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The objective was to quantify the incidence of tarsal lesions and level of hygiene by stall bed type. Cows were scored on 100 dairies from Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa, and New York in the fall and winter. Thirty-eight dairies used rubber-filled mattresses (RFM), 27 had sand beds, 29 had waterbeds, and 6 used compost packs (CPk). Stocking density, stall dimensions, bedding amount, bedding frequency, and type of bedding were recorded. One pen of early-lactation multiparous cows on each dairy was scored based on injury of the tarsal joints at the lateral and medial surfaces and tuber calcis at the dorsal, lateral, and medial surfaces. A tarsal score of 1 represented hair loss, 2 was moderate, and 3 indicated severe swelling. Differences between bed types in the percentages of cows with lesions were tested with one-way ANOVA by lesion severity and incidence, with farm as the experimental unit. Cows on sand beds or waterbeds had fewer lesion scores of 1, 2, and 3 than those on RFM. The percentages of score 1 were 54.6 +/- 4.4 (RFM), 22.5 +/- 4.7 (sand), and 29.8 +/- 4.3 (waterbed), whereas the percentages of score 2 were 14.0 +/- 1.4, 2.3 +/- 1.5, and 5.0 +/- 1.4, and of score 3 were 3.0 +/- 0.4, 0.2 +/- 0.4, and 0.4 +/- 0.4. Cows on CPk had no lesions. Hygiene scores ranged from 1 to 5, with 1 being clean and 5 soiled. The percentages of hygiene score 1 were 0 (compost), 0.4 (RFM), 0.4 (sand), and 0.4 (waterbeds); those with score 2 were 79.0, 84.0 +/- 0.01, 73.2 +/- 0.01, and 80.4 +/- 0.01; with score 3 were 20.3, 15.2 +/- 0.01, 23.8 +/- 0.01, and 18.6 +/- 0.01; with score 4 were 0.8, 0.005 +/- 0.001, 0.006 +/- 0.001, and 0.025 +/- 0.003; and with score 5 was 0 for all bed types. Cows on RFM and waterbeds had improved hygiene compared with cows on sand beds. There was no difference in somatic cell count (SCC) by bed type. The percentage of cows in fourth lactation or greater on waterbeds (19.8 +/- 1.8) was greater than those on RFM (13.3 +/- 1.6) or on sand (13.5 +/- 1.8). The percentage culled was lower for cows on waterbeds than on RFM (22.8 +/- 1.5 vs. 29.4 +/- 1.4). Score 3 tarsal lesions were correlated (r = 0.60) with SCC. The length of the sand bed was correlated with a greater percentage of mature cows. The SCC was correlated with the percentage of cows reported lame on the day of the visit (r = 0.45) and with neck rail height (r = -0.26). On dairies with RFM, severe lesions (r = 0.60), death losses (r = 0.52), and percentage of the herd reported lame on the day of the visit (r = 0.52) were all correlated with the SCC. Dairies with higher percentages of lesions had higher SCC, death losses, lameness, and culling rates. Adding bedding several times per week may reduce the incidence of lesions.

Can democracy resolve the new set of survival problems we face? Our greatest challenge is to modify or perhaps even reverse what has worked well. Our economic system must adapt to our ecological system. Genetic values that allowed Homo sapiens to prosper may be counterproductive today. Four preconceptions that hinder the United States in facing challenges: 1) It has a divine destiny; 2) Problem solving machinery and institutions are equal to the challenges; (the influence of money on politics undermines this); 3) Our political system and democracy are sustainable; 4) Population and economic growth are good. Nations must ask: How many people can we support? We cannot be growth maximizers and ecological realists at the same time. Both the Rio Declaration and the Brundtland Commission set utopian but unachievable goals.

In Christian theology, there is the story of Saint Martin of Tours. In the late thirteenth century, late one night outside an ancient city, Saint Martin of Tours was riding his horse down this ancient byway. Right outside the city gates, he comes across a cold and starving beggar. In an act of charity which got him sainted a couple hundred years later, he took his cloak and cut it in half. He took half of his dinner and gave it to the cold and starving beggar. Now, Bertold Brecht, in one of his plays, raises this question: What if instead of one cold and starving beggar, there were 50, or 60, or 100? What is the ethical choice now? What does the ethical person do? It is for asking these hard, but important, questions that you charge me, here and now, in 2007 A.D., with heresy. You charge me with heresy for changing "Love thy neighbor," to "Love thy nearest neighbor/ My answer to you is that this is the new bio-spiritual ethics. This is the new ethical reality. I wish with all my heart it were not, but my mind and soul tell me (tragically) that it is the new reality. Charity must begin at home. The Bible states (Timothy 5:8), "If any provide not for his own house, he hath denied the faith and is worse than an infidel.1" Painfully, but inevitably, mankind must fit itself into its ecosys tem. At some point?we can argue endlessly when that takes place?but at some point, infinite growth in a finite world comes to an end. At that point?whenever it happens?a new ethics must be formu lated.

