\u3ci\u3eAgonopterix Alstroemeriana\u3c/i\u3e (Oecophoridae) and Other Lepidopteran Associates of Poison Hemlock \u3ci\u3e(Conium Maculatum)\u3c/i\u3e in East Central Illinois

Poison hemlock (Conium maculatum) (Apiaceae), a noxious Eurasian weed extensively naturalized throughout North America, is characteristically attacked by few insects. Over the past two decades, an introduced oecophorid caterpillar, Agonopterix alstroemeriana, has been reported infesting poison hemlock, its sole host in its area of indigeneity, in parts of the northeastern and western United States. We report for the first time evidence of established midwestern populations of this species. We also report poison hemlock as a host plant for the polyphagous lepidopterans Eupithecia miserulata, Trichoplusia ni, and Spilosoma virginica

A Native Hymenopteran Predator of \u3ci\u3eAgonopterix Alstroemeriana\u3c/i\u3e (Lepidoptera: Oecophoridae) in East-Central Illinois

Agonopterix alstroemeriana is a European oecophorid moth that defoliates poison hemlock (Conium maculatum), a noxious Eurasian weed extensively naturalized throughout temperate Australia, New Zealand, North America, and South America. Throughout western North America, and increasingly in the Midwest and Northeast, A. alstroemeriana has been utilized in poison hemlock eradication programs. We report, for the first time, predation on A. alstroemeriana by Euodynerus foraminatus (Hymenoptera: Eumenidae), a native solitary wasp that paralyzes these and other lepidopteran larvae and uses them to provision its nests. The presence of an effective predator may reduce the impact of A. alstroemeriana in biological control programs

Road Warrior

To say that the monarch butterfly (Danaus plexippus) has fallen upon hard times is something of a colossal understatement. This butterfly\u27s heroic annual migration from its eastern North American summer breeding grounds to a specific spot in the oyamel fit forests of mountainous central Mexico has been systematically monitored since 1995, and during the winter of 2013–2014 the population plummeted to an all-time low; the estimated 35 million butterflies represent a reduction of more than 97% relative to the peak size recorded in 1996. In view of the iconic status of the species, memorably dubbed “the Bambi of the insect world” by Iowa State University entomologist Marlin Rice (Weiss 1999), this dire decline was the motivation behind a petition submitted in August 2014 to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the Secretary of the Interior to list D. plexippus as a threatened species (http://bit.ly/1zS9CjB). The petition is a sad litany of not only the multitudinous natural shocks their flesh is heir to, including an assortment of predators and pathogens, but also a staggering array of unnatural shocks, including “pesticide use from genetically engineered, pesticide-resistant crop systems that kill milkweeds and nectar sources, as well as by development, logging, and climate change.

The Effect of software requirements analysis on project success and product quality

This paper will demonstrate that the general project management principles\u27 regarding requirements analysis also hold true for software development projects. According to conventional project management wisdom, sound requirements analysis and scope definition tends to improve quality planning, thereby reducing project cost and duration, increasing project success and improving the quality of the resulting product. This paper will demonstrate that software development projects tend to challenge this time-proven notion. The paper will also demonstrate that the software development industry pays a high price for these practices by suffering longer project schedules, higher costs and producing poorer quality products by rushing requirements definition and analysis. The practice of unwise attempts to shorten software projects takes away from both the successes of the project and the quality of the resulting product. This demonstration will be accomplished by means of a literature review and an informal survey of various members of the software development industry

Osteoarthritis as an inflammatory disease (osteoarthritis is not osteoarthrosis!)

SummaryOsteoarthritis (OA) has long been considered a “wear and tear” disease leading to loss of cartilage. OA used to be considered the sole consequence of any process leading to increased pressure on one particular joint or fragility of cartilage matrix. Progress in molecular biology in the 1990s has profoundly modified this paradigm. The discovery that many soluble mediators such as cytokines or prostaglandins can increase the production of matrix metalloproteinases by chondrocytes led to the first steps of an “inflammatory” theory. However, it took a decade before synovitis was accepted as a critical feature of OA, and some studies are now opening the way to consider the condition a driver of the OA process. Recent experimental data have shown that subchondral bone may have a substantial role in the OA process, as a mechanical damper, as well as a source of inflammatory mediators implicated in the OA pain process and in the degradation of the deep layer of cartilage. Thus, initially considered cartilage driven, OA is a much more complex disease with inflammatory mediators released by cartilage, bone and synovium. Low-grade inflammation induced by the metabolic syndrome, innate immunity and inflammaging are some of the more recent arguments in favor of the inflammatory theory of OA and highlighted in this review

Experimental study of performance of minimum spanning tree algorithms

Throughout the study of various theories of algorithms much work has been done in the area of traversal and solving optimization problems on graphs. Some of this work includes studies of finding the Minimal-Cost Spanning Trees (MST) in directed and undirected connected graphs. Several algorithms have been developed for such task. These algorithms tend to differ in performance based on various factors, such as graph density, size of problem spaces, range of weights that can be assigned to the edges of the graphs, edge weight distributions, etc. The data structures used by an algorithm can have a significant impact on algorithm\u27s performance, for each of the aforementioned factors. This thesis presents the results of the experimental study of the impact the data structures have on performances of Kruskal\u27s and Prim\u27s algorithms for finding Minimum-Cost Spanning Trees in connected undirected graphs. The goal of this study is to compare performance of the practical implementations of Kruskal\u27s and Prim\u27s algorithms to their theoretical counterparts, as well as to measure and compare the differences in performances for various implementations of one algorithm, with respect to different implementation of the essential data structures. Performances of different algorithms are studied with respect to each-other for several variations of the types of data. As a result, a table depicting a schedule for use of the various implementations of either of the algorithms, as related to the type of graph used, is presented. The algorithms are implemented and executed on a single Sun UltraSparc workstation, in order to eliminate the discrepancies, which may result from the differences in the processor speeds and variable CPU loads on multiple test machines. The following implementations are studied: Kruskal\u27s Algorithm with heapsort, and disjoint-sets using union-by-rank and path-compression heuristic Kruskal\u27s Algorithm with counting sort and disjoint-sets using union-by-rank and path-compression heuristic Prim\u27s Algorithm with brute force implementation of priority queues Prim\u27s Algorithm with priority queue implemented using a proper implementation of binary heap with bubble-up performed each time a decrease-key operation is performed for a vertex Prim\u27s Algorithm with priority queue implemented using a lazy implementation of binary heap with bubble-up performed after all decrease-key operations are performed for a vertex Prim\u27s Algorithm with priority queue implemented using a binomial heap Prim\u27s Algorithm with priority queue implemented using a Fibonacci heap Upon the conclusion of the experiment, the best results were obtained from the implementation of Prim\u27s algorithm using the lazy heap implementation of a priority queue. For sparse graphs, Kruskal\u27s algorithm with counting sort performed very well, while for higher density graphs, Prim\u27s algorithm with binomial heap performed very well