Biological control in the Maltese Islands - past initiatives and future programmes

Past records of introduced predators and parasites for biological control programmes in the Maltese Islands are reviewed. Literature on this subject is very limited, difficult to obtain and to confirm. During the last 10 years, several exotic pest species were accidentally introduced into the Maltese Islands, including Aleurothrixus floccosus, Bemisia tabaci, Liriomyza spp., Frankliniella occidentalis and Phyllocnistis citrella. Natural enemies have been imported to control these pests. These include Dacnusa sibirica and Diglyphus isaea for the control of leafminers; Encarsia formosa, Eretmocerus califomicus and Macrolophus caliginosus for regulation of Bemisia tabaci; Cales noacki against Aleurothrixus floccosus; Orius laevigatus, o. insidiosus and Neoseiulus cucumeris against thrips; Aphidius colemani and Aphidoletes aphidimyza for the control of glasshouse aphids and Phytoseiulus persimilis and Amblyseius califomicus for the control of the red spider mite. Encarsia lutea and Eretmocerus mundus have been recorded from Bemisia tabaci in Malta. Faunistic studies of parasitic Hymenoptera occurring in Malta are currently being carried out. The data is presented and the significance of utilizing local natural enemies is briefly discussed.peer-reviewe

Report on the California Coastal Commission

Submitted to the Senate Rules Committee

Report on the California Coastal Commission

Submitted to the Senate Rules Committee

The State\u27s Regulation of Financial Institutions

Submitted to the Senate Rules Committee pursuant to SR 40 (1984)

バクテリアのべん毛フックの長さ制御に関する研究

博甲第20号生命システム科学博士県立広島大

Advances in global measles control and elimination: summary of the 1997 International Meeting

A meeting concerning advances in measles control and elimination, the third in a series, was held in Atlanta during August 1997. The meeting was cosponsored by CDC, the Pan American Health Organization, the World Health Organization, and the United Nations Children's Fund. Meeting participants concluded that substantial progress has been made toward controlling measles. Measles transmission has been interrupted in several countries, reinforcing the view that measles eradication is technically feasible using existing vaccines and intervention strategies. However, measles still accounts for 10% of global mortality from all causes among children aged <5 years (i.e., approximately 1 million deaths annually). Progress toward measles control varies substantially among countries and regions. Intensified efforts are necessary to implement appropriate control and elimination strategies, including supplementary vaccination campaigns, expansion of routine vaccination services, and surveillance. These strategies and estimates of the resources required to implement them will require adjustment based on accumulating experience. Programmatic and financial obstacles must be overcome if the final goal of measles eradication is to be achieved.Meeting participants -- Introduction -- Global experience with measles control -- Measles surveillance -- Vaccine safety -- Research -- Economic implications of measles elimination -- Next steps -- ReferenceJuly 24, 1998Summary of the 3rd Meeting on Advances in Measles Control and Elimination, held in Atlanta from August 27-29, 1997.Staff members of the following organizations prepared this report: Expanded Programme on Immunization, World Health Organization; Special Program for Vaccines and Immunization, Pan American Health Organization; National Immunization Program, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; Task Force for Child Survival and DevelopmentIncludes bibliographical references

Annex to report on Soviet interest in arms control and disarmament

"February 1, 1965.""1559"--handwritten on coverIncludes bibliographical reference

Multilayer perceptron functional adaptive control for trajectory tracking of wheeled mobile robots

Sigmoidal multilayer perceptron neural networks are proposed to effect functional adaptive control for handling the trajectory tracking problem in a nonholonomic wheeled mobile robot. The scheme is developed in discrete time and the multilayer perceptron neural networks are used for the estimation of the robot’s nonlinear kinematic functions, which are assumed to be unknown. On-line weight tuning is achieved by employing the extended Kalman filter algorithm based on a specifically formulated multiple-input, multiple-output, stochastic model for the trajectory error dynamics of the mobile base. The estimated functions are then used on a certainty equivalence basis in the control law proposed in (Corradini et al., 2003) for trajectory tracking. The performance of the system is analyzed and compared by simulation.peer-reviewe

A generative traversability model for monocular robot self-guidance

The research work disclosed in this publication is partially funded by the Strategic Educational Pathways Scholarship (Malta). The scholarship is part-financed by the European Union - European Social Fund (ESF) under the Operational Programme II - Cohesion Policy 2007-2013, Empowering People for More Jobs and a Better Quality of Life.In order for robots to be integrated into human active spaces and perform useful tasks, they must be capable of discriminating between traversable surfaces and obstacle regions in their surrounding environment. In this work, a principled semi-supervised (EM) framework is presented for the detection of traversable image regions for use on a low-cost monocular mobile robot. We propose a novel generative model for the occurrence of traversability cues, which are a measure of dissimilarity between safe-window and image superpixel features. Our classification results on both indoor and outdoor images sequences demonstrate its generality and adaptability to multiple environments through the online learning of an exponential mixture model. We show that this appearance-based vision framework is robust and can quickly and accurately estimate the probabilistic traversability of an image using no temporal information. Moreover, the reduction in safe-window size as compared to the state-of-the-art enables a self-guided monocular robot to roam in closer proximity of obstacles.peer-reviewe