I end with another parable, but it is also a true story. Harvey Cushing, the famous surgeon after whom the Cushing Lectures are named, made an international reputation in his allegiance to quality. He badgered his profession to a higher standard of self-effacement and railed against the debasement of clinical skills and overemphasis on research and pursuit of personal gain. We honor him to this day because those were, and remain, important points. Yet, Harvey Cushing served as a surgeon during World War I and at Ypres. Although the Allied mortality was as much as 50,000 soldiers a day, not counting the wounded, Cushing refused to operate on any more than two patients each day, arguing that to do so would have lowered his standard of care for his patients--a standard that made sense in one time but that became strikingly insensitive, and I suggest even unethical, in another when confronted with a different reality. The ethical claims for professional autonomy based on such standards of professional ethics has had the effect of supporting widespread distributional inequities. These inequities are clearly a form of rationing that have been condoned implicitly by the professional ethics in the name of professional autonomy. Many of the condemnations we hear today of prospective payment systems and how they will "ration" medicine contain a similar sense of unreality. The high standards are laudatory, but they should not be used as an excuse to not meet other pressing needs. High standards should never be used to make a problem worse.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)

Heifer (n = 72), bull (n = 22) and steer (n = 60) calves from matings of Hereford, Hereford x Angus and three-breed crossbred dams to Piedmontese (P), Gelbvieh (G) and Red Angus (RA) bulls were evaluated for growth and fertility traits. Birth weight, calving difficulty and adjusted 205-d weaning weight data were obtained from all calves. Pelvic dimensions, reproductive tract scores and pregnancy percentages were analyzed for heifers at 12 months of age. Breeding soundness examinations compared reproductive traits of bull calves at 12 and 13 months old. Steers were assigned to pens by breed of sire post-weaning to evaluate daily gain and adjusted feed efficiency for growing and finishing periods. Calves sired by P and G sires had heavier birth weights and higher calving difficulty scores (P

"In every age," writes Bronowski (1973), in The Ascent of Man, ''there is a turning point, a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world." Similarly, Abraham Lincoln (1862) said, "As our case is new, we must think and act anew. We must disenthrall ourselves . . ." It seems clear that the great forward leaps of human progress have been made by people who "disenthrall" themselves and develop "a new way of seeing and asserting the coherence of the world." We see this in Galileo and Copernicus, who had the audacity to claim the earth was not the center of the universe. We see this in Charles Darwin, who took on the religious establishment with the heretical idea that man was a product of evolution. We see it in political systems where Locke and Jefferson had the revolutionary ideas that humankind could govern themselves. We see it in Freud with his upsetting idea that man was not always a rational animal. All of these people challenged the current ordained wisdom of the time and all of them proved correct. These people were labeled heretics. Their ideas were aired amidst great controversy. Huxley once observed that, "All great truths begin as heresy." Humankind falls into a routine way of viewing the world and then, breaking the continuity, someone observes that the current orthodoxy is at variance with reality. A great debate ensues. New ideas are upsetting. Attempts are made to shout down new opinion. If the idea is grounded in

The objective was to conduct a broad survey of dairy management practices that have an effect on animal well-being. Dairies were visited during the fall and winter of 2005 and 2006 in Wisconsin, Minnesota, Indiana, Iowa, and New York. Data were collected on 113 dairies on colostrum feeding, dehorning, tail-docking, euthanasia methods, producer statements about welfare, use of specialized calf-raising farms (custom), level of satisfaction with calf-raising by producers, and cow behavior. Calves were raised by the owner on 50.4% of dairies; 30.1% were raised on custom farms during the milk-feeding period, 18.6% were custom raised after weaning, and 1% sold calves with the option to buy them back as first-lactation heifers. A total of 51.8% of producers were very satisfied with their current calf-raising methods. Three feedings of colostrum were fed to the calves on 23.9% of dairies, 2 feedings on 39.8% of farms, 1 feeding on 31.0% of farms, and colostrum replacement products were fed on 5.3% of farms. Many farms (61.9%) provided 3.8 L at first feeding. Calves were dehorned at different ages by various methods. By 8 wk, 34.5% of calves were dehorned. By 12 wk, 78.8% of calves were dehorned. The majority of calves were dehorned by hot iron (67.3%). The remainder were dehorned by gouging (8.8%), paste (9.7%), saw (3.5%), or unknown by calf owner (10.6%). Anesthetic use was reported by 12.4% of dairy owners and analgesia use by 1.8%. Tail-docking was observed on 82.3% of dairies. The most common reported docking time was pre- or postcalving (35.2%). The second most commonly reported time was d 1 (15.4%). Rubber band was the most common method (92.5%), followed by amputation (7.5%). Three dairies amputated precalving, 1 at 2 mo and 3 at d 1 or 2. Cow hygiene was the most common reason given to dock (73.5%), followed by parlor worker comfort (17.4%) and udder health (1.0%). Producers reported 2.0% of cows obviously lame. Gun was the preferred euthanasia method (85.7%), followed by i.v. euthanasia (8.0%), live pick-up (1.8%), and nondisclosure (3.5%). Most producers (77.9%) stated that cows were in an improved environment as compared with 20 yr ago, whereas 8.0% stated conditions were worse, and 14.2% were undecided. Dairies with higher percentages of cows that either approached or touched the observer had lower somatic cell counts. The survey results showed management practices that were important for animal welfare.

