Improving detection probabilities for pests in stored grain

BACKGROUND: The presence of insects in stored grains is a significant problem for grain farmers, bulk grain handlers and distributors worldwide. Inspections of bulk grain commodities is essential to detect pests and therefore to reduce the risk of their presence in exported goods. It has been well documented that insect pests cluster in response to factors such as microclimatic conditions within bulk grain. Statistical sampling methodologies for grains, however, have typically considered pests and pathogens to be homogeneously distributed throughout grain commodities. In this paper we demonstrate a sampling methodology that accounts for the heterogeneous distribution of insects in bulk grains. RESULTS: We show that failure to account for the heterogeneous distribution of pests may lead to overestimates of the capacity for a sampling program to detect insects in bulk grains. Our results indicate the importance of the proportion of grain that is infested in addition to the density of pests within the infested grain. We also demonstrate that the probability of detecting pests in bulk grains increases as the number of sub-samples increases, even when the total volume or mass of grain sampled remains constant. CONCLUSION: This study demonstrates the importance of considering an appropriate biological model when developing sampling methodologies for insect pests. Accounting for a heterogeneous distribution of pests leads to a considerable improvement in the detection of pests over traditional sampling models

SensX: About Sensing and Assessment of Complex Human Motion

The great success of wearables and smartphone apps for provision of extensive physical workout instructions boosts a whole industry dealing with consumer oriented sensors and sports equipment. But with these opportunities there are also new challenges emerging. The unregulated distribution of instructions about ambitious exercises enables unexperienced users to undertake demanding workouts without professional supervision which may lead to suboptimal training success or even serious injuries. We believe, that automated supervision and realtime feedback during a workout may help to solve these issues. Therefore we introduce four fundamental steps for complex human motion assessment and present SensX, a sensor-based architecture for monitoring, recording, and analyzing complex and multi-dimensional motion chains. We provide the results of our preliminary study encompassing 8 different body weight exercises, 20 participants, and more than 9,220 recorded exercise repetitions. Furthermore, insights into SensXs classification capabilities and the impact of specific sensor configurations onto the analysis process are given.Comment: Published within the Proceedings of 14th IEEE International Conference on Networking, Sensing and Control (ICNSC), May 16th-18th, 2017, Calabria Italy 6 pages, 5 figure

Visualizing and Assessing Acceptance Sampling Plans: The R Package AcceptanceSampling

Manufacturers and government agencies frequently use acceptance sampling to decide whether a lot from a supplier or exporting country should be accepted or rejected. International standards on acceptance sampling provide sampling plans for specific circumstances. The aim of this package is to provide an easy-to-use interface to visualize single, double or multiple sampling plans. In addition, methods have been provided to enable the user to assess sampling plans against pre-specified levels of performance, as measured by the probability of acceptance for a given level of quality in the lot

Empirical Support for Fundamental, Factor Models Explaining Major Capital Markets Using Wavelets

Factor models are used to explain asset returns on all major capital markets. We argue that standard econometric analyses implicitly assume that the relationships between prices, spreads, and interest rates and their respective risk factors are time-scale independent. Furthermore, by applying wavelet analysis, we do not have to assume capital market efficiency; in fact, we explicitly allow for inefficiencies such as noise trading, dispersed information, technical, feedback, fundamental, and rational trading to allow for typical characteristics of capital market data. We use wavelet analysis to decompose capital markets’ developments, and the risk factors, using the maximal overlap discrete wavelet transform (MODWT). We proceed by estimating the relationships on a scale-by-scale basis. Our respective empirical analyses for stock and bond markets are summarized and new research is presented with regards to European corporate bonds markets. On stock market, this approach finds more stable relationships between risk factors and price movements. On the bond markets, we find empirical evidence for four significantly evaluated factors. For the European corporate bonds market, the results show that the amount of credit spreads explained by risk factors is in fact high for certain time scales only which is similar to the findings for the other capital markets

Similarity Search for Spatial Trajectories Using Online Lower Bounding DTW and Presorting Strategies

