Evaluation of the pathogenicity of multiple isolates of Beauveria bassiana (Hypocreales: Clavicipitaceae) on Rhynchophorus ferrugineus (Coleoptera: Dryophthoridae) for the assessment of a solid formulation under simulated field conditions

A solid state formulation of Beauveria bassiana (Balsamo) Vuillemin has been developed for biological control of the Red Palm Weevil (RPW), Rhynchophorus ferrugineus (Olivier, 1790). Two kinds of bioassays (dry conidia and dipping) using 10 isolates from several coleopterans in Mediterranean environments, identified 2 RPW derived isolates (193 and 203) as most pathogenic to RPW larvae and adults (zero survival within first 4–5 d for dry conidia, and 14 and 23 d for dipping bioassays). Isolate 203 (5.1 × 108 ± 1.9 × 108 conidia g-1) was formulated with fragmented date seed into solid granules and tested in palms infested with RPW under semi-field conditions in Feb, Apr/May and Jun of both 2007 and 2008. Beauveria bassiana significantly reduced RPW adult survival with respect to controls in May 2007 and in the Apr/Jun 2008 experiments. Total RPW adult mortality was achieved within 30 days for all B. bassiana treatments, and was associated with increasing numbers of insects with signs of mycosis in 2008 experiments. Beauveria bassiana formulation reduced RPW multiplication in artificially infested palms compared to controls, and a positive correlation between numbers of larvae and time post-infestation was recorded. The suppression of RPW adult populations by B. bassiana persisted for at least 3 months under semi-field conditions. The Beauveria bassiana solid formulation, which induces great adult mortality and persistence in the field, could be applied as a preventive as well as a curative treatment for the integrated management of RPW.

Reauthorization of GSA and multiple award program : hearing before the Committee on Governmental Affairs, United States Senate, One Hundred Second Congress, second session, on S. 1958 ... and S. 2619 ... June 11, 1992.

"S. 1958, to authorize functions and activities under the Federal Property and Administrative Services Act of 1949, to amend laws relating to federal procurement, and for other purposes and S. 2619, to amend the Federal Property and Amdinistrative Services Act of 1949 to enact provisions governing the negotiation and award of contracts under the multiple award schedule program of the Feneral Services Administration"

The Department of Defense's inquiry into Project 112/Shipboard Hazard and Defense (SHAD) tests : hearing before the Subcommittee on Personnel of the Committee on Armed Services, United States Senate, One Hundred Seventh Congress, second session, October 10, 2002.

Errata: S.Hrg. 107-861 "was inadvertently printed with the incorrect designation of S.Hrg. 107-810."

The effects of negative affectivity on self-reported activity limitations in stroke patients:testing the symptom perception, disability and psychosomatic hypotheses

This study investigated whether Negative Affectivity (NA) causes bias in self-report measures of activity limitations or whether NA has a real, non-artifactual association with activity limitations. The Symptom Perception Hypothesis (NA negatively biases self-reporting), Disability Hypothesis (activity limitations cause NA) and Psychosomatic Hypothesis (NA causes activity limitations) were examined longitudinally using both self-report and objective activity limitations measures. Participants were 101 stroke patients and their caregivers interviewed within two weeks of discharge, six weeks later and six months post-discharge. NA and self-report, proxy-report and observed performance activity (walking) limitations were assessed at each interview. NA was associated with activity limitations across measures. Both the Disability and Psychosomatic Hypotheses were supported: initial NA predicted objective activity limitations at six weeks but, additionally, activity limitations at six weeks predicted NA at six months. These results suggest that NA both affects and is affected by activity limitations and does not simply influence reporting.

Analysis and design of power management scheme for an on-board solar energy storage system

This paper investigates the power management issues in a mobile solar energy storage system. A multi-converter based energy storage system is proposed, in which solar power is the primary source while the grid or the diesel generator is selected as the secondary source. The existence of the secondary source facilitates the battery state of charge detection by providing a constant battery charging current. Converter modeling, multi-converter control system design, digital implementation and experimental verification are introduced and discussed in details. The prototype experiment indicates that the converter system can provide a constant charging current during solar converter maximum power tracking operation, especially during large solar power output variation, which proves the feasibility of the proposed design. © 2014 IEEE.

The role of perceived housing quality and perceived choice to recovery: An ecological perspective on a housing first program in Lisbon

This study explores, from an ecological perspective, the relationship between perceived housing quality and the perception of choice, and between perceived choice and recovery of 45 Housing First Lisbon participants. For this purpose, we used a quantitative method and applied three instruments that report perceived housing quality, perceived choice and severe mental illness recovery. The findings reveal a significant and positive association between perceived housing quality and perceived choice, and between perceived choice and recovery, with choice being predicted by housing quality and recovery predicted by choice. These results reinforce the scientific evidence regarding the success of housing first models as a consumer choice-driven intervention, addressing pertinent environmental factors that contribute to housing stability. The study demonstrates that recovery processes can be maximized through services that empower their consumers by allowing them to choose and control the priority and order of the support services received.

