Combining ability, genetic diversity and heterosis in relation to F1 performance of tropically adapted shrunken (sh2) sweet corn lines

With 6 tables Abstract The objectives of this study were to evaluate the importance of heterosis for agronomic and quality traits in shrunken (sh2) sweet corn, assess the usefulness of combining ability to predict the value of parents and their crosses for further genetic improvement and examine whether genetic divergence can predict heterosis or F1 performance. Ten genetically diverse shrunken (sh2) sweet corn inbred lines were used to generate 45 F1s. F1s and parents were evaluated for agronomic and quality traits across environments. Heterosis was more important for yield-related traits than it was for ear aspects and eating quality. Heterosis for most traits was mostly dependent on dominance genetic effects of parental lines. Parents and F1per se performance were highly correlated with general combining ability effects and mid-parent values, respectively, for most traits. Hybrid performance for flavour and plant height was significantly but weakly related to simple sequence repeat (SSR)-based genetic distance (GD). Phenotypic distance (PD), estimated from phenotypic traits was correlated with heterosis for total soluble solids, ear length and flavour. © 2012 State of Queensland.

Valuation of reduced eutrophication in the Gulf of Finland : Choice experiment with attention to heterogeneous and discontinuous preferences and respondent uncertainty

Eutrophication of the Baltic Sea is a serious problem. This thesis estimates the benefit to Finns from reduced eutrophication in the Gulf of Finland, the most eutrophied part of the Baltic Sea, by applying the choice experiment method, which belongs to the family of stated preference methods. Because stated preference methods have been subject to criticism, e.g., due to their hypothetical survey context, this thesis contributes to the discussion by studying two anomalies that may lead to biased welfare estimates: respondent uncertainty and preference discontinuity. The former refers to the difficulty of stating one s preferences for an environmental good in a hypothetical context. The latter implies a departure from the continuity assumption of conventional consumer theory, which forms the basis for the method and the analysis. In the three essays of the thesis, discrete choice data are analyzed with the multinomial logit and mixed logit models. On average, Finns are willing to contribute to the water quality improvement. The probability for willingness increases with residential or recreational contact with the gulf, higher than average income, younger than average age, and the absence of dependent children in the household. On average, for Finns the relatively most important characteristic of water quality is water clarity followed by the desire for fewer occurrences of blue-green algae. For future nutrient reduction scenarios, the annual mean household willingness to pay estimates range from 271 to 448 and the aggregate welfare estimates for Finns range from 28 billion to 54 billion euros, depending on the model and the intensity of the reduction. Out of the respondents (N=726), 72.1% state in a follow-up question that they are either Certain or Quite certain about their answer when choosing the preferred alternative in the experiment. Based on the analysis of other follow-up questions and another sample (N=307), 10.4% of the respondents are identified as potentially having discontinuous preferences. In relation to both anomalies, the respondent- and questionnaire-specific variables are found among the underlying causes and a departure from standard analysis may improve the model fit and the efficiency of estimates, depending on the chosen modeling approach. The introduction of uncertainty about the future state of the Gulf increases the acceptance of the valuation scenario which may indicate an increased credibility of a proposed scenario. In conclusion, modeling preference heterogeneity is an essential part of the analysis of discrete choice data. The results regarding uncertainty in stating one s preferences and non-standard choice behavior are promising: accounting for these anomalies in the analysis may improve the precision of the estimates of benefit from reduced eutrophication in the Gulf of Finland.

Low-frequency dielectric constant measurements in the critical polar + non-polar binary liquid system: Methanol + n-heptane

The low-frequency (5–100 kHz) dielectric constant epsilon (Porson) has been measured in the temperature range 7 × 10−5 < t = (T − Tc)/Tc < 8 × 10−2. Near Tc an exponent ≈0.11 characterizes the power law behaviour of Image consistent with the theoretically predicted t−α singularity. However, over the full range of t an exponent ≈0.35 is obtained.

