Patterns in Estonian bogs as depicted in color kite aerial photographs

Tiivistelmä: Viron soiden pinnanmuodot värillisten leijailmakuvien valossa

Risk aversion and embedding bias

In Selten (1967) ?Strategy Method,? the second mover in the game submits a complete strategy. This basic idea has been exported to nonstrategic experiments, where a participant reports a complete list of contingent decisions, one for each situation or state in a given sequence, out of which one and only one state, randomly selected, will be implemented.In general, the method raises the following concern. If S0 and S1 are two differentsequences of states, and state s is in both S0 and S1, would the participant make the same decision in state s when confronted with S0 as when confronted with S1? If not, the experimental results are suspect of suffering from an ?embedding bias.?We check for embedding biases in elicitation methods of Charles Holt and Susan Laury(Laury and Holt, 2000, and Holt and Laury, 2002), and of the present authors (Bosch-Dom?nech and Silvestre, 1999, 2002, 2006a, b) by appropriately chosen replications of the original experiments. We find no evidence of embedding bias in our work. But in Holt and Laury?s method participants tend to switch earlier to the riskier option when later pairs of lotteries are eliminated from the sequence, suggesting the presence of some embedding bias.

Métodos não destrutivos para estimativa de densidade de área foliar em mangueira

O objetivo deste trabalho foi estimar o número de folhas de ramos do dossel de cultivares de mangueira e estimar a densidade de área foliar utilizando, respectivamente, uma relação alométrica e um modelo de interceptação de luz. O trabalho foi conduzido com as cultivares Alfa, Roxa e Malind, na fazenda experimental da Universidade Federal de Mato Grosso, no Município de Santo Antônio do Leverger, MT. As equações testadas para a determinação do número de folhas apresentaram desempenho ótimo, com índices de confiança que variaram entre 0,85 e 0,94, e podem ser utilizadas como alternativa para a estimativa da área foliar das três cultivares. O modelo de interceptação da luz também apresentou desempenho ótimo e bom na estimativa da densidade foliar, com índices de confiança que variaram entre 0,97 e 0,99 e 0,68 e 0,95 para as cultivares de mangueira Roxa e Malind, respectivamente.

Minimal requirements for parameters to be used for the development of predictive models for microbial source tracking. The example of the pair somatic coliphages and phages infecting Bacteroides

Several methods and approaches for measuring parameters to determine fecal sources of pollution in water have been developed in recent years. No single microbial or chemical parameter has proved sufficient to determine the source of fecal pollution. Combinations of parameters involving at least one discriminating indicator and one universal fecal indicator offer the most promising solutions for qualitative and quantitative analyses. The universal (nondiscriminating) fecal indicator provides quantitative information regarding the fecal load. The discriminating indicator contributes to the identification of a specific source. The relative values of the parameters derived from both kinds of indicators could provide information regarding the contribution to the total fecal load from each origin. It is also essential that both parameters characteristically persist in the environment for similar periods. Numerical analysis, such as inductive learning methods, could be used to select the most suitable and the lowest number of parameters to develop predictive models. These combinations of parameters provide information on factors affecting the models, such as dilution, specific types of animal source, persistence of microbial tracers, and complex mixtures from different sources. The combined use of the enumeration of somatic coliphages and the enumeration of Bacteroides-phages using different host specific strains (one from humans and another from pigs), both selected using the suggested approach, provides a feasible model for quantitative and qualitative analyses of fecal source identification.