Pre-breeding of bottle gourd [Lagenaria siceraria (molina) standl.].

Doctor of Philosophy in Crop Science. University of KwaZulu-Natal, Pietermaritzburg 2016.Abstract available in PDF file

Biloxi-English Dictionary with English-Biloxi Index

This is a revised version of the Dorsey-Swanton *A Dictionary of the Biloxi and Ofo Languages* with additional analysis, annotation, and commentary by David Kaufman.Biloxi (ISO 639-3: bll) is a dormant Siouan language. The only known resource available on the language has been /A Dictionary of the Biloxi and Ofo Languages/ (1912). The first linguist to document Biloxi in Louisiana was Albert Gatschet in 1886, who discovered that Biloxi was actually Siouan, not Muskogean as previously thought. The Reverend James O. Dorsey further documented the language in Louisiana in 1892-93. His dictionary, also incorporating some of Gatschet's previous work, was posthumously edited and published by the linguist John Swanton in 1912. The revised dictionary here contains most of the original Dorsey-Swanton data augmented with new entries (from Gatschet's unpublished field notes and from Haas's 1968 article, "The Last Words of Biloxi"). The current dictionary also regularizes the modified Americanist orthography. It contains 2,138 entries and includes my etymological analyses and notations, an English index, comparative data from Siouan and other languages, example sentences, cross-referencing of entries, cultural information, a brief grammatical sketch, as well as appendices on, for example, affixes, flora and fauna, medicinal plants, and human body parts

An Exploration of Four Sixteenth-Century Artefacts from St Helen's Ranworth: Conformity, Decency, Moderation and Memory in the Post-Reformation era.

The impact of the sixteenth-century English Reformation on parish life is an academically fertile and contested subject. The growth of interdisciplinary studies and material culture studies in particular has shed new light on the extent to which ordinary peoples’ faith and world-view changed in response to official reforms. This thesis brings a fresh perspective to these issues. Through close analysis of four early Reformation-era artefacts from one rural Norfolk parish, a composite view has emerged. The artefacts from St Helen’s Church, Ranworth, owed their existence to official injunctions or reformist pressures and have been interrogated from a range of material, liturgical and textual perspectives drawn from the disciplines of material culture studies, art, church and social histories. The examined artefacts are a printed volume of Erasmus’ paraphrases on the gospels and Acts of the Apostles, an Elizabethan communion cup, a wall monument of 1579 and the late Elizabethan parchment transcript of the Ranworth parish register. Attention has been given to the ordinances that instigated them and ways in which they were adopted, used and adapted by a sixteenth-century community that they were imposed upon. This visual and materially-based investigation throws new light on a number of current areas of academic focus in Reformation studies. Examining artefacts from different genres that are joined by a shared location and chronology have yielded insights into their surrounding culture and themes of conformity, decency, moderation and memory which predominate current academic debates

The Archaeology of an Ancient Seaside Town: Performance and Community at Samanco, Nepeña Valley, Peru Volume 1

Studies of social complexity increasingly recognize the role of maritime communities in the development of large sociopolitical systems. The Central Andes present an ideal region for understanding maritime aspects of ancient social complexity, due to one of the most productive sea biomasses in the world. In this study I investigate Samanco, an ancient seaside town, and its contribution to urban transformations along the North-Central coast of Peru during the mid-1st millennium BCE. I consult a theoretical framework of performance and its influence on community organization as a framework for analyzing sociopolitical development. Mapping and excavation at Samanco documented a densely occupied settlement. Materials recovered imply that ancient Samanco was a community of low status inhabitants focused on day-to-day subsistence and trade. The discovery of animal enclosures, diverse cultigens, primarily domestic ceramics, and most importantly a dense array of marine goods support the inference of an early urban town centered on food production. I argue that trade to inland residential centers of Samanco’s vast food products, likely through the aid of camelid caravans, played an important part in early urban political economy and the overall success of the community. Daily interactions, seen as culturally important performances, promoted subsistence industry as a site identity. Patios at the heart of neighborhood compounds served as venues for learning, socialization, and communal interactions which shaped and negotiated Samanco society. Neighborhood compounds were built and materialized in a way that emphasized exclusion and autonomy among various co-resident groups living in separate compounds. Limited social hierarchies were enacted through public performances inside monumental plazas. Results bring new insights into social complexity, arguing for non-state urban societies which challenge neo-evolutionary ideas of state formation. The results also advocate exploration of past ii experiences and communal interactions as a way of bringing humans back to the forefront of archaeological inquiry. This thesis also advocates approaching sites as biographies by detailing various site performances at Samanco up to the present. One example includes site re-use for tombs during the 16th century CE ascribed to a performance of ancestor veneration associated with site ruins. The thesis also analyzes contemporary engagements with Samanco’s archaeological heritage to understand how local Andean communities experience and perform with archaeological ruins. I argue that local communities conceive of sites as dangerous but also fortuitous places inseparable from the rural and mystical Andean landscape, commanding a performance of respect. Moreover, interactions with archaeological sites and the stories told about them are integral in the construction of rural mestizo identities. These results emphasize the importance of collaboration and the promotion of local knowledge in archaeological research

