Wycinanki: Production of a Non-Photorealistic Rendered Short Film

Animals have traditionally occupied a special role in human culture and media, and are also often the focus of today\u27s computer-animated films. The computer graphics (CG) short, Wycinanki, examines the human-animal bond through the story of a woman who rescues animals in Poland. Additionally, Wycinanki draws on the cultural history of its protagonist with its unique paper-cut render style. The goal of this film is to engage viewers and enhance the staying power of the film\u27s message via a compelling story and visuals. A significant amount of environment and character development and testing was necessary to translate the 2D art of papercutting into an effective animated CG short. The final render pipeline, while incorporating varying graphics programs and approaches, resulted in efficient renders and composites that satisfied the visual demands of the story

Architecture and consequent physiological properties of the semitendinosus muscle in domestic goats

Morphological and physiological analyses confirm that the semitendinosus muscle of goats contains two separate compartments in series, each with distinct innervation. These compartments of the muscle are in turn composed of short fibers (approximately four fibers in series in the proximal compartment and seven to eight fibers in the distal compartment) which overlap each other for more than 30% of their length, with much of the overlapping portions consisting of slender tails that terminate at one-tenth of the midfiber diameter. Groups of fibers are associated into relatively narrow bands that run end-to-end in each compartment. The data suggest that the maximum length of muscle fibers may be limited; even the fibers of parallelfibered muscles may not scale with the dimension of the animal.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/50284/1/1051990305_ftp.pd

Male spotted bowerbirds propagate fruit for use in their sexual display

Cultivation may be described as a process of co-evolution and niche construction, with two species developing a mutualistic relationship through association, leading to coordinated change [1]. Cultivation is rare but taxonomically widespread, benefiting the cultivator, usually through increased access to food, and the cultivar, by improved growth and protection, driving co-evolutionary changes (Supplemental information). Humans cultivate more than food, producing clothing, construction materials, fuel, drugs, and ornaments. A population of male spotted bowerbirds Ptilonorhynchus (Chlamydera) maculata uses fruits of Solanum ellipticum (Figure 1A), not as food but as important components of their sexual display [2,3]. Here, we show that males indirectly cultivate plants bearing these fruit - the first example of cultivation of a non-food item by a species other than humans. Plants appear at bowers following male occupation (Figure 1B). Males benefit, exhibiting more fruit at their bowers. Plants benefit because fruit are deposited in better germination sites. Fruits from plants near bowers differ visually from those far from bowers, and look more similar to fruits that are preferred by males in choice tests

Geographic mosaics and changing rates of cereal domestication

Domestication is the process by which plants or animals evolved to fit a human-managed environment, and it is marked by innovations in plant morphology and anatomy that are in turn correlated with new human behaviours and technologies for harvesting, storage and field preparation. Archaeobotanical evidence has revealed that domestication was a protracted process taking thousands of plant generations. Within this protracted process there were changes in the selection pressures for domestication traits as well as variation across a geographic mosaic of wild and cultivated populations. Quantitative data allow us to estimate the changing selection coefficients for the evolution of non-shattering (domestic-type seed dispersal) in Asian rice (Oryza sativa L.), barley (Hordeum vulgare L.), emmer wheat (Triticum dicoccon (Shrank) Schübl.) and einkorn wheat (Triticum monococcum L.). These data indicate that selection coefficients tended to be low, but also that there were inflection points at which selection increased considerably. For rice, selection coefficients of the order of 0.001 prior to 5500 BC shifted to greater than 0.003 between 5000 and 4500 BC, before falling again as the domestication process ended 4000–3500 BC. In barley and the two wheats selection was strongest between 8500 and 7500 BC. The slow start of domestication may indicate that initial selection began in the Pleistocene glacial era

SDIoT: A Software Defined based Internet of Things framework

The internet of things (IoT) represent the current and future state of the Internet. The large number of things (objects), which are connected to the Internet, produce a huge amount of data that needs a lot of effort and processing operations to transfer it to useful information. Moreover, the organization and control of this large volume of data requires novel ideas in the design and management of the IoT network to accelerate and enhance its performance. The software defined systems is a new paradigm that appeared recently to hide all complexity in traditional system architecture by abstracting all the controls and management operations from the underling devices (things in the IoT) and setting them inside a middleware layer, a software layer. In this work, a comprehensive software defined based framework model is proposed to simplify the IoT management process and provide a vital solution for the challenges in the traditional IoT architecture to forward, store, and secure the produced data from the IoT objects by integrating the software defined network, software defined storage, and software defined security into one software defined based control model