Bivalve mollusc culture research in Thailand

An account of research, which explored new biological and socioeconomic perspectives on bivalve mollusc culture to increase production and to improve the livelihood of farmers. It presents a review of the pathways in which aquatic macrophytes may be involved in the food production process, directly as human food, as livestock fodder, as fertilizer (mulch and manure, ash, green manure, compost, biogas slurry), and as food for aquatic herbivores, such as fish, turtles, rodents and manatees. Suggests research areas.Mollusc culture, Research programmes, ICLARM publications, Thailand, Bivalvia

Spin-spin Correlation in Some Excited States of Transverse Ising Model

We consider the transverse Ising model in one dimension with nearest-neighbour interaction and calculate exactly the longitudinal spin-spin correlation for a class of excited states. These states are known to play an important role in the perturbative treatment of one-dimensional transverse Ising model with frustrated second-neighbour interaction. To calculate the correlation, we follow the earlier procedure of Wu, use Szego's theorem and also use Fisher-Hartwig conjecture. The result is that the correlation decays algebraically with distance ($n$) as $1/\surd n$ and is oscillatory or non-oscillatory depending on the magnitude of the transverse field.Comment: 5 pages, 1 figur

El Diablo

In lieu of an abstract, below is the essay\u27s first paragraph. As El Diablo sailed gracefully over the back fence, he took a glance over his shoulder at Sam, who was befuddled. If Sam were capable of detecting the various expressions on Diablo\u27s face, he would have noticed that the most prominent feature was a roguish grin, smeared from ear to ear. As Diablo\u27s feet touched the grass on the other side, his mind raced with ideas as to how he would enjoy his newfound freedom. Escaping was simple this morning. The humans must have been up too late watching television--typical. He would probably stop by to occasionally look in on them, from afar, until he decided to actually come home. Oh, he was planning to return perhaps he wasn\u27t human, but he wasn\u27t stupid either; he knew which side his bread was buttered on. He simply felt that he was due for a holiday

The senior year : a study of transition, liminality and students\u27 perspectives of their final year as undergraduates.

The purpose of this study was to gain insights into the undergraduate senior year of college. Through the use of in-depth, phenomenological interviewing, four college seniors shared their previous experiences with life transitions and described how they were experiencing their final year as undergraduates. This study described the experiences of the participants and explored these questions: (1) What is the senior year of college like? (2) What are the challenges that students face in their senior year? (3) How does the undergraduate experience and cope with this transition? (4) Are the experiences in the senior year consistent with transition theory and inclusive of a liminal stage? The exploration of these types of questions sought the deeper meaning of the senior year experience and how it impacts the undergraduate. The results of this study were consistent with existing literature that identifies the undergraduate senior\u27s two primary challenges as securing post-college employment and deciding where to live after college. The significant findings of this study emerged through examining the senior year as its own unique slice of the undergraduate experience. In doing so, it become evident that the participants\u27 experiences during their senior year reflected the first-two stages of Schlossberg\u27s theory of adult transitions, and identified much of the senior year as a liminal state. Additionally, what surfaced from the participants\u27 insights was how the liminal experience of the participants was strongly influenced (positively and negatively) by two factors—(1) the individual\u27s success in securing a post-college life and (2) friends. This study also demonstrated that the experiences of these participants, while not representative of all college seniors, call for further concentrated research of the undergraduate senior year experience, with emphasis on the impact of friends on this life transition

Exact solution of a 2d random Ising model

The model considered is a d=2 layered random Ising system on a square lattice with nearest neighbours interaction. It is assumed that all the vertical couplings are equal and take the positive value J while the horizontal couplings are quenched random variables which are equal in the same row but can take the two possible values J and J-K in different rows. The exact solution is obtained in the limit case of infinite K for any distribution of the horizontal couplings. The model which corresponds to this limit can be seen as an ordinary Ising system where the spins of some rows, chosen at random, are frozen in an antiferromagnetic order. No phase transition is found if the horizontal couplings are independent random variables while for correlated disorder one finds a low temperature phase with some glassy properties.Comment: 10 pages, Plain TeX, 3 ps figures, submitted to Europhys. Let

Phonologically Informed Edit Distance Algorithms for Word Alignment with Low-Resource Languages

We present three methods for weighting edit distance algorithms based on linguistic information. These methods base their penalties on (i) phonological features, (ii) distributional character embeddings, or (iii) differences between cognate words. We also introduce a novel method for evaluating edit distance through the task of low-resource word alignment by using edit-distance neighbors in a high-resource pivot language to inform alignments from the low-resource language. At this task, the cognate-based scheme outperforms our other methods and the Levenshtein edit distance baseline, showing that NLP applications can benefit from information about cross-linguistic phonological patterns

Non-Entailed Subsequences as a Challenge for Natural Language Inference

Neural network models have shown great success at natural language inference (NLI), the task of determining whether a premise entails a hypothesis. However, recent studies suggest that these models may rely on fallible heuristics rather than deep language understanding. We introduce a challenge set to test whether NLI systems adopt one such heuristic: assuming that a sentence entails all of its subsequences, such as assuming that "Alice believes Mary is lying" entails "Alice believes Mary." We evaluate several competitive NLI models on this challenge set and find strong evidence that they do rely on the subsequence heuristic.Comment: Accepted as an abstract for SCiL 2019; added acknowledgment

Development of boldness and docility in yellow-bellied marmots

Peer reviewedPostprin