Machine-learning algorithms pervade our daily lives. In epidemiology, supervised machine learning has the potential for classification, diagnosis and risk factor identification. Here, we report the use of support vector machine learning to identify the features associated with hock burn on commercial broiler farms, using routinely collected farm management data. These data lend themselves to an...

BACKGROUND A simple binary scoring system (SBSS) was developed and used to assess the welfare measures of commercial broiler chickens in South Korea. We also correlated welfare measures with environmental parameters of broiler house. Our measures of welfare included lameness, hock burn (HB) and foot pad dermatitis (FPD), whilst environmental parameters included air temperature, relative humidit...

Saw Swee Hock School of Public Health, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Department of Paediatrics, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, Singapore, Department of Obstetrics & Gynaecology, Yong Loo Lin School of Medicine, National University of Singapore, National University Health System, Singapore, Singapore Institute for Clinical Sciences, Agency for S...

This experiment compared the effects of sand and straw bedding in free stalls on resting time, cleanliness, hock injuries, and hoof health of dairy cows and tested whether cow preferences for a bedding material depended on the familiarity with the material. A total of 52 dairy cows were kept either on straw bedded concrete stalls or sand stalls for at least 21 wk. The lying behavior was observe...

This study was conducted to determine normal rates of growth of different skeletal segments in the thoroughbred horse. Growth of body weight and eight skeletal segments (wither height, hip height, body length, knee to pastern length, hock to pastern length, shoulder to pastern length, width of chest, depth of girth) were monitored in 106 horses (60 colts, 46 fillies) during the period from 14 t...

The main aim of this research was to determine the potential effects different tillage systems (TT: traditional and RT: reduced tillage) on runoff erosion at two locations (Kahramanmaras Tarsus, Southern Turkey) under (i) fallow, (ii) wheat (Triticumaestivum L.), (iii) sainfoin (Onobrychissativa L.) crops. Rainfall simulations with intensity 120 mm h?1 30-min duration, representing a typical ex...

Sexual segregation outside the mating season is common in vertebrates. This has been shown to arise through resource partitioning in a number of taxa, but never in avian migrants. Western sandpipers (Calidris mauri) are migratory shorebirds that mainly breed in Alaska and overwinter along the coast in western and eastern North America down into South America. Females are slightly larger than ma...

Until recently, analyses of gender-dependent differences in viability selection and the ontogeny of sexual size dimorphism have been plagued by difficulties in determining the sex of nestling birds on the basis of morphology. Recently, this problem was overcome using molecular sex identification to report for the first time body-size-mediated antagonistic selection on the viability of male and ...