Effects of Insecticides on Pest Populations and Their Natural Enemies in Soybean Field

In the 5-time field experiments and broad demonstrations, effects of volume and application formulae of several pesticides on the population densities of major inset pests and natural enemies in the soybean field were determined. Results from the Ducan’s multiple range test indicated that 300 g/ha of Omethoate (fine granule) and 45 g/ha of Fenvalerate in the seedling stage and 300 g/ha of Chloromethiuron suspensoid in the flowering stage may control pests and protect major natural enemies. Application of these pesticides in the corresponding soybean stages is an effective way that mediates the conflict between chemical and biological controls in the field. There are over 170 species of natural enemies whose hosts are known in the soybean field in China. These natural enemies play important roles in controlling the soybean pests. However, farmers still strongly rely on chemicals to control these pests because natural enemies are not able to timely curb the pest infestations when there is a pest outbreak. Frequent chemical application in a higher volume will ruin the ecological balance. The conflict between biological and chemical controls has become a hot issue in the soybean production worldwide. Our objectives in this study are to decide the effective low concentrations of commonly used pesticides, determine the effect of the third and fourth generations of pesticides on the major insect pests and natural enemies in the soybean field and propose feasible control methods by coordinating control and chemical controls.Originating text in Chinese.Citation: Qi, Yaoxun, Ma, Zhengquan, Shan, De'An, Gao, Xiaohua, Wang, Qisheng. (1987). Effects of Insecticides on Pest Populations and Their Natural Enemies in Soybean Field. Plant Protection (Institute of Plant Protection, CAAS, China), 13, 4-6

The First Principle in Late Neoplatonism: A Study of the One's Causality in Proclus and Damascius

One of the main issues that dominates Neoplatonism in late antique philosophy of the 3rd–6th centuries A.D. is the nature of the first principle, called the ‘One’. From Plotinus onward, the principle is characterized as the cause of all things, since it produces the plurality of intelligible Forms, which in turn constitute the world’s rational and material structure. Given this, the tension that faces Neoplatonists is that the One, as the first cause, must transcend all things that are characterized by plurality—yet because it causes plurality, the One must anticipate plurality within itself. This becomes the main mo- tivation for this study’s focus on two late Neoplatonists, Proclus (5th cent. A.D.) and Damascius (late 5th–early 6th cent. A.D.): both attempt to address this tension in two rather different ways. Proclus’ attempted solution is to posit intermediate principles (the ‘henads’) that mirror the One’s nature, as ‘one’, but directly cause plurality. This makes the One only a cause of unity, while its production of plurality is mediated by the henads that it produces. Damascius, while appropriating Proclus’ framework, thinks that this is not enough: if the One is posed as a cause of all things, it must be directly related to plurality, even if its causality is mediated through the henads. Damascius then splits Proclus’ One into two entities: (1) the Ineffable as the first ‘principle’, which is absolutely transcendent and has no causal relation; and (2) the One as the first ‘cause’ of all things, which is only relatively transcendent under the Ineffable. Previous studies that compare Proclus and Damascius tend to focus either on the Ineffable or a skeptical shift in epistemology, but little work has been done on the causal framework which underlies both figures’ positions. Thus, this study proposes to focus on the causal frameworks behind each figure: why and how does Proclus propose to assert that the One is a cause, at the same time that it transcends its final effect? And what leads Damascius to propose a notion of the One’s causality that no longer makes it transcendent in the way that a higher principle, like the Ineffable, is? The present work will answer these questions in two parts. In the first, Proclus’ and Damascius’ notions of causality will be examined, insofar as they apply to all levels of being. In the second part, the One’s causality will be examined for both figures: for Proclus, the One’s causality in itself and the causality of its intermediate principles; for Damascius, the One’s causality, and how the Ineffable is needed to explain the One. The outcome of this study will show that Proclus’ framework results in an inner tension that Damascius is responding to with his notion of the One. While Damascius’ own solution implies its own tension, he at least solves a difficulty in Proclus—and in so doing, partially returns to a notion of the One much like Iamblichus’ and Plotinus’ One