Similarity search with respect to time series has received much attention from research and industry in the last decade. Dynamic time warping is one of the most widely used distance measures in this context. This is due to the simplicity of its definition and the surprising quality of dynamic time warping for time series classification. However, dynamic time warping is not well-behaving with respect to many dimensionality reduction techniques as it does not fulfill the triangle inequality. Additionally, most research on dynamic time warping has been performed with one-dimensional time series or in multivariate cases of varying dimensions. With this paper, we propose three extensions to LB_Rotation for two-dimensional time series (trajectories). We simplify LB_Rotation and adapt it to the online and data streaming case and show how to tune the pruning ratio in similarity search by using presorting strategies based on simple summaries of trajectories. Finally, we provide a thorough valuation of these aspects on a large variety of datasets of spatial trajectories

„WHEN WILL I BECOME A SCHNITZEL? – I HOPE NEVER. ” ECHTE UND FALSCHE FREUNDE DES ÜBERSETZERS IN DER TRANSLATIONSDIDAKTIK

Zjawisko fałszywych przyjaciół tłumacza odnosi się do pary języków i polega na tym, że słowa lub zwroty o podobnym brzmieniu lub podobnej pisowni mają odmienne znaczenie. Uczący się używający fałszywego przyjaciela mogą ośmieszyć się publicznie, tak jak to zilustrowano w tytule artykułu na przykładzie niemiecko-angielskiego kawału. Szczególnie politycy mają złą sławę, jeśli chodzi o stosowanie fałszywych przyjaciół tłumacza nie tylko w języku, np. kiedyś Helmut Kohl, a dziś niemiecki komisarz UE Günther Oettinger. Zjawisko to pojawiło się również w literaturze: przypomnimy sobie próby komunikacji po angielsku komisarza Kluftingersa w kryminałach duetu Klüpfel/Kobr. Użycie fałszywego przyjaciela w tłumaczeniu przynosi wstyd nie tylko politykom, ale także tłumaczom słowa pisanego i żywego. W tradycyjnej dydaktyce uczący się starają się unikać fałszywych przyjaciół jak diabeł święconej wody. Powstają specjalne słowniki poświęcone wyłącznie fałszywym przyjaciołom tłumacza, zaś zadaniem uczących się jest zapamiętanie takich podchwytliwych słów i zwrotów. Dotyczy to przede wszystkim tłumaczy ustnych, ponieważ inaczej niż tłumacze pisemni w swojej praktyce zawodowej nie mają czasu na sprawdzenie, czy w przypadku cisnącego się na usta, analogicznego sformułowania chodzi o fałszywego czy prawdziwego przyjaciela tłumacza, czyli – inaczej mówiąc – czy jest ono dopuszczalne w danym kontekście w języku docelowym. Autorzy niniejszego artykułu, posiadający wieloletnie doświadczenie w roli tłumacza, chcieliby wskazać na przykładzie par języków niemiecki-polski i niemiecki-angielski na niebezpieczeństwa jednostronnej dydaktyki w zakresie fałszywych przyjaciół tłumacza, która może skutkować tym, że uczący się w obawie przed ośmieszeniem nie będą wykorzystywać faktycznych analogii językowych. Ten negatywny wpływ dydaktyki w zakresie fałszywych przyjaciół tłumacza jest szczególnie widoczny w specjalistycznym języku gospodarki i prawa.The phenomenon of false friends of a translator relates to a pair of languages. It occurs when words or phrases that sound or look similar in two languages differ to a significant degree in meaning. Consequently, learners using a false friend make a fool of themselves as it has been illustrated in the title of the article with an English-German joke. Politicians in particular are notorious for using false friends (Helmut Kohl and the German EU commissioner Günther Oettinger might be good examples). This phenomenon appeared in literature as well: for instance attempts at communicating in English by the police officer Kluftingers in crime novels co-written by Klüpfel/Kobr. The use of a false friend shames not only politicians but also translators and interpreters. In traditional foreign language teaching, students are taught to avoid false friends at all costs. There are dictionaries devoted only to false friends and learners are supposed to learn them by heart. Especially interpreters are recommended to do that because, unlike translators, they do not have time while interpreting to check whether a similar word or phrase coming automatically to mind is a false friend or a real one, that is – in other words – whether the word or phrase has the equivalent meaning in the target language. The authors of this article, who have considerable professional experience of translation, would like to point out the dangers of one-sided teaching practice with regard to false friends, taking German and Polish and German and English as examples. Such teaching may discourage learners - for fear of humiliating themselves - from using actual linguistic analogies. This negative impact of the wayDas Phänomen der falschen Freunde des Übersetzers ist sprachenpaarbezogen und beruht darauf, dass ein phonetisch ähnlich wirkendes Wort oder eine analoge Wendung eine oft unterschiedliche Bedeutung besitzt und der Lernende sich durch den Gebrauch eines falschen Freundes öffentlich lächerlich macht, wie im Titel an einem deutsch-englischen Witz veranschaulicht. Insbesondere Politiker sind für ihre falschen Freunde (nicht nur in der Sprache) berüchtigt, früher war es Helmut Kohl, heute der deutsche EU-Kommissar Günther Oettinger. Auch in die Literatur hat das Phänomen Eingang gefunden, wenn wir an die englischen Kommunikationsversuche Kommissar Kluftingers in den Krimis des Allgäuer Autorenduos Klüpfel/Kobr denken. Ein falscher Freund im Translat ist aber nicht nur für Politiker höchstnotpeinlich, sondern gerade auch für Übersetzende und Dolmetschende. In der traditionellen Didaktik haben die Lernenden daher gelernt, die falschen Freunde zu fürchten wie der Teufel das Weihwasser. Es entstehen spezielle Wörterbücher mit falschen Freunden und die Aufgabe der Lernenden ist es, diese verfänglichen Wörter und Wendungen auswendig zu lernen. Das gilt insbesondere für Dolmetscher, denn sie haben anders als Übersetzer in der beruflichen Praxis nicht die Zeit zu überprüfen, ob es sich bei einer sich auf die Lippen drängenden, analogen Formulierung um einen falschen Freund oder einen echten handelt, d.h. um eine im jeweiligen Kontext zulässige und gängige Formulierung in der Zielsprache. Die mit langjähriger Erfahrung als Sprachmittler/In tätigen Autoren möchten am Beispiel des deutsch-polnischen und deutsch-englischen Sprachenpaars auf die Gefahren einer vereinseitigenden Didaktik der falschen Freunde hinweisen, die dazu führen kann, dass Lernende, in der Angst, sich lächerlich zu machen, tatsächliche sprachliche Analogien nicht nutzen. Diese negative Auswirkung der Falsche-Freunde-Didaktik betrifft insbesondere die Fachsprachen Wirtschaft und Recht

