Mass Rearing the Gypsy Moth Pupal Parasitoids \u3ci\u3eBrachymeria Lasus\u3c/i\u3e and \u3ci\u3eBrachymeria Intermedia\u3c/i\u3e (Hymenoptera: Chalcididae) for Small-Scale Laboratory Studies

An economical technique was developed for mass rearing the gypsy moth para- sitoids Brachymeria lasus and B. intermedia using a factitious host, the greater wax moth, Galleria mellonella (Lepidoptera: pyralidae). Percentages of host pupae producing adult B. lusus and B. intermedia were 72.2 and 67.5, respectively. Percentages of adult wax moths emerging from groups of pupae exposed to populations of B. lasus and B. intermedia were 3.4 and 9.8, respectively. Mean emergence times of males and females from parasitized pupae incubated at 29° C. were 12.1 days and 13.8 days for B. lasus and 11.9 days and 13.5 days for B. intermedia. This procedure provides a low-maintenance laboratory culture with high yields from host pupae

IMPROVED MULTIPLE BIRDSONG TRACKING WITH DISTRIBUTION DERIVATIVE METHOD AND MARKOV RENEWAL PROCESS CLUSTERING

DS & MP are supported by an EPSRC Leadership Fellowship EP/G007144/1

Letter From Captain Stowell, November 29, 1861

From Camp Griffin: There has been cannonading towards Edwards Ferry to-day — the report is Bank’s Div. is crossing the Riverhttps://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/letters-of-forrest-little/1026/thumbnail.jp

Float-polishing process and analysis of float-polished quartz

A fluid-mechanical model is developed for the float-polishing process. In this model laminar flow between the sample and the lap results in pressure gradients at the grooves that support the sample on a fluid layer. The laminar fluid motion also produces supersmooth, damage-free surfaces. Quartz substrates for applications in high-stress environments were float polished, and their surfaces were analyzed by optical scatterometry, photoacoustic spectroscopy, and atomic force microscopy. The removal of 100 µm of material by a lapping-polishing process, with final float polishing, left low levels of subsurface damage, with a surface roughness of approximately 0.2-nm rms

Learning Timbre Analogies from Unlabelled Data by Multivariate Tree Regression

This is the Author's Original Manuscript of an article whose final and definitive form, the Version of Record, has been published in the Journal of New Music Research, November 2011, copyright Taylor & Francis. The published article is available online at http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09298215.2011.596938

Audio Event Detection using Weakly Labeled Data

Acoustic event detection is essential for content analysis and description of multimedia recordings. The majority of current literature on the topic learns the detectors through fully-supervised techniques employing strongly labeled data. However, the labels available for majority of multimedia data are generally weak and do not provide sufficient detail for such methods to be employed. In this paper we propose a framework for learning acoustic event detectors using only weakly labeled data. We first show that audio event detection using weak labels can be formulated as an Multiple Instance Learning problem. We then suggest two frameworks for solving multiple-instance learning, one based on support vector machines, and the other on neural networks. The proposed methods can help in removing the time consuming and expensive process of manually annotating data to facilitate fully supervised learning. Moreover, it can not only detect events in a recording but can also provide temporal locations of events in the recording. This helps in obtaining a complete description of the recording and is notable since temporal information was never known in the first place in weakly labeled data.Comment: ACM Multimedia 201

Quantifying Planarian Behavior As An Introduction To Object Tracking And Signal Processing

Answers to mechanistic questions about biological phenomena require fluency in a variety of molecular biology techniques and physical concepts. Here, we present an interdisciplinary approach to introducing undergraduate students to an important problem in the areas of animal behavior and neuroscience—the neuronal control of animal behavior. In this lab module, students explore planarian behavior by quantitative image and data analysis with freely available software and low-cost resources. Planarians are ∼1–2-cm-long aquatic free-living flatworms famous for their regeneration abilities. They are inexpensive and easy to maintain, handle, and perturb, and their fairly large size allows for image acquisition with a webcam, which makes this lab module accessible and scalable. Our lab module integrates basic physical concepts such as center of mass, velocity and speed, periodic signals, and time series analysis in the context of a biological system. The module is designed to attract students with diverse disciplinary backgrounds. It challenges the students to form hypotheses about behavior and equips them with a basic but broadly applicable toolkit to achieve this quantitatively. We give a detailed description of the necessary resources and show how to implement the module. We also provide suggestions for advanced exercises and possible extensions. Finally, we provide student feedback from a pilot implementation

Lonely adatoms in space

There is a close relation between the problems of second layer nucleation in epitaxial crystal growth and chemical surface reactions, such as hydrogen recombination, on interstellar dust grains. In both cases standard rate equation analysis has been found to fail because the process takes place in a confined geometry. Using scaling arguments developed in the context of second layer nucleation, I present a simple derivation of the hydrogen recombination rate for small and large grains. I clarify the reasons for the failure of rate equations for small grains, and point out a logarithmic correction to the reaction rate when the reaction is limited by the desorption of hydrogen atoms (the second order reaction regime)

Successful Flash-Cooling of Xenon Derivatized Myoglobin Crystals

This paper demonstrates for the first time a method for preparing cryocooled xenon-derivatized protein crystals. The method is based upon the hypothesis and subsequent observation that the diffusion of a xenon atom from a tight binding site following depressurization occurs on a timescale of minutes. We have observed significant changes in diffraction intensities from myoglobin crystals for up to 5 min following depressurization from 1 MPa of xenon. In accordance with this observation, a xenon-derivatized myoglobin crystal was cryocooled at ~95 K within 20 s of complete depressurization. A crystallographic data set was then collected to 2.0 Å resolution and isomorphous and anomalous difference Patterson maps revealed the presence of a well ordered xenon site with an occupancy of approximately 0.5. Phasing statistics for this site were of good quality and demonstrate the practicality of this method. The ability to cryocool xenon-derivatized crystals will make this heavy-atom substitution method even more useful for single-isomorphous-replacement and multiple-isomorphous-replacement phasing of macromolecules