China's dairy farm structure has experienced fundamental changes across farm types. As the number of backyard farms has dramatically declined, the share of dairy cows from backyard farms has decreased by 22.4% from 2003 to 2008. However, the herd numbers of larger dairy farms have increased. In particular, the share of dairy cows has risen by 18.8% on small farms, by 22.2% on medium farms, and ...

On 15 Swiss poultry farms, broiler flocks, other farm animals, and the environment were examined during consecutive rearing periods to investigate the occurrence and genetic diversity of Campylobacter. Of the 5154 collected samples, 311 (6%) from 14 farms were Campylobacter positive by culture. Amongst the positive samples, 228 tested positive for Campylobacter jejuni and 92 for Campylobacter c...

LEDA and CGAL are platforms for combinatorial and geometric computing. We discuss the use of LEDA and CGAL for geometric computing and show that they provide a unique framework for exact, efficient and convenient geometric computing.

This paper proposes a cake-cutting protocol using cryptography when the cake is a heterogeneous good that is represented by an interval on a real line. Although the Dubins-Spanier moving-knife protocol with one knife achieves simple fairness, all players must execute the protocol synchronously. Thus, the protocol cannot be executed on asynchronous networks such as the Internet. We show that the...

This paper defi nes three types of typical certifi ed farms in Kenyan export production: smallholder farms, large-scale contracted farms, and exporter-owned farms. It assesses their economic performance, compares the fi nancial cost of compliance with the EurepGAP standard, and analyses transaction costs. Results show that larger farms are not generally performing more effi ciently compared to ...

The potential of Euglossini bees, especially Euglossa, as biological indicators of organic vs nonorganic coffee farms was studied in Atenas and San Isidro, Alajuela, Costa Rica using 1.8-cineole as lure. Observations were made for three days at each of four farms and complemented with data from a year of observations. Orchid bees were in greater abundance in the organic farms (t-Student test). ...

Peer-to-Peer (P2P) data integration combines the P2P infrastructure with traditional scheme-based data integration techniques. Some of the primary problems in this research area are the techniques to be used for querying, indexing and distributing documents among peers in a network especially when document files are in XML format. In order to handle this problem we describe an XML P2P system th...

High throughput is required in many tasks, especially real-time applications. A logical structure of parallel computing system for such applications is a pipeline of multiprocessor modules to be referred to as PMM. In this paper, a linear array based realization of PMM, referred to as PMMLA (PMM based on Linear Array), is proposed. The main design objective is to achieve uncompromised performan...

We analyze a class of proportional cake-cutting algorithms that use a minimal number of cuts (n − 1 if there are n players) to divide a cake that the players value along one dimension. While these algorithms may not produce an envy-free or efficient allocation—as these terms are used in the fair-division literature—one, divide-and-conquer (D&C), minimizes the maximum number of players that any ...

This paper presents the design and implementation methodology of the JCQ system, a Java-based Continual Query system for update monitoring over Web information sources. A continual query is a standing query that monitors updates of interest using distributed triggers and notiies users whenever the updates reach speciied thresholds. In this paper we focus on the strategies and techniques develop...