Electrical treeing in polyethylene: effect of nano fillers on tree inception and growth

Treeing in polyethylene based nanocomposite samples as well as unfilled polyethylene samples were studied using 50Hz ac voltage. The tree inception voltage was observed for different types of samples. The tree initiation time as well as the tree growth patterns at a fixed ac voltage have also been studied. The results show that there is an improvement in tree inception voltage with nano filler loading in polyethylene. Different tree growth patterns for both the unfilled polyethylene and the polyethylene nanocomposites have been observed. A slower tree growth was observed in polyethylene nanocomposites. The partial discharge characteristics of unfilled and nano filled polyethylene samples during the electrical tree growth period was also studied. Decrease in PD magnitude as well as in the number of pd pulses with electrical tree growth duration in polyethylene nanocomposites has also been observed. The possible reasons for the improvement in electrical tree growth and PD resistance with the addition of nano fillers are discussed.

Matching sender and receiver: poikilothermy and frequency tuning in a tree cricket

Animals communicate in non-ideal and noisy conditions. The primary method they use to improve communication efficiency is sender-receiver matching: the receiver's sensory mechanism filters the impinging signal based on the expected signal. In the context of acoustic communication in crickets, such a match is made in the frequency domain. The males broadcast a mate attraction signal, the calling song, in a narrow frequency band centred on the carrier frequency (CF), and the females are most sensitive to sound close to this frequency. In tree crickets, however, the CF changes with temperature. The mechanisms used by female tree crickets to accommodate this change in CF were investigated at the behavioural and biomechanical level. At the behavioural level, female tree crickets were broadly tuned and responded equally to CFs produced within the naturally occurring range of temperatures (18 to 27 degrees C). To allow such a broad response, however, the transduction mechanisms that convert sound into mechanical and then neural signals must also have a broad response. The tympana of the female tree crickets exhibited a frequency response that was even broader than suggested by the behaviour. Their tympana vibrate with equal amplitude to frequencies spanning nearly an order of magnitude. Such a flat frequency response is unusual in biological systems and cannot be modelled as a simple mechanical system. This feature of the tree cricket auditory system not only has interesting implications for mate choice and species isolation but may also prove exciting for bio-mimetic applications such as the design of miniature low frequency microphones.

The role of competition and habitat in structuring small mammal communities in a tropical montane ecosystem in southern India

Small mammals were sampled in two natural habitats (montane stunted evergreen forests and montane grassland) and four anthropogenic habitats (tea, wattle, bluegum and pine plantation) in the Upper Nilgiris in southern India. Of the species trapped, eight were in montane evergreen forests and three were in other habitats. Habitat discrimination was studied in the rodents Rattus rattus and Mus famulus and the shrew Suncus montanus in the montane forest habitat. Multivariate tests on five variables (canopy cover, midstorey density, ground cover, tree density, canopy height) showed that R. rattus uses areas of higher tree density and lower canopy cover. Suncus montanus and M. famulus use habitat with higher tree density and ground cover and lower canopy height. Multivariate tests did not discriminate habitat use between the species. Univariate tests, however, showed that M. famulus uses areas of higher tree density than R. rattus and S. montanus. Rattus rattus was the dominant species in the montane forest, comprising 60.9% of total density, while the rodent Millardia meltada was the dominant species in the grassland. Studies of spatial interaction between these two species in habitats where they coexisted showed neither overlap nor avoidance between the species. Rattus rattus, however, did use areas of lower ground cover than did M. meltada. The analysis of spatial interactions between the species, habitat discrimination and use, and the removal experiments suggest that interspecific competition may not be a strong force in structuring these small mammal communities. There are distinct patterns in the use of different habitats by some species, but microhabitat selection and segregation is weak. Other factors such as intraspecific competition may play a more important role in these communities.

Efficient statistical modeling for the compression of tree structured intermediate code

We propose a scheme for the compression of tree structured intermediate code consisting of a sequence of trees specified by a regular tree grammar. The scheme is based on arithmetic coding, and the model that works in conjunction with the coder is automatically generated from the syntactical specification of the tree language. Experiments on data sets consisting of intermediate code trees yield compression ratios ranging from 2.5 to 8, for file sizes ranging from 167 bytes to 1 megabyte.

