Salmonella in Pig Farms and on Pig Meat in Suriname

Salmonella is one of the most important food borne zoonotic pathogens. While mainly associated with poultry, it has also been associated with pigs. Compared to the high-income countries, there is much less known on the prevalence of Salmonella in low- and middle-income countries, especially in the Caribbean area. Therefore, we investigated the prevalence of Salmonella in pigs and pig meat in Suriname. A total of 53 farms and 53 meat samples were included, and Salmonella was isolated using standard protocols. Strains were subjected to whole genome sequencing. No Salmonella was found on pig meat. Five farms were found to be positive for Salmonella, and a total of eight different strains were obtained. Serotypes were S. Anatum (n = 1), S. Ohio (n = 2), a monophasic variant of S. Typhimurium (n = 3), one S. Brandenburg, and one S. Javaniana. The monophasic variant of S. Typhimurium belonged to the ST34 pandemic clone, and the three strains were very similar. A few resistance genes, located on mobile genetic elements, were found. Several plasmids were detected, though only one was carrying resistance genes. This is the first study on the prevalence of Salmonella in pigs in the Caribbean and that used whole genome sequencing for characterization. The strains were rather susceptible. Local comparison of similar serotypes showed a mainly clonal spread of certain serotypes.

Perceptions of Distributive Justice of People in Contemporary China: an Empirical Study

Objectives: This paper aims to explore the impact of media use, subjective class status, local comparison and demographic variables on Chinese people's perception of distributive justice through quantitative analysis. Based on the existing literature, distributive justice is divided into macro distributive justice and micro distributive justice, of which the micro distributive justice includes two dimensions of outcome justice and opportunity justice. The paper analyzes 2015 Chinese General Social Survey data (CGSS2015) and get some results. First, in terms of Chinese people's macro-distributive justice perception, the use of Internet media has a negative impact on macro-distributive justice perception, subjective class status and local comparison have a positive impact, and gender, degree of education and birth generation in demographic variables also have significant impacts; Second, in terms of perceived outcome justice, subjective class status and local comparison have significant positive impacts on perceived outcome justice, gender has a significant positive impact on perceived outcome justice, and degree of education and birth age have negative impacts on perceived outcome justice; Third, for perceived justice of opportunity, Internet media use and degree of education have significant negative effects, while subjective class status, local comparison, birth generation and other variables have positive effects.

Global-Local-Comparison Approach: Understanding Marine Mammal Spatial Behavior by Applying Spatial Statistics and Hypothesis Testing to Passive Acoustic Data

Technological innovation in underwater acoustics has progressed research in marine mammal behavior by providing the ability to collect data on various marine mammal biological and behavioral attributes across time and space. But with this comes the need for an approach to distill the large amounts of data collected. Though disparate general statistical and modeling approaches exist, here, a holistic quantitative approach specifically motivated by the need to analyze different aspects of marine mammal behavior within a Before-After Control-Impact framework using spatial observations is introduced: the Global-Local-Comparison (GLC) approach. This approach capitalizes on the use of data sets from large-scale, hydrophone arrays and combines established spatial autocorrelation statistics of (Global) Moran’s I and (Local) Getis-Ord Gi∗ (Gi∗) with (Comparison) statistical hypothesis testing to provide a detailed understanding of array-wide, local, and order-of-magnitude changes in spatial observations. This approach was demonstrated using beaked whale foraging behavior (using foraging-specific clicks as a proxy) during acoustic exposure events as an exemplar. The demonstration revealed that the Moran’s I analysis was effective at showing whether an array-wide change in behavior had occurred, i.e., clustered to random distribution, or vice-versa. The Gi∗ analysis identified where hot or cold spots of foraging activity occurred and how those spots varied spatially from one analysis period to the next. Since neither spatial statistic could be used to directly compare the magnitude of change between analysis periods, a statistical hypothesis test, using the Kruskal-Wallis test, was used to directly compare the number of foraging events among analysis periods. When all three components of the GLC approach were used together, a comprehensive assessment of group level spatial foraging activity was obtained. This spatial approach is demonstrated on marine mammal behavior, but it can be applied to a broad range of spatial observations over a wide variety of species.

