Relegated to the benthos, the blue mussel, Mytilus edulis, is confined to consuming resources available in the water above substrates. However, aquaculture manipulates the distribution of mussels and renders the resources of the water column available to mussels. With the identification of mussels as significant consumers of zooplankton, the presence of mussels in the water column suggests aqua...

Algorithmic skeletons abstract commonly used patterns of parallel computation, communication, and interaction. By demonstrating a predictable communication and computation structure, they provide a foundation for performance modelling and estimation. Grids pose a challenge to known distributed systems techniques as a result of their dynamism. One of the most prominent research areas concerns th...

Growing concerns about the environmental impact of fossil fuel energy and improvements in both the cost and performance of wind turbine technologies has spurred a sharp expansion in wind energy generation. However, both the increasing size of wind farms and the increased contribution of wind energy to the overall electricity generation market has created new challenges. As wind farms grow in si...

This study assesses the reported farm income crisis in Canada and uses farm financial data to illustrate the importance and impact that management skills and practices have on farm income and net worth. For grain and oilseed farms, large farms produce higher revenues per hectare and achieve economies of scale on operating expenses, interest and depreciation, making them significantly more profi...

The objective of the present study was to investigate optimal group size in cattle in communal pastures where cattle from various farms are turned out: (1) to ascertain if cows derived from each farm form an affiliative group and (2) to investigate the effect of the number of farm mates on social and maintenance behaviours when farm mates form an affiliative group. Farm mates were defined as co...

As the size of livestock farms in The Netherlands is on the increase for economic reasons, an important question is how disease introduction risks and risks of onward transmission scale with farm size (i.e. with the number of animals on the farm). Here we use the epidemic data of the 1997-1998 epidemic of Classical Swine Fever (CSF) Virus in The Netherlands to address this question for CSF risk...

The widespread use of Twitter makes it very interesting to determine the opinions and the sentiments expressed by its users. The shortness of the length and the highly informal nature of tweets render it very difficult to automatically detect such information. This paper reports the results to a challenge, set forth by SemEval-2013 Task 2, to determine the positive, neutral, or negative sentime...

Structural transformation is a process by which the relative contribution of nonagricultural sectors to the overall economy rises as agriculture’s share declines in relative terms. In absolute terms, however, agriculture continues to grow and contribute to overall economic growth. Agricultural productivity growth and increased farm incomes are prerequisites for structural transformation. Increa...