Biosecurity programs have long been known to be effective at preventing disease outbreaks in the poultry production system. However, these programs are only effective if they are properly adopted and adequately followed. Evaluation of the biosecurity practices on individual farms is needed to determine if such practices are followed and to what extent. Broiler growers for an integrator in Alaba...

The design of interactive experiences is increasingly important in our society. Examples include interactive media, computer games, and interactive portals. There is increasing interest in modes of interaction with virtual characters, as they represent a natural way for humans to interact. Creating such characters is a complex task, requiring both creative skills (to design personalities, emoti...

This paper describes a system that greatly simplifies the task of authoring new behaviors for virtual characters, including physical interactions between characters and other characters or objects. The system in implemented within Twig and allows users to interactively generate and test procedural controllers for characters, as well as triggering mechanisms and arbitration mechanisms for behavi...

We have developed an experimental platform that allows a large number of human participants to interact in real time within a common virtual world. Within this environment, human participants foraged for resources distributed in two spatially separated pools. In addition to varying the relative replenishment rate for the two pools (50-50, 65-35, or 80-20), we manipulated whether the participant...

Governments have a variety of channels at their disposal to interact with their citizens. Having realized that the electronic service channels are not successful for all citizen-government interactions, governments are now searching for the ideal mix of channels to serve their clients. In order to be successful, knowledge is needed on citizen behavior. First, to be able to fulfill citizens’ nee...

Molecular rotors are a group of fluorescent molecules that form twisted intramolecular charge transfer (TICT) states upon photoexcitation. When intramolecular twisting occurs, the molecular rotor returns to the ground state either by emission of a red-shifted emission band or by nonradiative relaxation. The emission properties are strongly solvent-dependent, and the solvent viscosity is the pri...

Professor Hersch argues that most state regulations aimed at fighting teen smoking have had little or no effect. She provides evidence that despite widespread age restrictions on purchasing tobacco, most teens do not consider it difficult for minors to purchase tobacco products within their community. She also presents evidence demonstrating a strong correlation between smoking rates and perc...

In this study, we aim to evolving autonomous virtual creatures which have complex shapes in a complex environment. We implement a basic physics law and fluid influences with a virtual environment and evolve artificial creatures in plural environments (on the ground, in the water). Each model, which is evolved in a different environment, obtains an effective moving behavior in each environment (...