Environmental History of Rice Plantations in the Early Modern Ottoman Empire Between the 15th And 19th Centuries and Its Potential for Climate Research

Historians readily discuss the effect of climate change on the 21st century, but Ottomanists rarely reference palaeoclimatology data. This research compares palaeoclimatological data with documentary evidence from institutionalized rice plantations in the Ottoman Empire. Between the 15th and 19th centuries, the empire employed a group of experts for the cultivation of rice in the vast region between the Tigris and the Danube. Extensive registers exist from this period in archives that give documentary evidence about the organization of plantations, yields, prices and destructive floods. The objective of the study, as presented in this article, is to find rice-related phenological data in Ottoman Archive registers. It utilizes a comparative analysis of the Old World Drought Atlas (OWDA) summer precipitation data reconstructed by Cook et al. (2015), temperature changes, documentary evidence about seasonal extremes and archival evidence. The comparison shows that palaeoclimatology proxies are important sources of information regarding changes in rice cultivation. It also indicates that the Ottoman archive is a valuable source of possible phenological data. Thus, research sources from nature and societies complement one another. The comparison also demonstrates that climate change during the Ottoman Empire’s reign showed regional differences, and a local comparison of phenological data and palaeoclimatological data can explain more about the effects of the Little Ice Age (LIA) on the empire.

MetNet: A two-level approach to reconstructing and comparing metabolic networks

Metabolic pathway comparison and interaction between different species can detect important information for drug engineering and medical science. In the literature, proposals for reconstructing and comparing metabolic networks present two main problems: network reconstruction requires usually human intervention to integrate information from different sources and, in metabolic comparison, the size of the networks leads to a challenging computational problem. We propose to automatically reconstruct a metabolic network on the basis of KEGG database information. Our proposal relies on a two-level representation of the huge metabolic network: the first level is graph-based and depicts pathways as nodes and relations between pathways as edges; the second level represents each metabolic pathway in terms of its reactions content. The two-level representation complies with the KEGG database, which decomposes the metabolism of all the different organisms into “reference” pathways in a standardised way. On the basis of this two-level representation, we introduce some similarity measures for both levels. They allow for both a local comparison, pathway by pathway, and a global comparison of the entire metabolism. We developed a tool, MetNet, that implements the proposed methodology. MetNet makes it possible to automatically reconstruct the metabolic network of two organisms selected in KEGG and to compare their two networks both quantitatively and visually. We validate our methodology by presenting some experiments performed with MetNet.

Local Comparison between Two Ninth Convergence Order Algorithms for Equations

A local convergence comparison is presented between two ninth order algorithms for solving nonlinear equations. In earlier studies derivatives not appearing on the algorithms up to the 10th order were utilized to show convergence. Moreover, no error estimates, radius of convergence or results on the uniqueness of the solution that can be computed were given. The novelty of our study is that we address all these concerns by using only the first derivative which actually appears on these algorithms. That is how to extend the applicability of these algorithms. Our technique provides a direct comparison between these algorithms under the same set of convergence criteria. This technique can be used on other algorithms. Numerical experiments are utilized to test the convergence criteria.

Determination of the single point precision associated with tactile gear measurements in scanning mode

The framework of the single point uncertainty developed at the Institute of Manufacturing Metrology (FMT) presents a methodology to determine and evaluate the local measurement uncertainty for a measurement setup by local comparison of a measurement series with an associated reference geometry. This approach, which was originally developed and optimized for the processing of complete areal measurements of work pieces using industrial X-ray computed tomography, was now also extended to line scans found in dimensional testing using tactile coordinate measuring machines (CMMs). The targets of the investigation are spur (involute) steel gear wheels, which can be dimensionally characterized by both helix and profile scans using a CMM in scanning mode in combination with a rotatory table. A second measurement procedure is characterized by a single scan of the complete gear profile without the usage of a rotatory table, using the “free-form scan” CMM functionality. The modification of the single point uncertainty framework in order to determine the single point precision of repeated gear wheel measurements was implemented successfully for gear measurements using the Zeiss Gear Pro evaluation software in combination with a rotatory table as well as unassisted free-form scans of the same gear. The examinations yielded abnormally high random measurement errors, which could not fully be explained within our examinations and was for the most part caused by the accuracy of the used rotatory table of the CMM. The alternative measurement method showed that the CMM system is capable of measuring very precisely in scanning mode if the changes in the curvature of the scan trajectory are favourable.