Influence of opposite sex on attraction produced by pioneer sex of four bark beetle species cohabiting pine in the Southern United States

Catches ofDendroctonus frontalis andIps avulsus on traps surrounding bolts infested with both sexes of each species in the gallery were not significantly different from catches at bolts infested only with the sex which normally pioneers the host colonization process. In contrast, the presence of the second sex in the gallery significantly reduced catches ofI. grandicollis andI. calligraphus and, additionally, the presence of females in the male galleries ofI. calligraphus significantly reduced the catch ofI. avulsus females as compared with their response to bolts infested with the maleI. calligraphus only.     

Step-growth polymerization of guanamines with unsaturated aldehydes

Summary In acid medium and at temperatures from 50 to 100°C the resins from three different guanamines and three different unsaturated aldehydes were synthesized. The products were red coloured resins, which were soluble in organic solvents and were able to cure with hexamethylenetetramine to form hard and almost insoluble products. Using a combination of NMR and GPC methods it was possible to predict the course and the mechanism of the reactions. The rates of the reactions depend on the reaction conditions and on the type of the monomer.     

Model-Reference Fuzzy Adaptive Control as a Framework for Nonlinear System Control

The paper presents a general methodology of adaptive control based on fuzzy model to deal with unknown plants. The problem of parameter estimation is solved using a direct approach, i.e. the controller parameters are adapted without explicitly estimating plant parameters. Thus, very simple adaptive and control laws are obtained using Lyapunov stability criterion. The generality of the approach is substantiated by Stone-Weierstrass theorem, which indicates that any continuous function can be approximated by fuzzy basis function expansion. In the sense of adaptive control, this implies the adaptive law with fuzzified adaptive control parameters. The proposed control algorithm may be viewed as an extension of classical adaptive control for linear plants, but compared to the latter it provides higher adaptation ability and consequently better performance if the plant is nonlinear. The global stability of the control system is assured and the tracking error converges to the residual set that depends on fuzzification properties. The main advantage of the approach is simplicity that suits control engineers since wide range of industrial processes can be controlled by the proposed method. In the paper, the control of heat exchanger is performed.     

Theoretical and Empirical Analysis of ReliefF and RReliefF

Relief algorithms are general and successful attribute estimators. They are able to detect conditional dependencies between attributes and provide a unified view on the attribute estimation in regression and classification. In addition, their quality estimates have a natural interpretation. While they have commonly been viewed as feature subset selection methods that are applied in prepossessing step before a model is learned, they have actually been used successfully in a variety of settings, e.g., to select splits or to guide constructive induction in the building phase of decision or regression tree learning, as the attribute weighting method and also in the inductive logic programming.A broad spectrum of successful uses calls for especially careful investigation of various features Relief algorithms have. In this paper we theoretically and empirically investigate and discuss how and why they work, their theoretical and practical properties, their parameters, what kind of dependencies they detect, how do they scale up to large number of examples and features, how to sample data for them, how robust are they regarding the noise, how irrelevant and redundant attributes influence their output and how different metrics influences them.     

GPU-accelerated DXT and JPEG compression schemes for low-latency network transmissions of HD, 2K,and 4K video

Low-latency transmissions of high resolution video such as HD, 2K, or 4K over both Internet and private IP networks have found a foothold in many interactive applications, ranging from collaborative environments in science and medicine to the arts and entertainment industry. In this paper we demonstrate how the power of commodity graphics processing units can be used for efficient implementation of JPEG and DXT compression. We propose an approach to fine-grained parallelization of JPEG compression and the use of auxiliary indexes for efficient decompression, which are backward compatible with the JPEG standard. In-depth performance analysis is provided to show various aspects of the proposed parallelization including the dependency on image content and on various settings of the compression algorithm, as well as the impact of compression for interactive applications in terms of end-to-end latency. The applicability of these compression schemes in medicine and cinematography has also been evaluated using double-blind ABX tests compared with uncompressed video. We describe selected successful real-world deployment use cases based on our open-source implementation within the UltraGrid framework, such as trans-Atlantic 4K interactive video streaming during the CineGrid 2011 workshop. As discussed in the paper, the proposed approaches to parallelization provide sufficient performance even for the future generation of 8K video processing systems, currently limited by availability of camera and display hardware.     

NICE h : a higher-order explicit numerical scheme for integration of constitutive models in plasticity

The article introduces, as a result of further development of the first-order scheme NICE, a simple and efficient higher-order explicit numerical scheme for the integration of a system of ordinary differential equations which is constrained by an algebraic condition (DAE). The scheme is based on the truncated Taylor expansion of the constraint equation with order h of the scheme being determined by the highest exponent in the truncated Taylor series. The integration scheme thus conceived will be named NICE ^h , considering both principal premises of its construction. In conjunction with a direct solution technique used to solve the boundary value problem, the NICE ^h scheme is very convenient for integrating constitutive models in plasticity. The plasticity models are defined mostly by a system of algebraic and differential equations in which the yield criterion represents the constraint condition. To study the properties of the new integration scheme, which, like the forward-Euler scheme, is characterised by its implementation simplicity due to the explicitness of its formulations, a damage constitutive model (Gurson–Tvergaard–Needleman model) is considered. The general opinion that the implicit backward-Euler scheme is much more accurate than the thus-far known explicit schemes is challenged by the introduction of the NICE ^h scheme. The accuracy of the higher-order explicit scheme in the studied cases is significantly higher than the accuracy of the classical backward-Euler scheme, if we compare them under the condition of a similar CPU time consumption.     

The Conceptual Model of Well-Being Management Based on Achieving Requisite Personal Holism

Organizations should look at humans as multilayered, not only as professional entities. In synergy, not only individually, we define humans as: (1) physical, (2) mental, (3) social, (4) spiritual, and (5) economic entities, marked by requisitely holistic patterns of relatively permanent characteristics, due to which individuals differ from each other; they differ also as specialized professionals. All these and other attributes form synergies. On this basis, the behavior of individuals who are willing to practice interdisciplinary cooperation becomes socially responsible and they have a high level of well-being.

Individuals as well as organizations seek requisite personal holism (RPH) on the one hand and psychic well-being (PWB) on the other hand. Thus, individuals implement individual techniques and organizations implement special strategies, programs, and actions in the frame of human resource management (HRM). That is how organizations in the frame of HRM, more specifically in the frame of management well-being, are developing special programs for managing PWB. These programs are based on their RPH and organizations might help employees to feel respected and valued in their work settings, without regard to their culture, religion, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, or other individual differences. The most-often applied programs of the kind include: (1) stress management programs, (2) diversity management programs, (3) wellness programs, (4) employee assistance programs, and (5) programs for personal growth.