Over the last few decades, the field of unmanned systems (UMSs) has begun to emerge into a variety of markets. The military has already deployed unmanned air, sea, and ground vehicles. Universities and other research institutions have developed semi-autonomous passenger vehicles that have driven on highways in the U.S. and abroad. The National Aeronautics and Space Administrations (NASA) has developed unmanned rovers that have been navigating the planet Mars for several years. Even the transit and commercial freight market has developed programs for unmanned vehicles research to help solve complex logistics issues.In order to compare the capabilities of unmanned systems in such a wide variety of markets, the Autonomy Levels for Unmanned Systems (ALFUS) framework has been established in a series of workshops. While this framework is still under some development, it can be used in its current state to compare unmanned systems. In this paper, we highlight some of the major accomplishments made in the field of ground vehicle autonomy in particular. We then map the capabilities of these ground vehicles to the ALFUS framework and summarize the resulting trends that occur from this mapping.

Both state healthcare reform and the market are shrinking the healthcare infrastructure and changing the needs of the workforce. Managed care, in its various forms, generally uses fewer doctors and makes more efficient use of hospitals. This will have a profound effect on medical schools, existing specialties, and underutilized hospitals. After many false starts, Adam Smith's "invisible hand" is having its impact. This article explores some of the consequences.

The status quo in our health care delivery system is unsustainable. An old world of health care is dying and a new world is being born. The basic defining characteristic of this new world of health care is that we have invented more beneficial medicine than we, as a society, can afford. Our genius has outrun our productivity. However we organize or however we fund health care, we shall not escape the necessity of making hard choices. The bottom line in health care is that there is no bottom line—infinite medical needs have run smack into finite resources. We will never get our health care spending under control until we accept this reality.

Too often, the limits of our language are the limits of our thinking. “If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” warned George Orwell. How we label something too often controls how we think about it. We get particular concepts in our head and they are hard to change. They govern how we think and how we act. “Disease” and “death” used to be considered as “God's will,” and it took hundreds of years and no small number of martyrs to get that corrected. It was very hard to develop modern medicine when so many subjects were thought of as outside of human control. Similarly, the number of children a woman had was thought to be “God's will,” and that has made the development of contraception controversial to this day. Human control over any part of human destiny is usually opposed vigorously. Humankind has the tendency to confuse the familiar with the necessary.

The more I reflect on the health care system, the more I am struck by the divergence between the medical ethics of the individual and the social ethics of the health care system. We spend volumes agonizing and debating informed consent, autonomy, discontinuation of life surf port systems, and the like, but little time debating the ethics of the system. We myopically obsess about individual trees while the whole forest is being clear cut. Take my state, Colorado. Almost every hospital has an ethics committee, but no one asks ethical questions of the entire system. Over 50 percent of our hospital beds are empty; we have twenty-one hospitals doing open heart surgery, and three doing transplants (three times what is needed). We have for (for 3.5 million people) more MRI machines than Canada, and far too many specialists. This, in a state in which 450,000 citizens are uninsured and another 400,000 underinsured. We have a large excess capacity in neonatology, yet 21 percent of our women give birth without adequate prenatal care. Excess capacity sits cheek-by-jowl with great need. California is estimated to have over 400 MRI machines, far beyond any reasonable need, while 5 million of its citizens are uninsured. Half-empty hospitals in Denver hire marketing people to run expensive TV campaigns to get a market share from their neighboring half-empty hospitals, while many children go without vaccinations. Our health science center is constantly practicing supercolider medicine and looking for the next Lorenzo's oil, while in its own backyard large numbers of ordinary people lack basic health care. When asked, the well-meaning people who run these institutions all plead innocent and tell you of the good they are doing for their state. "Each snowflake in an avalanche pleads `not guilty,'" observed a wise friend. We all have a duty to the community as well as to the individual, yet we are trustees of a painfully inadequate system. The excesses in any one part of it are directly related to the inadequacies in another part. An individual institution may have a wonderful and thoughtful ethics committee, but the system itself does a poor job of producing health for the society. In no category (except life expectancy at age eighty) are we as healthy as citizens in Europe, or Great Britain, or Canada, or Japan. The inability to ask the larger questions of health policy and the refusal to adopt a larger ethical vision has taken a serious toll on our nation's health. Paul Starr, in his book The Social Transformation of Medicine, discusses the victory of allopathic health care over public health and the price society paid for relying so heavily on the least effective system of maximizing the health of the public. The excessive focus on the individual to the exclusion of the society caused us to train too many specialists and too few generalists. …

