolitan well-heeled and moneyed to come and work, or settle, in the small cityscape. Nature in Singapore is primarily seen by the Government as a resource ‘that can be shaped to economic and national development objectives’ (Yuen 1996:968); and indeed, what strikes visitors to this ‘garden city’ is its cleanliness, orderliness, and greenery. But if ‘nature’ in Singapore is a matter of top-down governmental control (of both city-state aesthetics and economy), ‘nature’ has also been the realm for those wanting to rebel against the Government. In other words, politics in Singapore has often revolved around citizens taking up cat- and crow-culling, the saving of graveyards, or specific conservation issues as ways of resisting Governmental prerogatives. In light of the recent writings on the meaning of ‘nature’ and ‘non-humans’ — explored through supposed ‘eco-farms’ for ‘agri-tainment’, fishing and foraging, and the culling of cats and crows — the paper explores the tension between ‘development’ and ‘culture’ in the context of the city-state of Singapore.

This report presents evidence on the progress made by national authorities and other agents over the past six months. Globally in the animal health sector, there have been some significant enhancements in avian influenza detection capacity, surveillance and reporting systems, trans-boundary disease controls, poultry vaccination policies, and poultry compensation arrangements. In the human health sector, there is evidence for global enhancements in surveillance and reporting systems; and the information obtained is consistent with increased numbers of health care workers trained in highly pathogenic avian influenza, with rising availability of personal protective equipment, and with growth in planned population coverage by anti-viral stockpiles. This report identifies as priorities for international action in 2007: firstly to sustain the political commitment for national and international action: the risk of complacency cannot be taken. Secondly, capability for rapid reporting and re...

Environmental Philosophy has been used in developing countries as a lethal weapon against the small scale farmers. Emission trading and its lucrative offers leave almost all the academics "sold out" for the corporate capital. They successfully market fear among people that something dangerous is impending upon us lest we handle these farmers with iron fist! Driven by the fear, the common public too raises his voice against the farmer, failing to recognize the difference between agro-industry and small-scale farming.  There are intellectuals who mourn the dead elephants.  However, to one's disappointment, they are culpably and cruelly ignoring the adivasi human beings, mauled, killed and eaten by tigers in India. Had it happened to any human beings in Europe, the homeland of environmental movements and deep ecology, the entire predator species would have become a museum piece.  Author says that instead of Green Terrorism, Green Luddism and Earth first movement, we need Man-First movement and scoffs at the inflated claims of environmentalists that their science is more  an arbitrary science(soft science) than a precision science(hard science).

We present a system to capture and view "Gigapixel images": very high resolution, high dynamic range, and wide angle imagery consisting of several billion pixels each. A specialized camera mount, in combination with an automated pipeline for alignment, exposure compensation, and stitching, provide the means to acquire Gigapixel images with a standard camera and lens. More importantly, our novel viewer enables exploration of such images at interactive rates over a network, while dynamically and smoothly interpolating the projection between perspective and curved projections, and simultaneously modifying the tone-mapping to ensure an optimal view of the portion of the scene being viewed.

Foot and mouth disease (FMD) is a highly transmissible viral infection of cloven hooved animals associated with severe economic losses when introduced into FMD-free countries. Information on the impact of the disease in FMDV-endemic countries is poorly characterised yet essential for the prioritisation of scarce resources for disease control programmes. A FMD (virus serotype SAT2) outbreak on a large-scale dairy farm in Nakuru County, Kenya provided an opportunity to evaluate the impact of FMD on clinical mastitis and culling rate. A cohort approach followed animals over a 12-month period after the commencement of the outbreak. For culling, all animals were included; for mastitis, those over 18 months of age. FMD was recorded in 400/644 cattle over a 29-day period. During the follow-up period 76 animals were culled or died whilst in the over 18 month old cohort 63 developed clinical mastitis. Hazard ratios (HR) were generated using Cox regression accounting for non-proportional haza...

In this paper we propose a design architecture for the graphics engine of a virtual reality system to be deployed over the web. The graphics engine is decomposed in high and low level components. The high level component manages the hierarchical organization of the virtual objects, while the low level component acts as the interface to the graphics hardware and is mainly responsible for operations, such as vertex transforms and polygon rasterization. Several meihods for geometry representation, compression and culling are compared and associated with different geometry types. The use of OpenGL as a general-purpose machine to implement mathematical operations is considered in the context of programmable shaders. Finally a prototype application for virtual worlds modeling is presented along with detailed discussion on technical and implementation issues.

