Preedicting Seed and Forage Yields of Alfalfa Open Pollinated Progenies

Selecting traits measured in North Central Region nurseries has contributed to agronomically superior cultivars for forage production in the region, but not all of them have the genetic capacity for high seed yield in the western states. Seeds of such cultivars are also more expensive than more prolific cultivars, but both cost efficiency and traits for increased forage and seed yields are desired. That will be possible only if such traits are highly heritable and also are genetically correlated with yield attributes. For those reasons experiments were initiated in 1966 to determine: (a) whether associations between seed production potential and morphological or physiological plant characteristics exist, and (b) if such associations can be used to identify plants with both forage and seed production potentials

The evolution of language: a comparative review

For many years the evolution of language has been seen as a disreputable topic, mired in fanciful "just so stories" about language origins. However, in the last decade a new synthesis of modern linguistics, cognitive neuroscience and neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory has begun to make important contributions to our understanding of the biology and evolution of language. I review some of this recent progress, focusing on the value of the comparative method, which uses data from animal species to draw inferences about language evolution. Discussing speech first, I show how data concerning a wide variety of species, from monkeys to birds, can increase our understanding of the anatomical and neural mechanisms underlying human spoken language, and how bird and whale song provide insights into the ultimate evolutionary function of language. I discuss the ‘‘descended larynx’ ’ of humans, a peculiar adaptation for speech that has received much attention in the past, which despite earlier claims is not uniquely human. Then I will turn to the neural mechanisms underlying spoken language, pointing out the difficulties animals apparently experience in perceiving hierarchical structure in sounds, and stressing the importance of vocal imitation in the evolution of a spoken language. Turning to ultimate function, I suggest that communication among kin (especially between parents and offspring) played a crucial but neglected role in driving language evolution. Finally, I briefly discuss phylogeny, discussing hypotheses that offer plausible routes to human language from a non-linguistic chimp-like ancestor. I conclude that comparative data from living animals will be key to developing a richer, more interdisciplinary understanding of our most distinctively human trait: language

Utilization of globemallow (Sphaeralcea) taxa by sheep

Please contact the NWISRL if you have a copy of this publication

Utilization of globemallow (Sphaeralcea) taxa by sheep

Please contact the NWISRL if you have a copy of this publication

Dependent types for program understanding

Abstract. Weakly-typed languages such as Cobol often force programmers to represent distinct data abstractions using the same low-level physical type. In this paper, we describe a technique to recover implicitlydefined data abstractions from programs using type inference. We present a novel system of dependent types which we call guarded types, a pathsensitive algorithm for inferring guarded types for Cobol programs, and a semantic characterization of correct guarded typings. The results of our inference technique can be used to enhance program understanding for legacy applications, and to enable a number of type-based program transformations.