559 research outputs found
USING HYDROGEOPHYSICS & XRF TO PRODUCE A HIGH-RESOLUTION 3-DIMENSIONAL SOIL CADMIUM MAP FOR EVALUATING HYBRID WHEAT TRIALS
Cadmium (Cd) accumulation in wheat decreases germination, growth, grain yield, and in higher concentration leads to adverse effects on human health (Liu et al, 2018). Due to wheat cultivars variation in Cd accumulation, wheat breeders aim to select those at low Cd concentration lines in a field. Hence the need to quantify the concentration of Cd at different parts of a field and visually represent on a high resolution Cd distribution map. Various ways to quantify the concentration of soil Cd exist. However, the cost of equipment required make the process quite expensive and labor intensive. This work studied the feasibility of predicting the concentration of Cd and other soil chemical elements based on readily available environmental covariates collected at the site. These are electrical conductivity in shallow and deep zones (ECaS, ECaD), total gamma counts and elevation. Soil samples were collected from Havelock farm, analyzed in the lab and then results were used to train and test different statistical models to predict the occurrence of chemical elements in the soil.
Showed statistical correlation between Geo-covariates and some soil element data (i.e. Zn & Fe) providing proof-of-concept for technique and warranting further investigation • At Havelock Cd was below level of detection • Adding VNIR to Geo-covariates improves prediction accuracy in nonlinear statistical model
Future-proofing hydrogeology by revising groundwater monitoring practice
Groundwater is an important global resource and its sustainable use faces major challenges. New methods and advances in computational science could lead to much improved understanding of groundwater processes and subsurface properties. A closer look at current groundwater monitoring practice reveals the need for updates with a special focus on the benefits of high-frequency and high-resolution datasets. To future-proof hydrogeology, this paper raises awareness about the necessity for improvement, provides initial recommendations and advocates for the development of universal guide-lines
Isotropy of the velocity of light and the Sagnac effect
In this paper, it is shown, using a geometrical approach, the isotropy of the
velocity of light measured in a rotating frame in Minkowski space-time, and it
is verified that this result is compatible with the Sagnac effect. Furthermore,
we find that this problem can be reduced to the solution of geodesic triangles
in a Minkowskian cylinder. A relationship between the problems established on
the cylinder and on the Minkowskian plane is obtained through a local isometry.Comment: LaTeX, 13 pages, 3 eps figures; typos corrected, added references,
minor changes; to appear in "Relativity in Rotating Frames", ed. G. Rizzi G.
and M.L. Ruggiero, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht (2003
Binary Tree Approach to Scaling in Unimodal Maps
Ge, Rusjan, and Zweifel (J. Stat. Phys. 59, 1265 (1990)) introduced a binary
tree which represents all the periodic windows in the chaotic regime of
iterated one-dimensional unimodal maps. We consider the scaling behavior in a
modified tree which takes into account the self-similarity of the window
structure. A non-universal geometric convergence of the associated superstable
parameter values towards a Misiurewicz point is observed for almost all binary
sequences with periodic tails. There are an infinite number of exceptional
sequences, however, which lead to superexponential scaling. The origin of such
sequences is explained.Comment: 25 pages, plain Te
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Ecological theatre and the evolutionary game: how environmental and demographic factors determine payoffs in evolutionary games
In the standard approach to evolutionary games and replicator dynamics, differences in fitness can be interpreted as an excess from the mean Malthusian growth rate in the population. In the underlying reasoning, related to an analysis of "costs" and "benefits", there is a silent assumption that fitness can be described in some type of units. However, in most cases these units of measure are not explicitly specified. Then the question arises: are these theories testable? How can we measure "benefit" or "cost"? A natural language, useful for describing and justifying comparisons of strategic "cost" versus "benefits", is the terminology of demography, because the basic events that shape the outcome of natural selection are births and deaths. In this paper, we present the consequences of an explicit analysis of births and deaths in an evolutionary game theoretic framework. We will investigate different types of mortality pressures, their combinations and the possibility of trade-offs between mortality and fertility. We will show that within this new approach it is possible to model how strictly ecological factors such as density dependence and additive background fitness, which seem neutral in classical theory, can affect the outcomes of the game. We consider the example of the Hawk-Dove game, and show that when reformulated in terms of our new approach new details and new biological predictions are produced
Competing biosecurity and risk rationalities in the Chittagong poultry commodity chain, Bangladesh
This paper anthropologically explores how key actors in the Chittagong live bird trading network perceive biosecurity and risk in relation to avian influenza between production sites, market maker scenes and outlets. They pay attention to the past and the present, rather than the future, downplaying the need for strict risk management, as outbreaks have not been reported frequently for a number of years. This is analysed as ‘temporalities of risk perception regarding biosecurity’, through Black Swan theory, the idea that unexpected events with major effects are often inappropriately rationalized (Taleb in The Black Swan. The impact of the highly improbable, Random House, New York, 2007). This incorporates a sociocultural perspective on risk, emphasizing the contexts in which risk is understood, lived, embodied and experienced. Their risk calculation is explained in terms of social consent, practical intelligibility and convergence of constraints and motivation. The pragmatic and practical orientation towards risk stands in contrast to how risk is calculated in the avian influenza preparedness paradigm. It is argued that disease risk on the ground has become a normalized part of everyday business, as implied in Black Swan theory. Risk which is calculated retrospectively is unlikely to encourage investment in biosecurity and, thereby, points to the danger of unpredictable outlier events
The relativistic Sagnac Effect: two derivations
The phase shift due to the Sagnac Effect, for relativistic matter and
electromagnetic beams, counter-propagating in a rotating interferometer, is
deduced using two different approaches. From one hand, we show that the
relativistic law of velocity addition leads to the well known Sagnac time
difference, which is the same independently of the physical nature of the
interfering beams, evidencing in this way the universality of the effect.