飞行器多任务在线实时航迹规划

针对不确定环境中的飞行器多任务航迹规划问题展开研究,提出了一种基于飞行路线图的两阶段航迹规划框架,航迹规划分成学习和查询两个阶段,环境信息和飞行器约束条件分阶段体现.在该框架下,通过采用一种混合多任务动态航迹规划方法,分别在稀疏路线图上实时搜索初始航迹和在精细路线图上启发式搜索后备航迹,能够在具有预先未知威胁、可变飞行任务的战场环境中实时生成三维航迹.

Implementation of a survey form marking system using image processing techniques on an Imputer

This paper describes the feasibility of the application of an Imputer in a multiple choice answer sheet marking system based on image processing techniques.

Improving E-Assessment Systems With A focus On Adaptive Feedback And Marking

Institutions involved in the provision of tertiary education across Europe are feeling the pinch. European universities, and other higher education (HE) institutions, must operate in a climate where the pressure of government spending cuts (Garben, 2012) is in stark juxtaposition to the EU’s strategy to drive forward and maintain a growth of student numbers in the sector (eurostat, 2015).

In order to remain competitive, universities and HE institutions are making ever-greater use of electronic assessment (E-Assessment) systems (Chatzigavriil et all, 2015; Ferrell, 2012). These systems are attractive primarily because they offer a cost-effect and scalable approach for assessment. In addition to scalability, they also offer reliability, consistency and impartiality; furthermore, from the perspective of a student they are most popular because they can offer instant feedback (Walet, 2012).

There are disadvantages, though.

First, feedback is often returned to a student immediately on competition of their assessment. While it is possible to disable the instant feedback option (this is often the case during an end of semester exam period when assessment scores must be can be ratified before release), however, this option tends to be a global ‘all on’ or ‘all off’ configuration option which is controlled centrally rather than configurable on a per-assessment basis.

If a formative in-term assessment is to be taken by multiple groups of
students, each at different times, this restriction means that answers to each question will be disclosed to the first group of students undertaking the assessment. As soon as the answers are released “into the wild” the academic integrity of the assessment is lost for subsequent student groups.

Second, the style of feedback provided to a student for each question is often limited to a simple ‘correct’ or ‘incorrect’ indicator. While this type of feedback has its place, it often does not provide a student with enough insight to improve their understanding of a topic that they did not answer correctly.

Most E-Assessment systems boast a wide range of question types including Multiple Choice, Multiple Response, Free Text Entry/Text Matching and Numerical questions. The design of these types of questions is often quite restrictive and formulaic, which has a knock-on effect on the quality of feedback that can be provided in each case.

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs) are most prevalent as they are the most prescriptive and therefore most the straightforward to mark consistently. They are also the most amenable question types, which allow easy provision of meaningful, relevant feedback to each possible outcome chosen.
Text matching questions tend to be more problematic due to their free text entry nature. Common misspellings or case-sensitivity errors can often be accounted for by the software but they are by no means fool proof, as it is very difficult to predict in advance the range of possible variations on an answer that would be considered worthy of marks by a manual marker of a paper based equivalent of the same question.

Numerical questions are similarly restricted. An answer can be checked for accuracy or whether it is within a certain range of the correct answer, but unless it is a special purpose-built mathematical E-Assessment system the system is unlikely to have computational capability and so cannot, for example, account for “method marks” which are commonly awarded in paper-based marking.

From a pedagogical perspective, the importance of providing useful formative feedback to students at a point in their learning when they can benefit from the feedback and put it to use must not be understated (Grieve et all, 2015; Ferrell, 2012).

In this work, we propose a number of software-based solutions, which will overcome the limitations and inflexibilities of existing E-Assessment systems.

A dynamical deterministic packet marking scheme for DDoS traceback

DDoS attack source traceback is an open and challenging problem. Deterministic packet marking (DPM) is a simple and relatively effective traceback scheme among the available traceback methods. However, the existing DPM schemes inheret a critical drawback of scalability in tracing all possible attack sources, which roots at their static mark encoding and attempt to mark all Internet routers for their traceback purpose. We find that a DDoS attack session usually involves a limited number of attack sources, e.g. at the thousand level. In order to achieve the traceback goal, we only need to mark these attack related routers. We therefore propose a novel Marking on Demand (MOD) scheme based on the DPM mechanism to dynamical distribute marking IDs in both temporal and space dimensions. The proposed MOD scheme can traceback to all possible sources of DDoS attacks, which is not possible for the existing DPM schemes. We thoroughly compare the proposed MOD scheme with two dominant DPM schemes through theoretical analysis and experiments. The the results demonstrate that the MOD scheme outperforms the existing DPM schemes. © 2013 IEEE.