The Spin-Statistics Relation and Noncommutative Quantum Field Theory

The efforts of combining quantum theory with general relativity have been great and marked by several successes. One field where progress has lately been made is the study of noncommutative quantum field theories that arise as a low energy limit in certain string theories. The idea of noncommutativity comes naturally when combining these two extremes and has profound implications on results widely accepted in traditional, commutative, theories. In this work I review the status of one of the most important connections in physics, the spin-statistics relation. The relation is deeply ingrained in our reality in that it gives us the structure for the periodic table and is of crucial importance for the stability of all matter. The dramatic effects of noncommutativity of space-time coordinates, mainly the loss of Lorentz invariance, call the spin-statistics relation into question. The spin-statistics theorem is first presented in its traditional setting, giving a clarifying proof starting from minimal requirements. Next the notion of noncommutativity is introduced and its implications studied. The discussion is essentially based on twisted Poincaré symmetry, the space-time symmetry of noncommutative quantum field theory. The controversial issue of microcausality in noncommutative quantum field theory is settled by showing for the first time that the light wedge microcausality condition is compatible with the twisted Poincaré symmetry. The spin-statistics relation is considered both from the point of view of braided statistics, and in the traditional Lagrangian formulation of Pauli, with the conclusion that Pauli's age-old theorem stands even this test so dramatic for the whole structure of space-time.

Huffman Binary Coding of WLN Symbols for File-Compression

Construction of Huffman binary codes for WLN symbols is described for the compression of a WLN file. Here, a parenthesized representation of the tree structure is used for computer encoding.

Einstein relation in n-i-p-i and microstructures of nonlinear optical, optoelectronic and related materials: Simplified theory, relative comparison and suggestions for an experimental determination

We investigate the Einstein relation for the diffusivity-mobility ratio (DMR) for n-i-p-i and the microstructures of nonlinear optical compounds on the basis of a newly formulated electron dispersion law. The corresponding results for III-V, ternary and quaternary materials form a special case of our generalized analysis. The respective DMRs for II-VI, IV-VI and stressed materials have been studied. It has been found that taking CdGeAs2, Cd3As2, InAs, InSb, Hg1−xCdxTe, In1−xGaxAsyP1−y lattices matched to InP, CdS, PbTe, PbSnTe and Pb1−xSnxSe and stressed InSb as examples that the DMR increases with increasing electron concentration in various manners with different numerical magnitudes which reflect the different signatures of the n-i-p-i systems and the corresponding microstructures. We have suggested an experimental method of determining the DMR in this case and the present simplified analysis is in agreement with the suggested relationship. In addition, our results find three applications in the field of quantum effect devices.

Activity recognition using binary tree SVM

This paper presents an effective classification method based on Support Vector Machines (SVM) in the context of activity recognition. Local features that capture both spatial and temporal information in activity videos have made significant progress recently. Efficient and effective features, feature representation and classification plays a crucial role in activity recognition. For classification, SVMs are popularly used because of their simplicity and efficiency; however the common multi-class SVM approaches applied suffer from limitations including having easily confused classes and been computationally inefficient. We propose using a binary tree SVM to address the shortcomings of multi-class SVMs in activity recognition. We proposed constructing a binary tree using Gaussian Mixture Models (GMM), where activities are repeatedly allocated to subnodes until every new created node contains only one activity. Then, for each internal node a separate SVM is learned to classify activities, which significantly reduces the training time and increases the speed of testing compared to popular the `one-against-the-rest' multi-class SVM classifier. Experiments carried out on the challenging and complex Hollywood dataset demonstrates comparable performance over the baseline bag-of-features method.