Memory Bounded Open-Loop Planning in Large POMDPs using Thompson Sampling

State-of-the-art approaches to partially observable planning like POMCP are based on stochastic tree search. While these approaches are computationally efficient, they may still construct search trees of considerable size, which could limit the performance due to restricted memory resources. In this paper, we propose Partially Observable Stacked Thompson Sampling (POSTS), a memory bounded approach to open-loop planning in large POMDPs, which optimizes a fixed size stack of Thompson Sampling bandits. We empirically evaluate POSTS in four large benchmark problems and compare its performance with different tree-based approaches. We show that POSTS achieves competitive performance compared to tree-based open-loop planning and offers a performance-memory tradeoff, making it suitable for partially observable planning with highly restricted computational and memory resources.Comment: Presented at AAAI 201

Longitudinal study of an Australian pig farm infected with monophasic Salmonella Typhimurium-like PT193 (1,4,[5],12:i:- PT193) using MLVA

An Australian weaner-to-finish pig herd with a history of entrenched Salmonella infection (\u3e10 months in duration) was sampled on 5 occasions over a 15 month period commencing in 2011. On each occasion, either 12 or 18 individual pen faecal samples were collected from pigs between 6 weeks and 22 weeks of age (n=71). From the Salmonella positive samples (n=42), a total of 346 isolates were further processed (up to 10 colony picks per sample). All of the 123 isolates typed were identified as monophasic S. Typhimuriumlike PT193 (mSTm193). Results of antibiotic sensitivity testing found 336 of 346 isolates were resistant to ampicillin, streptomycin, sulphathiozole and tetracycline (ASSuT). In addition, all 346 isolates were examined by MLVA and 13 different closely-related MLVA profiles were identified. Only 2 MLVA profiles persisted throughout the 15 month study. This study is the first report of monophasic S. Typhimurium-like PT193, its persistence and associated clinical disease in an Australian pig herd