Another derivation is based on a formal analogy with the phase shift induced by
the magnetic potential for charged particles travelling in a region where a
constant vector potential is present: this is the so called Aharonov-Bohm
effect. Both derivations are carried out in a fully relativistic context, using
a suitable 1+3 splitting that allows us to recognize and define the space where
electromagnetic and matter waves propagate: this is an extended 3-space, which
we call "relative space". It is recognized as the only space having an actual
physical meaning from an operational point of view, and it is identified as the
'physical space of the rotating platform': the geometry of this space turns out
to be non Euclidean, according to Einstein's early intuition.Comment: 49 pages, LaTeX, 3 EPS figures. Revised (final) version, minor
corrections; to appear in "Relativity in Rotating Frames", ed. G. Rizzi and
M.L. Ruggiero, Kluwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht, (2003). See also
http://digilander.libero.it/solciclo
Evolutionary connectionism: algorithmic principles underlying the evolution of biological organisation in evo-devo, evo-eco and evolutionary transitions
The mechanisms of variation, selection and inheritance, on which evolution by natural selection depends, are not fixed over evolutionary time. Current evolutionary biology is increasingly focussed on understanding how the evolution of developmental organisations modifies the distribution of phenotypic variation, the evolution of ecological relationships modifies the selective environment, and the evolution of reproductive relationships modifies the heritability of the evolutionary unit. The major transitions in evolution, in particular, involve radical changes in developmental, ecological and reproductive organisations that instantiate variation, selection and inheritance at a higher level of biological organisation. However, current evolutionary theory is poorly equipped to describe how these organisations change over evolutionary time and especially how that results in adaptive complexes at successive scales of organisation (the key problem is that evolution is self-referential, i.e. the products of evolution change the parameters of the evolutionary process). Here we first reinterpret the central open questions in these domains from a perspective that emphasises the common underlying themes. We then synthesise the findings from a developing body of work that is building a new theoretical approach to these questions by converting well-understood theory and results from models of cognitive learning. Specifically, connectionist models of memory and learning demonstrate how simple incremental mechanisms, adjusting the relationships between individually-simple components, can produce organisations that exhibit complex system-level behaviours and improve the adaptive capabilities of the system. We use the term “evolutionary connectionism” to recognise that, by functionally equivalent processes, natural selection acting on the relationships within and between evolutionary entities can result in organisations that produce complex system-level behaviours in evolutionary systems and modify the adaptive capabilities of natural selection over time. We review the evidence supporting the functional equivalences between the domains of learning and of evolution, and discuss the potential for this to resolve conceptual problems in our understanding of the evolution of developmental, ecological and reproductive organisations and, in particular, the major evolutionary transitions
Future-proofing hydrogeology by revising groundwater monitoring practice
Groundwater is an important global resource and its sustainable use faces major challenges. New methods and advances in computational science could lead to much improved understanding of groundwater processes and subsurface properties. A closer look at current groundwater monitoring practice reveals the need for updates with a special focus on the benefits of high-frequency and high-resolution datasets. To future-proof hydrogeology, this technical note raises awareness about the necessity for improvement, provides initial recommendations and advocates for the development of universal guidelines
Hepatitis C virus-specific cellular immune responses in individuals with no evidence of infection
The detection of hepatitis C virus (HCV)-specific T cell responses in HCV-uninfected, presumably unexposed, subjects could be due to an underestimation of the frequency of spontaneously resolving infections, as most acute HCV infections are clinically silent. To address this hypothesis, HCV-specific cellular immune responses were characterized, in individuals negative for an HCV PCR assay and humoral response, with (n = 32) or without (n = 33) risk of exposure to HCV. Uninfected volunteers (n = 20) with a chronically HCV-infected partner were included as positive controls for potential exposure to HCV and HCV infection, respectively. HCV-specific T cell responses in freshly isolated peripheral blood mononuclear cells were studied ex vivo by ELISPOT and CFSE-based proliferation assays using panels of HCV Core and NS3-derived peptides. A pool of unrelated peptides was used as a negative control, and a peptide mix of human cytomegalovirus, Epstein-Bar virus and Influenza virus as a positive control. Overall, 20% of presumably HCV-uninfected subject tested had detectable T-cell responses to the virus, a rate much higher than previous estimates of HCV prevalence in developed countries. This result would be consistent with unapparent primary HCV infections that either cleared spontaneously or remained undetected by conventional serological assays
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