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Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons

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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Utilizing Behavioral Monitoring To Detect Sickness Or Injury In Dairy Cow And Calves, Nicole Louise Eberhart Aug 2016

Utilizing Behavioral Monitoring To Detect Sickness Or Injury In Dairy Cow And Calves, Nicole Louise Eberhart

Masters Theses

Cattle experience behavioral changes during incidences of discomfort such as respiratory disease, hock injuries, and lameness. Visual evaluation of these conditions, particularly lameness and respiratory disease can be subjective and may lead to untreated animals, which reduces the overall well-being of the animals. In order to improve detection of affected cattle, continuous or combined monitoring systems should be used. These technologies may improve detection compared to visual assessment by reducing human bias. Behavioral changes in particular may be detected through these means, with changes indicating potential health abnormalities in the individual cattle. One such behavior that changes during incidences of …


Mechanisms For Social Influence, Jeremy David Auerbach Aug 2015

Mechanisms For Social Influence, Jeremy David Auerbach

Masters Theses

Throughout the thesis, I study mathematical models that can help explain the dependency of social phenomena in animals and humans on individual traits. The first chapter investigates consensus building in human groups through communication of individual preferences for a course of action. Individuals share and modify these preferences through speaker listener interactions. Personality traits, reputations, and social networks structures effect these modifications and eventually the group will reach a consensus. If there is variation in personality traits, the time to reach consensus is delayed. Reputation models are introduced and explored, finding that those who can best estimate the average initial …