The conversion of a live chicken into safe and wholesome meat products suitable for human consumption takes place in a series of processing steps. Few of the processes require force to carry it out successively among which are slaughtering and de-feathering. The latter is the focus in this paper, plucking force of chicken produced from two breeds of chicken. Each sample of the chicken carcass w...

BACKGROUND As access to antiretroviral therapy (ART) has grown in Africa, attention has turned to evaluating the socio-economic impacts of ART. One key issue is the extent to which improvements in health resulting from ART allows individuals to return to work and earn income. Improvements in health from ART may also be associated with reduced impaired presenteeism, which is the loss of producti...

In this paper, a model of the harp plucking is developed. It is split into two successive time phases, the sticking and the slipping phases, and uses a mechanical description of the human finger's behavior. The parameters of the model are identified through measurements of the finger/string displacements during the interaction. The validity of the model is verified using a configurable and repe...

We present an attachment for the bass guitar which allows MIDI-controlled actuated fretting. This instrument adaptation is presented as a potential method of augmenting the bass guitar for those with upper-limb disabilities. Following a survey of 48 bassists, we found that timbral and dynamic features related to the plucking hand were most important to the survey respondents. We designed an act...

Excessive edge density in graphs can cause serious readability issues, which in turn can make the graphs difficult to understand or even misleading. Recently, we introduced the idea of providing tools that offer interactive edge bending as a method by which edge congestion can be disambiguated. We extend this direction, presenting a new tool, Edge Plucking, which offers new interactive methods ...