Ranked amongst the top five milk-producing countries globally, the Pakistan dairy industry can help to overcome food shortage and hunger, alleviate poverty and positively impact economic growth. This influencing role could potentially be more significant while the COVID-19 pandemic severely affects humanity, challenges the economy and increases the risk of global food shortage. However, its large national population of dairy livestock contrasts with Pakistan's top-five ranking, indeed, four to five Pakistani cows produce milk equivalent to one dairy cow of countries with a well-developed dairy industry. Low milk yield per cow negatively impacts the national production and compromises the development of an efficient processing sector, such that consumers are very often forced to use adulterated milk sold by local ‘milkmen.’ As a consequence, while committed to alleviating global hunger, Pakistan imports in excess of half a million tons of milk and milk-based products annually. Ma...

First-lactation records on 836,452 daughters of 3,064 Norwegian Red sires were used to examine associations between culling in first lactation and 305-d protein yield, susceptibility to clinical mastitis, lactation mean somatic cell score (SCS), nonreturn rate within 56 d in heifers and primiparous cows, and interval from calving to first insemination. A Bayesian multivariate threshold-linear model was used for analysis.

Despite the ever-increasing power of graphics workstations, rendering and animating virtual actors remains a very expensive task. Current scenegraphs are clearly oriented toward the management of static scenarios instead of toward scenes with multiple dynamic elements guided by complex behaviors, as in the case of virtual actors, human or not. Applications that deal with the management of multiple actors require the development of specific methods that reduce not only the number of polygons sent to graphics hardware but also the calculations involved in the management of multiple reference systems and the behavior of actors. In this paper we propose a culling method based on the use of different types of bounding spheres, which minimizes the number of calculations related to the behavior of actors and allows better use of the capacities of present-day graphics hardware. With the same aim in mind, we also propose a method for managing levels of detail which acts not only on a geometric level but also on skeletal and behavioral levels. These ideas can be implemented on top of traditional scenegraphs, resulting in significant improvements in computational costs. This improvement is analyzed, as well as the results obtained when managing scenes with thousands of virtual actors.

Data from an observational study, carried out during a 4.5 year period (1986-1990), were used to quantify the effects of health disorders on the risk of culling. The study population consisted of 47 commercial Holstein dairy herds from western France, comprising 4123 cows.

This paper describes the methodological aspects of the application of various established and new graphics techniques in virtual reality applications, in order to visually enrich conventional walkthroughs and extend the common capabilities of virtual environment visualization platforms. The paper describes these techniques and goes to the extent of explaining various practical implementation issues. Examples and application case studies are provided to demonstrate the enhancements. Keywords:

B ovine leukemia virus (BLV) is an oncogenic retrovirus with worldwide distribution. Recent surveys indicate that 43.5% of dairy cattle and 89% of dairy herds in the United States are infected. 1 Direct costs to the producer are associated with clinical disease in the form of lymphosarcoma and trade restrictions imposed on seropositive cattle. More insidious losses may be associated with subclinical infection through reduced milk production and premature culling.

Reproductive organs were collected from one slaughterhouse and culling data were obtained from Finnish swine herd records to determine the types and frequencies of various fertility disturbances in Finnish female pigs. Detailed information about the type and occurrence of fertility disturbances was obtained through a close examination of the slaughterhouse material. A total of 1708 reproductive organs of female pigs were examined. The following findings were recorded: no macroscopical abnormalities 52.3%, inactive ovaries 25.1%, parovarian cysts 22.9%, single ovarian cysts 3.1%, multiple ovarian cysts 3.1%, uterine disorders 1.4%, ovarian adhesions 1.1%, congenital anomalies 0.8%, tumour-like lesions in ovaries 0.8%, obstruction of oviduct 0.2%, and suppurative ovarian infection 0.1%. A large proportion, 42% of the culled gilts and 39% of the culled sows, were slaughtered because of impaired fertility based on no pregnancy, no heat or poor piglet production. The sows were removed from the herds 33 days on average after weaning.

First-lactation records on 836,452 daughters of 3,064 Norwegian Red sires were used to examine associations between culling in first lactation and 305-d protein yield, susceptibility to clinical mastitis, lactation mean somatic cell score (SCS), nonreturn rate within 56 d in heifers and primiparous cows, and interval from calving to first insemination. A Bayesian multivariate threshold-linear model was used for analysis.

