Oribatid assemblies of tropical high mountains on some points of the “Gondwana-Bridge” – a case study

This work is the first part of a series of studies, which introduces the methodological possibilities of coenological and zoogeographical indication and – following the climate, vegetation and elevation zones – the pattern-describing analysis of the main Oribatid sinusia of the world explored till our days.This current work is a case-study, which displays the comparison of 9 examination sites from 3 different geographical locations. On each location, three vegetation types have been examined: a plain rain-forest, a mossforest and a mountainous paramo. Analyses are based on the hitherto non-published genus-level database and coenological tables of the deceased János Balogh professor. Occurrence of 18 genera is going to be published as new data for the given zoogeographical region

Bootstrapping Monte Carlo Tree Search with an Imperfect Heuristic

We consider the problem of using a heuristic policy to improve the value approximation by the Upper Confidence Bound applied in Trees (UCT) algorithm in non-adversarial settings such as planning with large-state space Markov Decision Processes. Current improvements to UCT focus on either changing the action selection formula at the internal nodes or the rollout policy at the leaf nodes of the search tree. In this work, we propose to add an auxiliary arm to each of the internal nodes, and always use the heuristic policy to roll out simulations at the auxiliary arms. The method aims to get fast convergence to optimal values at states where the heuristic policy is optimal, while retaining similar approximation as the original UCT in other states. We show that bootstrapping with the proposed method in the new algorithm, UCT-Aux, performs better compared to the original UCT algorithm and its variants in two benchmark experiment settings. We also examine conditions under which UCT-Aux works well.Comment: 16 pages, accepted for presentation at ECML'1

Effect of black caarbon on the growth, development and evapotranspriration of maize

Abstract. The effect of soot on certain parameters of maize was analysed. We applied low rates of soot (3 gm–2week–1) with a motorised sprayer. The effect of soot on evapotranspiration was tested on plants grown in evapotranspirometer (ET). Soot pollution had no influence on maize growth and development. Leaf withering after full maturity, however, was delayed by the presence of soot. The ability of soot to absorb irradiation and thus increase leaf surface temperatures led to an increase of 4% in the annual evapotranspiration sum. Soot pollution reduced dry matter (DM) on the rainfed plots (8.8 %), but not in the ET tanks. In the ET tanks, soot had no significant influence on either the stalk or the grain DM, though slight reductions were recorded. On the non-irrigated plot there was 12.4 % reduction in grain dry matter in response to pollution. Supplementary water supplies mitigated the plant damage caused by soot. A further advantage was detected in the number of deformed ears

A Neural Networks Committee for the Contextual Bandit Problem

This paper presents a new contextual bandit algorithm, NeuralBandit, which does not need hypothesis on stationarity of contexts and rewards. Several neural networks are trained to modelize the value of rewards knowing the context. Two variants, based on multi-experts approach, are proposed to choose online the parameters of multi-layer perceptrons. The proposed algorithms are successfully tested on a large dataset with and without stationarity of rewards.Comment: 21st International Conference on Neural Information Processin

Accuracy of Estimating Highly Eccentric Binary Black Hole Parameters with Gravitational-wave Detections

Mergers of stellar-mass black holes on highly eccentric orbits are among the targets for ground-based gravitational-wave detectors, including LIGO, VIRGO, and KAGRA. These sources may commonly form through gravitational-wave emission in high-velocity dispersion systems or through the secular Kozai-Lidov mechanism in triple systems. Gravitational waves carry information about the binaries' orbital parameters and source location. Using the Fisher matrix technique, we determine the measurement accuracy with which the LIGO-VIRGO-KAGRA network could measure the source parameters of eccentric binaries using a matched filtering search of the repeated burst and eccentric inspiral phases of the waveform. We account for general relativistic precession and the evolution of the orbital eccentricity and frequency during the inspiral. We find that the signal-to-noise ratio and the parameter measurement accuracy may be significantly higher for eccentric sources than for circular sources. This increase is sensitive to the initial pericenter distance, the initial eccentricity, and the component masses. For instance, compared to a 30 M-circle dot-30 M-circle dot non-spinning circular binary, the chirp mass and sky-localization accuracy can improve by a factor of similar to 129 (38) and similar to 2 (11) for an initially highly eccentric binary assuming an initial pericenter distance of 20M(tot) (10M(tot))

Genetic diversity among twelve grape cultivars indigenous to the Carpathian Basin revealed by RAPD markers

Twelve cultivars (Vitis vinifera L.) were subjected to RAPD analysis in order to estimate the genetic diversity among these genotypes and to analyse their genetic relationships. The study was performed using 28 primers that generated 120 polymorphic fragments. There was genetic variation among the cultivars with values of genetic diversity ranging from 0.419 to 0.642 using the Jaccard coefficient. UPGMA analysis of distance matrix resulted in a dendrogram with three clusters. The dendrogram shows that the cultivars of our study can be distinguished to a relatively high degree. Results were compared with the taxonomic classification and with the synonyms of the cultivars. The RAPD technique was useful for identification and discrimination of these grape cultivars

Effect of Long-Term Cycling Load for Abutment Screw Fixation in Implant Prosthodontics

The aim of this in vitro study was to use rotational tests on commercially available abutment screws to evaluate their potential for preload generation and to follow changes in torque by using newer fixation geometry on the interface of the implant-abutment screw joint. Five identical implant/abutment assemblies were chosen from each of the following systems: external hex with standard abutment and Replace with TorgTite screw (Nobel Biocare), Camlog universal abutment (Altatec Biotechnologies), DenTi internal hex (Dentimplant Ltd. Szentes, Hungary), straight abutment with internal antirotational element (Uniplant, Sinalisal, Budapest). Wax patterns of the upper premolar were performed and then cast from nickel-chrome alloy and full crown castings were cemented on abutments. In a test machine the magnitude and time of chewing function was predefined by using the desired force pattern. Each specimen was stressed for cycles equivalent to an intaoral load of 5 months or longer timescale. In the static test greater loss in torques was calculated for standard Branemark and Replace screw joints. Assuming that the optimum proportion is the same when we calculate loosening versus tightening torque we obtained a decrease between 0.70-0.59 for Replace and Branemark abutments and a more moderate loss of between 0.90-0.84 for the other systems investigated. The ten month equivalent cycling test produced a loosening torque of 16-17 Ncm for Branemark and Replace abutments. Similar decrease in torque was not found for the other three systems. It was concluded that different approach in achievement of necessary mechanical integration can be seen in implant systems, although a reliable loosening torque could be measured after a longer time scale