Multi-tier framework for the inferential measurement and data-driven modeling

A framework for the inferential measurement and data-driven modeling has been proposed and assessed in several real-world application domains. The architecture of the framework has been structured in multiple tiers to facilitate extensibility and the integration of new components. Each of the proposed four tiers has been assessed in an uncoupled way to verify their suitability. The first tier, dealing with exploratory data analysis, has been assessed with the characterization of the chemical space related to the biodegradation of organic chemicals. This analysis has established relationships between physicochemical variables and biodegradation rates that have been used for model development. At the preprocessing level, a novel method for feature selection based on dissimilarity measures between Self-Organizing maps (SOM) has been developed and assessed. The proposed method selected more features than others published in literature but leads to models with improved predictive power. Single and multiple data imputation techniques based on the SOM have also been used to recover missing data in a Waste Water Treatment Plant benchmark. A new dynamic method to adjust the centers and widths of in Radial basis Function networks has been proposed to predict water quality. The proposed method outperformed other neural networks. The proposed modeling components have also been assessed in the development of prediction and classification models for biodegradation rates in different media. The results obtained proved the suitability of this approach to develop data-driven models when the complex dynamics of the process prevents the formulation of mechanistic models. The use of rule generation algorithms and Bayesian dependency models has been preliminary screened to provide the framework with interpretation capabilities. Preliminary results obtained from the classification of Modes of Toxic Action (MOA) indicate that this could be a promising approach to use MOAs as proxy indicators of human health effects of chemicals.Finally, the complete framework has been applied to three different modeling scenarios. A virtual sensor system, capable of inferring product quality indices from primary process variables has been developed and assessed. The system was integrated with the control system in a real chemical plant outperforming multi-linear correlation models usually adopted by chemical manufacturers. A model to predict carcinogenicity from molecular structure for a set of aromatic compounds has been developed and tested. Results obtained after the application of the SOM-dissimilarity feature selection method yielded better results than models published in the literature. Finally, the framework has been used to facilitate a new approach for environmental modeling and risk management within geographical information systems (GIS). The SOM has been successfully used to characterize exposure scenarios and to provide estimations of missing data through geographic interpolation. The combination of SOM and Gaussian Mixture models facilitated the formulation of a new probabilistic risk assessment approach.Aquesta tesi proposa i avalua en diverses aplicacions reals, un marc general de treball per al desenvolupament de sistemes de mesurament inferencial i de modelat basats en dades. L'arquitectura d'aquest marc de treball s'organitza en diverses capes que faciliten la seva extensibilitat així com la integració de nous components. Cadascun dels quatre nivells en que s'estructura la proposta de marc de treball ha estat avaluat de forma independent per a verificar la seva funcionalitat. El primer que nivell s'ocupa de l'anàlisi exploratòria de dades ha esta avaluat a partir de la caracterització de l'espai químic corresponent a la biodegradació de certs compostos orgànics. Fruit d'aquest anàlisi s'han establert relacions entre diverses variables físico-químiques que han estat emprades posteriorment per al desenvolupament de models de biodegradació. A nivell del preprocés de les dades s'ha desenvolupat i avaluat una nova metodologia per a la selecció de variables basada en l'ús del Mapes Autoorganitzats (SOM). Tot i que el mètode proposat selecciona, en general, un major nombre de variables que altres mètodes proposats a la literatura, els models resultants mostren una millor capacitat predictiva. S'han avaluat també tot un conjunt de tècniques d'imputació de dades basades en el SOM amb un conjunt de dades estàndard corresponent als paràmetres d'operació d'una planta de tractament d'aigües residuals. Es proposa i avalua en un problema de predicció de qualitat en aigua un nou model dinàmic per a ajustar el centre i la dispersió en xarxes de funcions de base radial. El mètode proposat millora els resultats obtinguts amb altres arquitectures neuronals. Els components de modelat proposat s'han aplicat també al desenvolupament de models predictius i de classificació de les velocitats de biodegradació de compostos orgànics en diferents medis. Els resultats obtinguts demostren la viabilitat d'aquesta aproximació per a desenvolupar models basats en dades en aquells casos en els que la complexitat de dinàmica del procés impedeix formular models mecanicistes. S'ha dut a terme un estudi preliminar de l'ús de algorismes de generació de regles i de grafs de dependència bayesiana per a introduir una nova capa que faciliti la interpretació dels models. Els resultats preliminars obtinguts a partir de la classificació dels Modes d'acció Tòxica (MOA) apunten a que l'ús dels MOA com a indicadors intermediaris dels efectes dels compostos químics en la salut és una aproximació factible.Finalment, el marc de treball proposat s'ha aplicat en tres escenaris de modelat diferents. En primer lloc, s'ha desenvolupat i avaluat un sensor virtual capaç d'inferir índexs de qualitat a partir de variables primàries de procés. El sensor resultant ha estat implementat en una planta química real millorant els resultats de les correlacions multilineals emprades habitualment. S'ha desenvolupat i avaluat un model per a predir els efectes carcinògens d'un grup de compostos aromàtics a partir de la seva estructura molecular. Els resultats obtinguts desprès d'aplicar el mètode de selecció de variables basat en el SOM milloren els resultats prèviament publicats. Aquest marc de treball s'ha usat també per a proporcionar una nova aproximació al modelat ambiental i l'anàlisi de risc amb sistemes d'informació geogràfica (GIS). S'ha usat el SOM per a caracteritzar escenaris d'exposició i per a desenvolupar un nou mètode d'interpolació geogràfica. La combinació del SOM amb els models de mescla de gaussianes dona una nova formulació al problema de l'anàlisi de risc des d'un punt de vista probabilístic

