We explore the role of farm animals in providing care to different types of participants at care farms (e.g., youngsters with behavioural problems, people with severe mental problems and people with dementia). Care farms provide alternative and promising settings where people can interact with animals compared to a therapeutic healthcare setting. We performed a literature review, conducted focu...

Online detectors form an important part of achieving coordination and synchronization in large-scale distributed applications running in peer to peer systems, the Grid, PlanetLab, and large-scale Enterprise like server farms. Detectors can be used to monitor the up/down status of hosts, the malicious behavior among processes, the availability behavior among hosts, and to estimate the number of ...

We address the challenge of link estimation and routing over highly dynamic links, thats is, bursty links that rapidly shift between reliable and unreliable periods of transmissions. Based on significant empirical evidence of over 100,000 transmissions over each link in 802.15.4 and 802.11 testbeds, we propose two metrics, expected future transmissions (EFT) and MAC3, for runtime estimation of ...

For the HERA-B experiment a processor farm for the third level trigger and full event reconstruction is planned. It will consist of more than 100 processor nodes, receiving data via high speed data links from a switching network. In 1996, a VME-based system (test farm) was built to test a possible implementation. In parallel, investigations of alternative, non-VME-based solutions for the proces...

The level 2 trigger on charged particles (L2C) of the NA48 experiment features powerful capabilities for implementing complex triggering algorithms in real-time software. These algorithms may involve track reconstruction, vertex, invariant mass or transverse momentum computation, etc. After a brief outline of the L2C architecture, this paper describes the salient features of the I/O and process...

Farm restructuring during transition is often defined as a combination of the change of the internal organization of a farm and the change in farm size, following the liberalization of the economy and the privatization of property rights. Following this definition, farm restructuring involves downsizing farm units and reorganizing management-ownership-workforce relationships. This paper tries t...

This study analyzed the impact of off-farm earnings on the intensity of adoption of improved maize varieties and the productivity of maize farming in Uganda in the years 2005/06 and 2009/10. Summary statistics show significantly higher adoption intensity and expenditure on purchased inputs among households with off-farm income relative to their counterparts without off-farm income. Households w...

This study applied multi agent simulation to investigate the impact of farm credit (an agricultural land-use change adaptation strategy) on farm household livelihood. General household and land use data were obtained from 186 sampled household. Two household types were identified; the first household type was better-off in terms of land area cultivated and income generated from rain-fed rice. O...

PURPOSE Operating or riding on farm equipment is one of the leading causes of farm-related injuries and fatalities among children and adolescents. The aim of this study is to examine environment, crash, vehicle, and occupant characteristics and the probability of injury, given a crash, in youth under age 18 on farm equipment. METHOD Data from the Departments of Transportation on farm equipmen...

To quantify the respiratory disease burden among agricultural workers, we examined the 1988-1998 National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) "Multiple Cause of Death Data" and the 1988-1994 Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey data (NHANES III). Proportionate mortality ratios (PMRs) were determined for 11 respiratory conditions among 6 agricultural groups: crop farm workers, ...