Augmented reality deals with the problem of dynamically augmenting or enhancing (images or live video of) the real world with computer generated data (e.g., graphics of virtual objects). This poses two major problems: (a) determining the precise alignment of real and virtual coordinate frames for overlay, and (b) capturing the 3D environment including camera and object motions. The latter is important for interactive augmented reality applications where users can interact with both real and virtual objects. Here we address the problem of accurately tracking the 3D motion of a monocular camera in a known 3D environment and dynamically estimating the 3D camera location. We utilize fully automated landmark-based camera calibration to initialize the motion estimation and employ extended Kalman filter techniques to track landmarks and to estimate the camera location. The implementation of our approach has been proven to be efficient and robust and our system successfully tracks in real-t...

Despite the ever-increasing power of graphics workstations, rendering and animating virtual actors remains a very expensive task. Current scenegraphs are clearly oriented toward the management of static scenarios instead of toward scenes with multiple dynamic elements guided by complex behaviors, as in the case of virtual actors, human or not. Applications that deal with the management of multiple actors require the development of specific methods that reduce not only the number of polygons sent to graphics hardware but also the calculations involved in the management of multiple reference systems and the behavior of actors. In this paper we propose a culling method based on the use of different types of bounding spheres, which minimizes the number of calculations related to the behavior of actors and allows better use of the capacities of present-day graphics hardware. With the same aim in mind, we also propose a method for managing levels of detail which acts not only on a geometric level but also on skeletal and behavioral levels. These ideas can be implemented on top of traditional scenegraphs, resulting in significant improvements in computational costs. This improvement is analyzed, as well as the results obtained when managing scenes with thousands of virtual actors.

Breeding values for clinical mastitis, interval from calving to first insemination, and 56-d nonreturn rate for heifers and primiparous cows, were predicted using multivariate linear-threshold sire models, with or without including information on culling during the first lactation. Breeding values for 3,064 sires were predicted using 3 data sets with an average of 273, 135, and 68 first-crop daughters per sire, respectively. For each data set, accuracies of selection for health and fertility traits were evaluated through the predictive ability of predicted sire breeding values with respect to phenotypic performance of second-crop daughters. The predictive ability of estimated breeding values for clinical mastitis and interval from calving to first insemination did not improve when including information on early culling, irrespective of the size of first-crop daughter groups. For 56-d nonreturn rates (heifer and primiparous cow), sire evaluations based on reduced size of daughter gro...

This analysis was originally published in a slightly different form in the World Bank's June 2006 edition of the Global Development Finance, available at http://www.worldbank.org/gdf2006. (2) Andrew Burns and Dominique van der Mensbrugghe are Lead Economists in the Prospects Group of the World Bank Development Economics directorate. Hans Timmer is manager of the group.

Cull sow physical conditions were associated with on-farm production records. Sows (923) within one integrated U.S. production system were evaluated at two harvest facilities. Physical conditions evaluated at harvest were analyzed by parity, culling code and production measures. Farm culling codes were categorized into poor body condition (BC), old age (G), lameness (L), other (O), poor litter performance (P) and reproductive failure (R). Production measures included lifetime pigs born alive (LPBA), pigs born alive in the last litter (PBALL), pigs per sow per year (PSY) and weaning to culling interval. The L culling code had a greater (P < 0.05) prevalence of cracked hooves when compared to the other five culling codes (30.9% vs. 18.7%). Sows without front cracked hooves tended (P = 0.07) to have greater PSY (0.80) when compared to sows having front cracked hooves. Females without rear digital overgrowth had more (P < 0.05) PBALL (0.54) and tended (P = 0.06) to have increased PSY (0.80) when compared to sows with rear digital overgrowth. Sows without shoulder lesions had greater (P < 0.05) LPBA (2.01) when compared to sows with shoulder lesions. Regression coefficient estimates for percent lung lesion involvement were positive and tended (P < 0.10) to be different from zero for LPBA (0.06) and PSY (0.03). Females with severe teeth wear tended (P ≤ 0.10) to have fewer LPBA (1.36), PBALL (0.45) and had fewer (P < 0.01) PSY (1.10) when compared to sows without severe teeth wear. Sows culled for BC and L had lower (P < 0.01) backfat when compared to sows from the other four culling codes (1.83 and 2.04 cm vs. 2.47 to 2.85 cm, respectively). Multiple cull sow physical conditions evaluated at harvest had associations with on-farm reproductive measures.

