École Supérieure de Management Appliqué

A baby sea turtle needs to reach the ocean. To achieve that, she has to overcome lots of obstacles and predators on her way.

Tom, a daydreaming and astronomy enthusiast child is separated from his young girl friend Andreya. Driven by nostalgia and his childhood mission, Tom makes a promise of going to the moon one day.

Objectives: To compare average daily gain (ADG) of Ugandan nursery and finisher pigs fed a commercial diet, a forage-based diet, or a silage-based diet, and to compare the cost effectiveness of the diets. Materials and methods: Each pig was randomly assigned to the commercial diet, the forage-based diet, or the silage-based diet. Pigs were weighed every 3 weeks from 65 to 230 days of age. Growth was compared within and across diet on the basis of starting body weight (BW). The cost of feed per kg of BW gain was determined. Results: As age and BW increased, mean BW variability increased in pigs fed the forage-based or silage-based diets and decreased in pigs fed the commercial diet. Starting BW was positively associated with ADG (P < .01). Average daily gain of nursery pigs fed the commercial diet was higher than that of pigs fed the forage-based and silage-based diets. At sufficient BW (≥ 11.9 kg), pigs fed the silage-based diet achieved ADG similar to that in pigs fed the commercial diet. Implications: At sufficient BW (11 to 12 kg) pigs grow well on forage- or silage-based diets. If some ingredients are in surplus on farms, the forage- and silage-based diets are more cost effective than the commercial diet when pigs reach 8.5 kg BW. Interventions to improve weaning weights and provision of creep feed, and identification of nutrient-dense, digestible, palatable feedstuffs for development of low-cost balanced diets are needed in order to improve pig growth performance in East Africa.

The aim of the present study is the representation of a method to identify and prioritize accident-prone sections (APSs) based upon efficiency concept to emphasize accidents with regard to traffic, geometric and environmental circumstances of road which can consider the interaction of accidents as well as their casual factors. This study incorporates the segmentation procedure into data envelopment analysis (DEA) technique which has no requirement of distribution function and special assumptions, unlike the regression models. A case study has been done on 144.4km length of Iran roads to describe the approach. Eleven accident-prone sections were identified among 154 sections obtained from the segmentation process and their prioritization was made based on the inefficiency values coming from DEA method. The comparisons demonstrated that the frequency and severity of accidents would not be only considered as the main factors for black-spots identification but proper rating can be possible by obtaining inefficiency values from this method for the road sections. This approach could applicably offer decision-making units for identifying accident-prone sections and their prioritizations. Also, it can be used to prioritize intersections, roundabouts or the total roads of the safety organization domain.