Two-timeslot two-way full-duplex relaying for 5G wireless communication networks

We propose a novel two-timeslot two-way full-duplex (FD) relaying scheme, in which the access link and the backhaul link are divided in the time domain, and we study the average end-to-end rate and the outage performance. According to the user equipment capability and services, we investigate two scenarios: three-node I- and four-node Y-relaying channels. Among various relaying protocols, the well-known amplify-and-forward and decode-and-forward are considered. Closed-form expressions for the average end-to-end rate and the outage probability, under the effect of residual self-interference and inter-user interference, are presented. The results show that the proposed two-timeslot two-way FD relaying scheme can achieve higher rate and better outage performance than the half-duplex one, when residual self-interference is below a certain level. Therefore, this relaying scheme presents a reasonable tradeoff between performance and complexity, and so, it could be efficiently used in the fifth-generation wireless networks

Resonance Rayleigh Scattering Spectra of an Ion-Association Complex of Naphthol Green B–Chitosan System and Its Application in the Highly Sensitive Determination of Chitosan

This work describes a highly-sensitive and accurate approach for the determination of chitosan (CTS) using Naphthol Green B (NGB) as a probe in the Resonance Rayleigh scattering (RRS) method. The interaction between CTS and NGB leads to notable enhancement of RRS, and the enhancement is proportional to the concentration of CTS over a certain range. Under optimum conditions, the calibration curve of ΔI against CTS concentration was ΔI = 1860.5c + 86.125 (c, µg/mL), R2 = 0.9999, and the linear range and detection limit (DL) were 0.01–5.5 µg/mL and 8.87 ng/mL. Moreover, the effect of the molecular weight of CTS on the accurate quantification of CTS was studied. The experimental data were analyzed through linear regression analysis using SPSS20.0, and the molecular weight was found to have no statistical significance. This method has been applied to assay two CTS samples and obtained good recovery and reproducibility

Class-Wise Fully Convolutional Network for Semantic Segmentation of Remote Sensing Images

Semantic segmentation is a fundamental task in remote sensing image interpretation, which aims to assign a semantic label for every pixel in the given image. Accurate semantic segmentation is still challenging due to the complex distributions of various ground objects. With the development of deep learning, a series of segmentation networks represented by fully convolutional network (FCN) has made remarkable progress on this problem, but the segmentation accuracy is still far from expectations. This paper focuses on the importance of class-specific features of different land cover objects, and presents a novel end-to-end class-wise processing framework for segmentation. The proposed class-wise FCN (C-FCN) is shaped in the form of an encoder-decoder structure with skip-connections, in which the encoder is shared to produce general features for all categories and the decoder is class-wise to process class-specific features. To be detailed, class-wise transition (CT), class-wise up-sampling (CU), class-wise supervision (CS), and class-wise classification (CC) modules are designed to achieve the class-wise transfer, recover the resolution of class-wise feature maps, bridge the encoder and modified decoder, and implement class-wise classifications, respectively. Class-wise and group convolutions are adopted in the architecture with regard to the control of parameter numbers. The method is tested on the public ISPRS 2D semantic labeling benchmark datasets. Experimental results show that the proposed C-FCN significantly improves the segmentation performances compared with many state-of-the-art FCN-based networks, revealing its potentials on accurate segmentation of complex remote sensing images

Full-duplex two-way and one-way relaying:average rate, outage probability, and tradeoffs

In this paper, we systematically study the average rate and outage probability tradeoffs of full-duplex two-way and one-way relaying under residual self-interference. Among various relaying protocols, two common of them are considered: amplify-and-forward (AF) and decode-and-forward (DF). Furthermore, we consider the application of physical-layer network coding (PNC) and analog network coding (ANC) to full-duplex two-way relaying. Novel closed-form expressions for the average rate and outage probability, are presented. The results show that full-duplex two-way relaying can achieve higher rate than one-way relaying in the medium to high signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) region, at the cost of a certain loss in the outage performance. Moreover, DF protocol can achieve better outage performance than the AF one, but it suffers from a certain loss in the rate in the high SNR region. It is also shown that PNC can further improve the rate and outage performance. In addition, the results clearly reveal the effects of time multiplexing, forward protocol, and network coding on relaying systems, which would shed light on designing practical full-duplex relaying schemes