I would like to take this occasion to talk about one of the greatest concerns of this administration-energy. The energy issues are tremendously complex. It seems, I guess, that the more complex a society becomes, the more complex its problems and their solutions become. Llewellyn Thompson, former ambassador to Russia, brought back to us a good proverb to illustrate that theme. It seems a Russian peasant was walking down the road when he saw a canary flying down the same road. The canary wasn't watching where it was flying; it flew smack into a tree and fell to the ground, stunned. The peasant picked up the canary and looked at it, wondering what to do. Then he spied some fresh cow dung nearby and, hoping it was warm and rejuvenative, he placed the canary in the cow dung. It worked. Soon the warmth revived the canary and it sat up and started to chirp-at which point a large tom cat came out of the bushes, knocked that canary out of the cow dung and killed it. Now as in most Russian proverbs, there are three morals; the first: It isn't always your enemies who put you into it; the second: It isn't always your friends who take you out of it; the third: When you're up to your neck in it, don't chirp. The story could well illustrate some of the verities of the energy crises. First, it wasn't our enemies who put us into it. The Arabs may have moved up the time schedule, but the energy crisis was forming long before the embargo. It isn't always our friends in the oil companies who can take us out of this crisis. We need them, of course, but we will need more. We are now up to our necks in it and we must get about solving this crisis. We thus live in the midst of a large intellectual schizophrenia. Many very good and intelligent people look at our current economic problems as temporary hiccups in the system that will soon give way to Daniel Bell's salubrious vision of the "Postindustrial state." This vision of America forecasts shorter work weeks, abundance for all, and a constantly rising per capita income. The economic pie will continue to grow, indeterminately, according to this scenario. The other vision of America is we are heading into an age of scarcity. There are limits to economic growth, goes the argument, which require us to make new institutional arrangements. Kenneth Boulding has written a marvelous article saying that the creative management of decline is one of the chief challenges of the future.

We consider the problem of quantitatively modeling movements of marked flea beetles in cultivated arrays of the cole crop, collards (Brassica oleraceae). Methods for the estimation of temporally and spatially dependent parameters in general dispersal models are outlined and a summary of our findings using these methods with flea beetle data is given.

Much of the world's burgeoning population lives in abject poverty. Not surprisingly, pressure to immigrate to the United States has been growing steadily. But the demands to come to the United States far exceed this country's ability to absorb the numbers of people who would like to come here. Lamm calls for a reevaluation of this country's immigration policies and more stringent action against illegal immigration. America's immigration policies, he contends, must conform to the realities of our time.

When I look at the world of western water, I see several remarkable ironies. • In the West it is ironic that we treat our most valuable resource as worthless. We understand the value of gold or oil or beef. Yet we take for granted the water needed to mine and mill the gold or to feed and process the beef. And we do not stop to think of the relative values of the last gallon of oil or water. • We recognize the West as an arid land. In its aridity is much of its charm and beauty. But the ironic western response to aridity is neither to use the water with special care nor to treat it with special respect. The West has shown a romantic attraction to the challenge of "making the desert bloom even as the rose." We talk scarcity; yet we have set our largest cities in the deserts and then insisted on surrounding ourselves with Kentucky bluegrass. • Tourists flock to Colorado to enjoy our canyons and rivers, to fish in our streams, to enjoy a mountain environment. They spend $4.4 billion a year here. Yet, ironically, many people still consider it wasteful to leave water in a stream for fish and wildlife, recreation, and scenery. Somehow, a dam or diversion that will take the water out of the stream is considered a nobler use. • Another irony was demonstrated a few months ago when the city of Thornton, just north of Denver, announced plans to contract with farmers to meet its future water needs. Colorado

✓ In this 199th year of constitutional government in the United States a careful evaluation of all our basic institutions is required if this country is to remain a great nation. The delivery of health care, a basic institution, must be included in the determination of how finite resources can be most effectively and efficiently used for what appears to be almost infinite needs.

This book examines the problems posed in the United States by current levels of immigration both legal and illegal. Consideration is given to the number of immigrants the country can absorb and to the problems associated with immigration such as exploitation of migrants lawlessness the splintering of society language conflict employment and pressures on social services. The authors also examine the need to change laws governing migration and ways of making the laws enforceable. (ANNOTATION)