Cooking with plants in ancient Europe and beyond

Plants have constituted the basis of human subsistence. This volume focuses on plant food ingredients that were consumed by the members of past societies and on the ways these ingredients were transformed into food. The thirty chapters of this book unfold the story of culinary transformation of cereals, pulses as well as of a wide range of wild and cultivated edible plants. Regional syntheses provide insights on plant species choices and changes over time and fragments of recipes locked inside amorphous charred masses. Grinding equipment, cooking installations and cooking pots are used to reveal the ancient cooking steps in order to pull together the pieces of a culinary puzzle of the past. From the big picture of spatiotemporal patterns and changes to the micro-imaging of usewear on grinding tool surfaces, the book attempts for the first time a comprehensive and systematic approach to ancient plant food culinary transformation. Focusing mainly on Europe and the Mediterranean world in prehistory, the book expands to other regions such as South Asia and Latin America and covers a time span from the Palaeolithic to the historic periods. Several of the contributions stem from original research conducted in the context of ERC project PlantCult: Investigating the Plant Food Cultures of Ancient Europe. The book’s exploration into ancient cuisines culminates with an investigation of the significance of ethnoarchaeology towards a better understanding of past foodways as well as of the impact of archaeology in shaping modern culinary and consumer trends. The book will be of interest to archaeologists, food historians, agronomists, botanists as well as the wider public with an interest in ancient cooking

Research on Characterization and Processing of Table Olives

Written by experts in the field of table olives, this book is a source of recent research advances on the characterization and processing of table olives. Research papers are provided relating to the characterization of their composition of volatiles and the sensory profile; mineral composition and bioavailability; changes in bioactive components (chlorophylls) by processing; and new strategies to reduce sodium and additives for stabilizing the organoleptic properties and avoiding defects in table olives. Other research papers are included in relation to microbiological and chemical changes in table olives during spontaneous or controlled fermentation employing different cultivars, and the optimized use of starter cultures for the improvement of the different fermentative processes. In addition, this book includes an overview of the main technologies used for olive fermentation, including the role of lactic acid bacteria and yeasts characterizing this process, and of the processing and storage effects on the nutritional and sensory properties of table olives

Textiles in Ancient Mediterranean Iconography

This volume provides an ambitious synopsis of the complex, colourful world of textiles in ancient Mediterranean iconography. A wealth of information on ancient textiles is available from depictions such as sculpture, vase painting, figurines, reliefs and mosaics. Commonly represented in clothing, textiles are also present in furnishings and through the processes of textile production. The challenge for anyone analysing ancient iconography is determining how we interpret what we see. As preserved textiles rarely survive in comparable forms, we must consider the extent to which representations of textiles reflect reality, and critically evaluate the sources. Images are not simple replicas or photographs of reality. Instead, iconography draws on select elements from the surrounding world that were recognisable to the ancient audience, and reveal the perceptions, ideologies, and ideas of the society in which they were produced. Through examining the durable evidence, this anthology reveals the ephemeral world of textiles and their integral role in the daily life, cult and economy of the ancient Mediterranean