Tree structure for efficient data mining using rough sets

In data mining, an important goal is to generate an abstraction of the data. Such an abstraction helps in reducing the space and search time requirements of the overall decision making process. Further, it is important that the abstraction is generated from the data with a small number of disk scans. We propose a novel data structure, pattern count tree (PC-tree), that can be built by scanning the database only once. PC-tree is a minimal size complete representation of the data and it can be used to represent dynamic databases with the help of knowledge that is either static or changing. We show that further compactness can be achieved by constructing the PC-tree on segmented patterns. We exploit the flexibility offered by rough sets to realize a rough PC-tree and use it for efficient and effective rough classification. To be consistent with the sizes of the branches of the PC-tree, we use upper and lower approximations of feature sets in a manner different from the conventional rough set theory. We conducted experiments using the proposed classification scheme on a large-scale hand-written digit data set. We use the experimental results to establish the efficacy of the proposed approach. (C) 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

An O(mn) Gomory-Hu Tree Construction Algorithm for Unweighted Graphs

We present a fast algorithm for computing a Gomory-Hu tree or cut tree for an unweighted undirected graph G = (V,E). The expected running time of our algorithm is Õ(mc) where |E| = m and c is the maximum u-vedge connectivity, where u,v ∈ V. When the input graph is also simple (i.e., it has no parallel edges), then the u-v edge connectivity for each pair of vertices u and v is at most n-1; so the expected running time of our algorithm for simple unweighted graphs is Õ(mn).All the algorithms currently known for constructing a Gomory-Hu tree [8,9] use n-1 minimum s-t cut (i.e., max flow) subroutines. This in conjunction with the current fastest Õ(n20/9) max flow algorithm due to Karger and Levine [11] yields the current best running time of Õ(n20/9n) for Gomory-Hu tree construction on simpleunweighted graphs with m edges and n vertices. Thus we present the first Õ(mn) algorithm for constructing a Gomory-Hu tree for simple unweighted graphs.We do not use a max flow subroutine here; we present an efficient tree packing algorithm for computing Steiner edge connectivity and use this algorithm as our main subroutine. The advantage in using a tree packing algorithm for constructing a Gomory-Hu tree is that the work done in computing a minimum Steiner cut for a Steiner set S ⊆ V can be reused for computing a minimum Steiner cut for certain Steiner sets S' ⊆ S.

Decision tree design and applications in speech processing

The design and operation of the minimum cost classifier, where the total cost is the sum of the measurement cost and the classification cost, is computationally complex. Noting the difficulties associated with this approach, decision tree design directly from a set of labelled samples is proposed in this paper. The feature space is first partitioned to transform the problem to one of discrete features. The resulting problem is solved by a dynamic programming algorithm over an explicitly ordered state space of all outcomes of all feature subsets. The solution procedure is very general and is applicable to any minimum cost pattern classification problem in which each feature has a finite number of outcomes. These techniques are applied to (i) voiced, unvoiced, and silence classification of speech, and (ii) spoken vowel recognition. The resulting decision trees are operationally very efficient and yield attractive classification accuracies.

Geometric Decision Tree

In this paper, we present a new algorithm for learning oblique decision trees. Most of the current decision tree algorithms rely on impurity measures to assess the goodness of hyperplanes at each node while learning a decision tree in top-down fashion. These impurity measures do not properly capture the geometric structures in the data. Motivated by this, our algorithm uses a strategy for assessing the hyperplanes in such a way that the geometric structure in the data is taken into account. At each node of the decision tree, we find the clustering hyperplanes for both the classes and use their angle bisectors as the split rule at that node. We show through empirical studies that this idea leads to small decision trees and better performance. We also present some analysis to show that the angle bisectors of clustering hyperplanes that we use as the split rules at each node are solutions of an interesting optimization problem and hence argue that this is a principled method of learning a decision tree.

Females of a tree cricket prefer larger males but not the lower frequency male calls that indicate large body size

In the tree cricket Oecanthus henryi, females are attracted by male calls and can choose between males. To make a case for female choice based on male calls, it is necessary to examine male call variation in the field and identify repeatable call features that are reliable indicators of male size or symmetry. Female preference for these reliable call features and the underlying assumption behind this choice, female preference for larger males, also need to be examined. We found that females did prefer larger males during mating, as revealed by the longer mating durations and longer spermatophore retention times. We then examined the correlation between acoustic and morphological features and the repeatability of male calls in the field across two temporal scales, within and across nights. We found that carrier frequency was a reliable indicator of male size, with larger males calling at lower frequencies at a given temperature. Simultaneous playback of male calls differing in frequency, spanning the entire range of natural variation at a given temperature, revealed a lack of female preference for low carrier frequencies. The contrasting results between the phonotaxis and mating experiments may be because females are incapable of discriminating small differences in frequency or because the change in call carrier frequency with temperature renders this cue unreliable in tree crickets. (C) 2012 The Association for the Study of Animal Behaviour. Published by Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

A new species of Raorchestes (Amphibia: Anura: Rhacophoridae) from mid-elevation evergreen forests of the southern Western Ghats, India

A new species of the shrub frog genus Raorchestes Biju, Souche, Dubois, Dutta and Bossuyt is described as Raorchestes kakachi sp. nov. from Agastyamalai hill region in the southern Western Ghats, India. The small sized Raorchestes (male: 24.7–25.8 mm, n = 3 and female: 24.3–34.1 mm, n = 3) is distinguished from all other known congeners by the following suite of characters. Snout oval in dorsal view; tympanum indistinct; head wider than long; moderate webbing in feet; colour on dorsum varying from ivory to brown, blotches of dark brown on flanks, brown mottling on throat reducing towards vent; inner and outer surface of thigh, inner surface of shank and inner surface of tarsus with a distinct dark brown horizontal band which extends upto first three toes on upper surface. A detailed description, advertisement call features, ecology, natural history notes and comparison with closely related species are provided for the new species.