SECTION 1: BACKGROUND 9. Recent widespread transmission of the H5N1 strain of avian influenza among birds has generated unprecedented response in anticipation of a potential global influenza pandemic. First surfacing in Hong Kong in 1997, H5N1 avian influenza remains largely a disease of birds with sporadic infections among humans who have had contact with infected fowl. Between the end of 2003 and 25 th January 2007, OIE recorded 4544 outbreaks of H5N1 avian influenza in poultry in 36 countries. A resurgence of human disease in 2003 has not abated and WHO now reports 269 human cases of H5N1 influenza worldwide, of which 163 have been fatal (as of 25 th

Lactation performance of cows infected with Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (Map) was previously studied using only serum ELISA as a diagnostic method. This study evaluated on two dairy farms in Minnesota, USA the lactation performance (measures of health, production, reproduction, and survival) of cows shedding Map in feces before calving and of cows culled with clinical signs consistent with Johne's disease (JD) during the subsequent lactation. Fecal samples were collected from 1052 cows within 21 day before calving and tested for Map with bacterial culture. Producers' observed signs of clinical disease (milk fever, retained placenta, metritis, ketosis, displaced abomasum, lameness, mastitis, pneumonia, and JD) and production and reproduction data were recorded for each cow. The association between fecal shedding or clinical JD and lactation performance was evaluated. Logistic regression was used to evaluate the association with any clinical and subclinical diseases as the outcome. General linear model was used to evaluate the association with milk production, and survival analysis techniques were used to evaluate the association with days in the study before culling and days from calving to conception. In 84 cows (8% of 1052 cows) fecal samples were positive for Map (46% light, 26% moderate, and 28% heavy shedders).

Despite the ever-increasing power of graphics workstations, rendering and animating virtual actors remains a very expensive task. Current scenegraphs are clearly oriented toward the management of static scenarios instead of toward scenes with multiple dynamic elements guided by complex behaviors, as in the case of virtual actors, human or not. Applications that deal with the management of multiple actors require the development of specific methods that reduce not only the number of polygons sent to graphics hardware but also the calculations involved in the management of multiple reference systems and the behavior of actors. In this paper we propose a culling method based on the use of different types of bounding spheres, which minimizes the number of calculations related to the behavior of actors and allows better use of the capacities of present-day graphics hardware. With the same aim in mind, we also propose a method for managing levels of detail which acts not only on a geometric level but also on skeletal and behavioral levels. These ideas can be implemented on top of traditional scenegraphs, resulting in significant improvements in computational costs. This improvement is analyzed, as well as the results obtained when managing scenes with thousands of virtual actors.

Lactation performance of cows infected with Mycobacterium avium subsp. paratuberculosis (Map) was previously studied using only serum ELISA as a diagnostic method. This study evaluated on two dairy farms in Minnesota, USA the lactation performance (measures of health, production, reproduction, and survival) of cows shedding Map in feces before calving and of cows culled with clinical signs consistent with Johne's disease (JD) during the subsequent lactation. Fecal samples were collected from 1052 cows within 21 day before calving and tested for Map with bacterial culture. Producers' observed signs of clinical disease (milk fever, retained placenta, metritis, ketosis, displaced abomasum, lameness, mastitis, pneumonia, and JD) and production and reproduction data were recorded for each cow. The association between fecal shedding or clinical JD and lactation performance was evaluated. Logistic regression was used to evaluate the association with any clinical and subclinical diseases as the outcome. General linear model was used to evaluate the association with milk production, and survival analysis techniques were used to evaluate the association with days in the study before culling and days from calving to conception. In 84 cows (8% of 1052 cows) fecal samples were positive for Map (46% light, 26% moderate, and 28% heavy shedders).

Emerging wildlife diseases pose a significant threat to natural and human systems. Because of real or perceived risks of delayed actions, disease management strategies such as culling are often implemented before thorough scientific knowledge of disease dynamics is available. Adaptive management is a valuable approach in addressing the uncertainty and complexity associated with wildlife disease problems and can be facilitated by using a formal model.

Foot and mouth disease (FMD) is a major threat, not only to countries whose economies rely on agricultural exports, but also to industrialized countries that maintain a healthy domestic livestock industry by eliminating major infectious diseases from their livestock populations. In this paper a simple mathematical model is formulated and comprehensively analyzed to assess the impact of vaccination and culling on controlling FMD. Overally the study demonstrates that vaccination and culling are essential on controlling FMD if they are all implemented. Furthermore the study illustrates that culling latently infected (early detection of infected animals) is extremely important on controlling FMD dynamics.