Improving Hunted Wild Boar Carcass Hygiene: Roles of Different Factors Involved in the Harvest Phase

Game meat production strongly differs from that of other meats, as peculiar factors present in the field and in the steps prior to transfer to a game-handling establishment can influence the hygiene of the carcasses and, therefore, of the meat. The effects of such factors were considered in hunted wild boars based on the main hygienic criteria adopted in meat processing. Environmental, animal, and hunting conditions were studied during two selective hunting seasons in Central Italy. A total of 120 hunted wild boar carcasses were sampled after the skinning process and analyzed for aerobic colony count, Enterobacteriaceae count, and Salmonella spp. isolation. The calculated mean values for aerobic colony and Enterobacteriaceae counts were 3.66 and 2.05 CFU/cm2, respectively, in line with the limits set for the meat of other ungulates by EU legislation. Salmonella spp. showed a prevalence of 2.5% (IC 95%: 1.72–3.27%). Statistical analysis of the data performed with the AIC criterion showed that the main parameter to consider for improving the hygienic level of carcasses is to reduce the time in the refrigerator before skinning, followed by hunting on cold days (<10 °C) without rain, hunting animals <60 kg, and reducing the time between shooting and evisceration.

Loose Detecting of Tower Crane Bolts Based on Time Series Analysis

This paper deals with the loose detecting of tower crane bolts which is one of the core issues of the tower crane structure health monitoring. Based on the time series model ,we make research on the method of extracting the structure damage factor of tower crane. First, we establish an AR model with the detecting data, use AIC criterion to get AR model order,and then select the residual variance of AR model as the damage sensitive factor. Furthermore, we carry out a single-limb experiment on tower crane and analyze the single-limb experiment state. Good condition and injure state are compared using the above approach. It was found that the approach could effectively judge the healthy and injury states of the tower crane structure with an application value of real-time online damage diagnosis for early warning.

Criteria for longitudinal data model selection based on Kullback’s symmetric divergence

International audience Recently, Azari et al (2006) showed that (AIC) criterion and its corrected versions cannot be directly applied to model selection for longitudinal data with correlated errors. They proposed two model selection criteria, AICc and RICc, by applying likelihood and residual likelihood approaches. These two criteria are estimators of the Kullback-Leibler's divergence distance which is asymmetric. In this work, we apply the likelihood and residual likelihood approaches to propose two new criteria, suitable for small samples longitudinal data, based on the Kullback's symmetric divergence. Their performance relative to others criteria is examined in a large simulation study