the number of lambs sold per ewe mated in the breeding flock has a considerable impact on sheep operation profitability. this depends primarily on fertility, prolificacy (# of lambs), and lamb survival, mothering ability, milk production of the ewe and lamb growth rate. optimal reproduction does vary by environment and management system – some sheep operations don’t want a lambing rate over 200...

In this paper we propose and prove correct a new self-stabilizing velocity agreement (flocking) algorithm for oblivious and asynchronous robot networks. Our algorithm allows a flock of uniform robots to follow a flock head emergent during the computation whatever its direction in plane. Robots are asynchronous, oblivious and do not share a common coordinate system. Our solution includes three m...

A statistic to measure the level of connectedness achieved among flocks would help producers to assess the risk of comparing EBV of animals from different flocks. The objectives of this research were to evaluate the pattern of change over time in selected connectedness measures and to determine how effectively these measures quantify the level of risk due to potential bias in EBV comparisons ac...

We propose a novel shape-constrained flock animation system for interactively controlling flock navigation in virtual environments. This system is capable of making the spatial distribution of a flock meet static or deforming shape constraints while performing flock simulation. Such a capability can find many applications in the entertainment industry. Given a 3D constraining shape, our system ...

Let F be a flock of the quadratic cone Q: X 2=X1X3 , in PG(3, q), q even, and let 6t : X0 =xt X1 + t X2 +zt X3 , t # Fq , be the q planes defining the flock F. A flock is equivalent to a herd of ovals in PG(2, q), q even, and to a flock generalized quadrangle of order (q, q). We show that if the herd contains a monomial oval, this oval is the Segre oval. This implies a result on the existence o...

Flocks of birds are highly variable in shape in all contexts (while travelling, avoiding predation, wheeling above the roost). Particularly amazing in this respect are the aerial displays of huge flocks of starlings (Sturnus vulgaris) above the sleeping site at dawn. The causes of this variability are hardly known, however. Here we hypothesise that variability of shape increases when there are ...