Transition of primiparous heifers to the milking herd is a period with multiple stressors. The objective of these studies was to determine effects of parlour experience and prepartum milking (pre-milking) on behavioural and physiological indicators of stress after calving. Two experiments were conducted, one was in a free-stall housing confinement system and the second was in a modified grazing...

Assessment programs are one way beef producers communicate information about animal welfare to retailers and the public. Programs that monitor cattle through the production cycle (e.g., the Global Animal Partnership) or at individual stages (e.g., slaughter; the North American Meat Institute) exist, but to date, there is no assessment program addressing welfare specifically in the cow-calf sect...

This paper investigates a discrete-time impatient customer queue with Bernoulli-schedule vacation interruption. The  vacation times and the service times during regular busy period and during working vacation period are assumed to follow geometric distribution. We obtain the steady-state probabilities at arbitrary and outside observer's observation epochs using recursive technique. Cost analysi...

The ever increasing demand of the subscribers has put pressure on the capacity of wireless networks around the world. To utilize the scare resources, in the present paper we propose an optimal allocation scheme for an integrated wireless/cellular model with handoff priority and handoff guarantee services. The suggested algorithm optimally allocates the resources in each cell and dynamically adj...

A very interesting dialogue has been established here concerning the role of insurance in our society. I would, however, like to step back from the insurance issue to discuss several major developments that will shape how genetic information is used in our society. First, revolutionary change is going on among employers in the way they respond to the cost of health insurance. Employers are sayi...

HPC application developers can no longer afford the luxury of programming to just one platform. The usefulness and longevity of software now depend on portability as well as performance. This paper examines the appropriateness of existing tools in developing and tuning applications that must be both efficient and portable. A series of design tradeoffs have been made, with the result that today'...

Queuing theory is the formal study of waiting in line and is an entire discipline in operations management. This article will give the reader a general background into queuing theory, its associated terminology, and its relationship to patient satisfaction. Queuing theory has been used in the past to assess such things as staff schedules, working environment, productivity, customer waiting time...

THEWORK OF MANY LIBRARY ASSOCIATIONS would be constrained, some of it even impossible to accomplish, without the efforts of their employees. Staff create and carry out programs for association membership and assure continuity for the organization. Issues relating to staff roles and the responsibilities they have in associations are explored and reasons for their sometimes conflicting relationsh...