Bird communities of the Colorado Rocky Mountains along a gradient of exurban development

Most insights about the effects of residential development on wildlife are based on research from urban and suburban areas. Yet exurban development is an increasingly prevalent form of human settlement in many parts of the world. Moreover because such development often occurs near the periphery of protected areas, it may have a disproportionate influence on native species. We examined bird community patterns in the Rocky Mountains of north-central Colorado across a gradient of exurban development to determine how avifauna responded to this form of settlement. Using fixed-radius point counts, we surveyed the occurrence and abundance of breeding birds in 11 developed sites and in 6 nearby undeveloped sites, all occurring in a forested matrix. We sampled ground-level habitat features at each survey point and derived digital land-cover maps from aerial photographs to characterize and quantify road development and building density. We found little evidence that land-cover varied with development intensity, yet bird abundance increased significantly with building density. Patterns of species richness were equivocal due to a highly influential observation. Principal components analysis (PCA) distinguished two axes that explained nearly 50% of the variation in the bird community and were strongly associated with road and building density. Weighted average analysis showed a marked decline in the abundance and richness of species that were insectivorous or nested in snags, suggesting that reductions in dead wood may have influenced the bird community. However, no conclusions could be drawn because dead wood was confounded with building density. Logistic regression of species occurrence and building density indicated that the incidence of some generalist species increased with building density, whereas the incidence of specialists decreased. Overall, our results suggest that development at low densities can favor habitat generalists. Similar patterns have been observed in more urbanized areas. If exurban development persists as a popular form of settlement in the Rocky Mountains, a regional plan for protecting avian habitat and limiting development dispersion will be necessary to maintain native bird communities.     

A performance of hollow clay tile (HCT) laid reinforced cement concrete (RCC) roof for tropical summer climates

Most of the Indian concrete buildings have 150 mm thick reinforced cement concrete (RCC) with weathering course (WC) having 75–100 mm thick lime brick mortar. Such roofs account for about 40–75% of total heat transmitted into the occupant zone depending upon the location and also account for the major portion of electricity bill in air-conditioned buildings. A new concept wherein hollow clay tiles (HCT) are laid over RCC instead of WC, has been proposed. The transient heat transmission across various types of roof structures for typical Indian climatic conditions has been studied. The energy savings obtained with the use of HCT roof is found to be 38–63% when compared with conventional WC roof. When air is allowed to flow through the hollow passages, the air flow is found to take care of all variations in the outside climate and solar radiation, thus providing almost uniform roof bottom surface temperature.     

中国传统人居环境理念对当代城市设计的启发

近年来,中法文化交流逐渐开展,作为中国建筑学者,本文提出一个人们常常忽略的问题,即在历史上中国人居环境规划建设并非就建筑论建筑,而是结建筑,城市规划,地景为一体,共同发展。这一具有东方特色的整体设计思想,可以说是中国建筑文化史上光辉的篇章,频值得继承和发展,谨提出讨论。     

Early detection of human actions—A hybrid approach

Early detection of human actions is essential in a wide spectrum of applications ranging from video surveillance to health-care. While human action recognition has been extensively studied, little attention is paid to the problem of detecting ongoing human action early, i.e. detecting an action as soon as it begins, but before it finishes. This study aims at training a detector to be capable of recognizing a human action when only partial action sample is seen. To do so, a hybrid technique is proposed in this work which combines the benefits of computer vision as well as fuzzy set theory based on the fuzzy Bandler and Kohout's sub-triangle product (BK subproduct). The novelty lies in the construction of a frame-by-frame membership function for each kind of possible movement. Detection is triggered when a pre-defined threshold is reached in a suitable way. Experimental results on a publicly available dataset demonstrate the benefits and effectiveness of the proposed method.     

全球化背景下的企业文化管理研究

在全球化时代,国际间合作的趋势不断加强,跨国跨文化背景下的商业竞争从上世纪80年代晚期以来越来越明显。商业领域理念竞争的核心也是文化竞争。如何在外部文化与企业原有文化之间找到最佳平衡,取得商务活动的成功,协调利益相关者之间的权利和利益关系,已成为人们备受重视的话题。     

Joint-free construction in rich concretes

The established approach to construction in mass concrete by reduced cement content cannot now be developed for casting large pours for cement-rich heavily reinforced structural sections. A new approach is needed, says the author, who is chief advisory engineer (Midlands Region) of the UK Cement and Concrete Association, who here gives his personal views based on a special study of site experience in large-pour concreting.     

Spatio-temporal layout of human actions for improved bag-of-words action detection

We investigate how human action recognition can be improved by considering spatio-temporal layout of actions. From literature, we adopt a pipeline consisting of STIP features, a random forest to quantize the features into histograms, and an SVM classifier. Our goal is to detect 48 human actions, ranging from simple actions such as walk to complex actions such as exchange. Our contribution to improve the performance of this pipeline by exploiting a novel spatio-temporal layout of the 48 actions. Here each STIP feature does not in the video contributes to the histogram bins by a unity value, but rather by a weight given by its spatio-temporal probability. We propose 6 configurations of spatio-temporal layout, where the varied parameters are the coordinate system and the modeling of the action and its context. Our model of layout does not change any other parameter of the pipeline, it requires no re-learning of the random forest, yields a limited increase of the size of its resulting representation by only a factor two, and at a minimal additional computational cost of only a handful of operations per feature. Extensive experiments show that the layout is demonstrated to be distinctive of actions that involve trajectories, (dis)appearance, kinematics, and interactions. The visualization of each action’s layout illustrates that our approach is indeed able to model spatio-temporal patterns of each action. Each layout is experimentally shown to be optimal for a specific set of actions. Generally, the context has more effect than the choice of coordinate system. The most impressive improvements are achieved for complex actions involving items. For 43 out of 48 human actions, the performance is better or equal when spatio-temporal layout is included. In addition, we show our method outperforms state-of-the-art for the IXMAS and UT-Interaction datasets.     

人血白蛋白提取工艺的对比分析与改进方案

人血白蛋白是血液制剂的主要产品,也是血浆蛋白生产工艺主干的最终产物。人们按着血浆蛋白质之间,蛋白质与水分子之间及各种离子的相互作用,从而把各种成份分离,纯化。目前应用最广泛的是低温乙醇法。本文对国内流行的低温乙醇法中的COHN＂5＋9＂、COHN6及N—K法工艺进行了比较。N—K法与前两种工艺相比,减少了乙醇的消耗,收率有所提高。改进工艺是采用萃取方法,将血浆分成二组沉淀Fr＂Ⅰ＋Ⅱ＋Ⅲ＂和Fr＂IV＋V＂,减少了稀释倍数,节省乙醇试剂,使蛋白保持天然状态,并提高纯度。