Is Our Students Learning - QuestionMark: Extending E-Assessment Systems for Adapative Marking and Feedback

Our key contribution is a flexible, automated marking system that adds desirable functionality to existing E-Assessment systems. In our approach, any given E-Assessment system is relegated to a data-collection mechanism, whereas marking and the generation and distribution of personalised per-student feedback is handled separately by our own system. This allows content-rich Microsoft Word feedback documents to be generated and distributed to every student simultaneously according to a per-assessment schedule.

The feedback is adaptive in that it corresponds to the answers given by the student and provides guidance on where they may have gone wrong. It is not limited to simple multiple choice which are the most prescriptive question type offered by most E-Assessment Systems and as such most straightforward to mark consistently and provide individual per-alternative feedback strings. It is also better equipped to handle the use of mathematical symbols and images within the feedback documents which is more flexible than existing E-Assessment systems, which can only handle simple text strings.

As well as MCQs the system reliably and robustly handles Multiple Response, Text Matching and Numeric style questions in a more flexible manner than Questionmark: Perception and other E-Assessment Systems. It can also reliably handle multi-part questions where the response to an earlier question influences the answer to a later one and can adjust both scoring and feedback appropriately.

New question formats can be added at any time provided a corresponding marking method conforming to certain templates can also be programmed. Indeed, any question type for which a programmatic method of marking can be devised may be supported by our system. Furthermore, since the student’s response to each is question is marked programmatically, our system can be set to allow for minor deviations from the correct answer, and if appropriate award partial marks.

Marking time: leading and managing the development of assessment in higher education

This book highlights the University of New South Wales (UNSW) Assessment as Learning Project, a three year process of assessment change in faculty. The UNSW Vice-Chancellor, Professor Frederick Hilmer charged faculties with a learning and teaching agenda to investigate ways to make quality assessment practices more effective and efficient for both staff and students. The examples provided in this edited collection demonstrate exemplary case studies and theoretical perspectives on learning, teaching, and assessment. This book presents leading research in assessment as learning with a focus on changing practices as well as discipline specific practices.

A feasible IP traceback framework through dynamic deterministic packet marking

DDoS attack source traceback is an open and challenging problem. Deterministic packet marking (DPM) is a simple and effective traceback mechanism, but the current DPM based traceback schemes are not practical due to their scalability constraint. We noticed a factor that only a limited number of computers and routers are involved in an attack session. Therefore, we only need to mark these involved nodes for traceback purpose, rather than marking every node of the Internet as the existing schemes doing. Based on this finding, we propose a novel marking on demand (MOD) traceback scheme based on the DPM mechanism. In order to traceback to involved attack source, what we need to do is to mark these involved ingress routers using the traditional DPM strategy. Similar to existing schemes, we require participated routers to install a traffic monitor. When a monitor notices a surge of suspicious network flows, it will request a unique mark from a globally shared MOD server, and mark the suspicious flows with the unique marks. At the same time, the MOD server records the information of the marks and their related requesting IP addresses. Once a DDoS attack is confirmed, the victim can obtain the attack sources by requesting the MOD server with the marks extracted from attack packets. Moreover, we use the marking space in a round-robin style, which essentially addresses the scalability problem of the existing DPM based traceback schemes. We establish a mathematical model for the proposed traceback scheme, and thoroughly analyze the system. Theoretical analysis and extensive real-world data experiments demonstrate that the proposed traceback method is feasible and effective.

A General Latent Class Model for Performance Evaluation of Diagnostic Tests in the Absence of a Gold Standard: An Application to Chagas Disease

We propose a new general Bayesian latent class model for evaluation of the performance of multiple diagnostic tests in situations in which no gold standard test exists based on a computationally intensive approach. The modeling represents an interesting and suitable alternative to models with complex structures that involve the general case of several conditionally independent diagnostic tests, covariates, and strata with different disease prevalences. The technique of stratifying the population according to different disease prevalence rates does not add further marked complexity to the modeling, but it makes the model more flexible and interpretable. To illustrate the general model proposed, we evaluate the performance of six diagnostic screening tests for Chagas disease considering some epidemiological variables. Serology at the time of donation (negative, positive, inconclusive) was considered as a factor of stratification in the model. The general model with stratification of the population performed better in comparison with its concurrents without stratification. The group formed by the testing laboratory Biomanguinhos FIOCRUZ-kit (c-ELISA and rec-ELISA) is the best option in the confirmation process by presenting false-negative rate of 0.0002% from the serial scheme. We are 100% sure that the donor is healthy when these two tests have negative results and he is chagasic when they have positive results.