Scalable multi-dimensional user intent identification using tree structured distributions

The problem of identifying user intent has received considerable attention in recent years, particularly in the context of improving the search experience via query contextualization. Intent can be characterized by multiple dimensions, which are often not observed from query words alone. Accurate identification of Intent from query words remains a challenging problem primarily because it is extremely difficult to discover these dimensions. The problem is often significantly compounded due to lack of representative training sample. We present a generic, extensible framework for learning the multi-dimensional representation of user intent from the query words. The approach models the latent relationships between facets using tree structured distribution which leads to an efficient and convergent algorithm, FastQ, for identifying the multi-faceted intent of users based on just the query words. We also incorporated WordNet to extend the system capabilities to queries which contain words that do not appear in the training data. Empirical results show that FastQ yields accurate identification of intent when compared to a gold standard.

OTCYMIST: Otsu-Canny minimal spanning tree for born-digital images

Text segmentation and localization algorithms are proposed for the born-digital image dataset. Binarization and edge detection are separately carried out on the three colour planes of the image. Connected components (CC's) obtained from the binarized image are thresholded based on their area and aspect ratio. CC's which contain sufficient edge pixels are retained. A novel approach is presented, where the text components are represented as nodes of a graph. Nodes correspond to the centroids of the individual CC's. Long edges are broken from the minimum spanning tree of the graph. Pair wise height ratio is also used to remove likely non-text components. A new minimum spanning tree is created from the remaining nodes. Horizontal grouping is performed on the CC's to generate bounding boxes of text strings. Overlapping bounding boxes are removed using an overlap area threshold. Non-overlapping and minimally overlapping bounding boxes are used for text segmentation. Vertical splitting is applied to generate bounding boxes at the word level. The proposed method is applied on all the images of the test dataset and values of precision, recall and H-mean are obtained using different approaches.

Delineation of seismic source zones based on seismicity parameters and probabilistic evaluation of seismic hazard using logic tree approach

The delineation of seismic source zones plays an important role in the evaluation of seismic hazard. In most of the studies the seismic source delineation is done based on geological features. In the present study, an attempt has been made to delineate seismic source zones in the study area (south India) based on the seismicity parameters. Seismicity parameters and the maximum probable earthquake for these source zones were evaluated and were used in the hazard evaluation. The probabilistic evaluation of seismic hazard for south India was carried out using a logic tree approach. Two different types of seismic sources, linear and areal, were considered in the present study to model the seismic sources in the region more precisely. In order to properly account for the attenuation characteristics of the region, three different attenuation relations were used with different weightage factors. Seismic hazard evaluation was done for the probability of exceedance (PE) of 10% and 2% in 50 years. The spatial variation of rock level peak horizontal acceleration (PHA) and spectral acceleration (Sa) values corresponding to return periods of 475 and 2500 years for the entire study area are presented in this work. The peak ground acceleration (PGA) values at ground surface level were estimated based on different NEHRP site classes by considering local site effects.

Scale-dependent relationships between tree species richness and ecosystem function in forests

1. The relationship between species richness and ecosystem function, as measured by productivity or biomass, is of long-standing theoretical and practical interest in ecology. This is especially true for forests, which represent a majority of global biomass, productivity and biodiversity. 2. Here, we conduct an analysis of relationships between tree species richness, biomass and productivity in 25 forest plots of area 8-50ha from across the world. The data were collected using standardized protocols, obviating the need to correct for methodological differences that plague many studies on this topic. 3. We found that at very small spatial grains (0.04ha) species richness was generally positively related to productivity and biomass within plots, with a doubling of species richness corresponding to an average 48% increase in productivity and 53% increase in biomass. At larger spatial grains (0.25ha, 1ha), results were mixed, with negative relationships becoming more common. The results were qualitatively similar but much weaker when we controlled for stem density: at the 0.04ha spatial grain, a doubling of species richness corresponded to a 5% increase in productivity and 7% increase in biomass. Productivity and biomass were themselves almost always positively related at all spatial grains. 4. Synthesis. This is the first cross-site study of the effect of tree species richness on forest biomass and productivity that systematically varies spatial grain within a controlled methodology. The scale-dependent results are consistent with theoretical models in which sampling effects and niche complementarity dominate at small scales, while environmental gradients drive patterns at large scales. Our study shows that the relationship of tree species richness with biomass and productivity changes qualitatively when moving from scales typical of forest surveys (0.04ha) to slightly larger scales (0.25 and 1ha). This needs to be recognized in forest conservation policy and management.