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Understanding wastewater treatment processes is key to ensuring finished quality for discharge into the environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some New Zealand dairy farmers are using semen from Norwegian Red (NR) bulls to explore the performance of this breed under local grazing conditions. The objective of this study was to compare the first lactation performance of first cross NR cattle with traditional New Zealand breeds. Data were collected from six dairy farms in Southland, New Zealand, during 2022–2023 milk production seasons. Data were collected from 1178 first lactation cows including herd test of daily yields of milk, fat and protein and somatic cell counts, and persistency. Breeds included 386 NR cross (NRX), 231 Holstein Friesian (F), 84 Holstein Friesian cross (FX), 134 Holstein Friesian x Jersey (FJ) and 58 Jersey cross (JX) cows. Findings indicate F cows produced the greatest cumulative milk yield (3,744 kg), 138.6 kg more than NRX cows. There were no significant differences among the breed groups for milk yield and milk solids yield persistency and SCS (SCS = Log2 SCC). The total lactation milk yield of NRX cows was lower than that of the other breeds, excluding JX. These results pertain specifically to first lactation cows; therefore, it is necessary to undertake further analysis to evaluate the long-term productivity and longevity of NR breeds under New Zealand conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Primary dysmenorrhea is one of the most prevalent gynecologic condition affecting women, especially adolescent girls. Among adolescents, associated symptoms of dysmenorrhea impact the general health status, negatively influence the quality of life, resulting in school absenteeism and decreased academic performance. This study protocol was developed to estimate the prevalence of dysmenorrhea and evaluate the effectiveness of Meditation and Yoga intervention on dysmenorrhea among adolescent girls. In phase I, data will be collected from adolescent girls (N » 5000) aged between 13 and 18 years to estimate the prevalence of dysmenorrhea and in the second phase, Cluster-Randomized Controlled Trial will be conducted to evaluate the impact of Meditation and Yoga on dysmenorrhea. From the first phase, those adolescent girls (N=400) with high pain intensity (numerical pain rating scale ≥ 4) from each school, with schools as clusters, will be assigned to the interventional and control arm. The interventional arm will receive the proposed Meditation and Yoga intervention for 12 weeks under supervision and the control arm will continue with standard routine care. The outcomes such as pain intensity, stress, academic performance, self-efficacy and biomarker levels (Hb, Progesterone, Estrogen, Prostaglandins F2α and E2) will be assessed at baseline and 12 weeks after the intervention. Yoga's popularity and medical benefits have grown with the growing interest in alternative and complementary medicine. There is insufficient evidence to support yoga as a treatment for dysmenorrhea symptoms. This research contributes to the evidence on the impact of meditation and yoga on primary dysmenorrhea among adolescent girls.

‘Middle censoring’ is a very general censoring scheme where the actual value of an observation in the data becomes unobservable if it falls inside a random interval (L, R) and includes both left and right censoring. In this paper, we consider discrete lifetime data that follow a geometric distribution that is subject to middle censoring. Two major innovations in this paper, compared to the earlier work of Davarzani and Parsian [3], include (i) an extension and generalization to the case where covariates are present along with the data and (ii) an alternate approach and proofs which exploit the simple relationship between the geometric and the exponential distributions, so that the theory is more in line with the work of Iyer et al. [6]. It is also demonstrated that this kind of discretization of life times gives results that are close to the original data involving exponential life times. Maximum likelihood estimation of the parameters is studied for this middle-censoring scheme with covariates and their large sample distributions discussed. Simulation results indicate how well the proposed estimation methods work and an illustrative example using time-to-pregnancy data from Baird and Wilcox [1] is included.