Efficient search for statistically significant dependency rules in binary data

Analyzing statistical dependencies is a fundamental problem in all empirical science. Dependencies help us understand causes and effects, create new scientific theories, and invent cures to problems. Nowadays, large amounts of data is available, but efficient computational tools for analyzing the data are missing. In this research, we develop efficient algorithms for a commonly occurring search problem - searching for the statistically most significant dependency rules in binary data. We consider dependency rules of the form X->A or X->not A, where X is a set of positive-valued attributes and A is a single attribute. Such rules describe which factors either increase or decrease the probability of the consequent A. A classical example are genetic and environmental factors, which can either cause or prevent a disease. The emphasis in this research is that the discovered dependencies should be genuine - i.e. they should also hold in future data. This is an important distinction from the traditional association rules, which - in spite of their name and a similar appearance to dependency rules - do not necessarily represent statistical dependencies at all or represent only spurious connections, which occur by chance. Therefore, the principal objective is to search for the rules with statistical significance measures. Another important objective is to search for only non-redundant rules, which express the real causes of dependence, without any occasional extra factors. The extra factors do not add any new information on the dependence, but can only blur it and make it less accurate in future data. The problem is computationally very demanding, because the number of all possible rules increases exponentially with the number of attributes. In addition, neither the statistical dependency nor the statistical significance are monotonic properties, which means that the traditional pruning techniques do not work. As a solution, we first derive the mathematical basis for pruning the search space with any well-behaving statistical significance measures. The mathematical theory is complemented by a new algorithmic invention, which enables an efficient search without any heuristic restrictions. The resulting algorithm can be used to search for both positive and negative dependencies with any commonly used statistical measures, like Fisher's exact test, the chi-squared measure, mutual information, and z scores. According to our experiments, the algorithm is well-scalable, especially with Fisher's exact test. It can easily handle even the densest data sets with 10000-20000 attributes. Still, the results are globally optimal, which is a remarkable improvement over the existing solutions. In practice, this means that the user does not have to worry whether the dependencies hold in future data or if the data still contains better, but undiscovered dependencies.

The new binary pulsar and the observation of gravitational spin precession

The possibility of observing gravitational spin precession due to spin-orbit coupling in a binary pulsar system is considered. An analysis is presented which can aid in delineating the relevant physical effects from pulse-structure data. In this analysis, it is assumed that the pulsar radiation emanates from a cone whose axis is tilted with respect to the axis of rotation. It is found that the time-averaged pulse width and polarization sweep vary periodically with time and that this variation has a periodicity of the order of the spin-precession frequency averaged over a complete revolution. It is concluded that for an orbital period of about 180 years, it suffices to measure polarization data with an accuracy of a few parts in 100 over a period of six months to a year in order to uncover the effects of spin precession. The consistency of the analysis is checked, and the calculations are applied to a recently discovered binary pulsar.

Quantization noise in binary holograms

The signal-to-noise (S/N) ratio in the reconstructed image from a binary hologram has been quantitatively related to the amplitude and phase quantization levels. The S/N ratio increases monotonically with increasing number of quantization levels. This observation is further supported by experimental results.

A Floor Control Server in a Distributed Conference Service

The conferencing systems in IP Multimedia (IM) networks are going through restructuring, accomplished in the near future. One of the changes introduced is the concept of floors and floor control in its current form with matching entity roles. The Binary Floor Control Protocol (BFCP) is a novelty to be exploited in distributed tightly coupled conferencing services. The protocol defines the floor control server (FCS), which implements floor control giving access to shared resources. As the newest tendency is to distribute the conferencing services, the locations of different functionality units play an important role in developing the standards. The floor control server location is not yet single-mindedly fixed in different standardization bodies, and the debate goes on where to place it within the media server, providing the conferencing service. The thesis main objective is to evaluate two distinctive alternatives in respect the Mp interface protocol between the respective nodes, as the interface in relation to floor control is under standardization work at the moment. The thesis gives a straightforward preamble in IMS network, nodes of interest including floor control server and conferencing. Knowledge on several protocols – BFCP, SDP, SIP and H.248 provides an important background for understanding the functionality changes introduced in the Mp interface and therefore introductions on those protocols and how they are connected to the full picture is given. The actual analysis on the impact of the floor control server into the Mp reference point is concluded in relation to the locations, giving basic flows, requirements analysis including a limited implementation proposal on supporting protocol parameters. The overall conclusion of the thesis is that even if both choices are seemingly useful, not one of the locations is clearly the most suitable in the light of this work. The thesis suggests a solution having both possibilities available to be chosen from in separate circumstances, realized with consistent standardization. It is evident, that if the preliminary assumption for the analysis is kept regarding to only one right place for the floor control server, more work is to be done in connected areas to discover the one most appropriate location.

Critical Exponent β and Rectilinear Diameter of the Binary-Liquid System Carbon Disulfide + Nitromethane

The system CS2 + CH3NO2 shows β=0.315±0.004 over 10-6<ε=|T-Tc| / Tc<2�10-1 with no indication of a classical value ½ even far away from Tc. The diameter shows a curvature and is of the form �c+b ε+fε7 / 8exp(-gεh).