Short-term effect of targeted placements of sheep excrement on grassland in inner mongolia on soil and plant parameters

Grazing animal excrement plays an important role in nutrient cycling and redistribution in grazing ecosystems, due to grazing in large areas and return in small areas. To elucidate the changes to the soil and pasture caused by sheep urine, fresh dung, and compost patches, a short- term field experiment using artificially placed pats was set up in the autumn of 2003 in the Inner Mongolian steppe. Urine application significantly increased soil pH during the first 32 days in soil layers at depths of both 0 - 5 cm and 5 - 15 cm. Rapid hydrolysis of urea gave large amounts of urine- nitrogen ( N) as ammonium ( NH4+) in soil extracts and was followed by apparent nitrification from day 2. Higher inorganic N content in the urine- treated soil was found throughout the experiment compared with the control. No significant effects of sheep excrement on soil microbial carbon ( C) and soil microbial N was found, but microbial activities significantly increased compared with the control after application of sheep excrement. Forty- six percent of dung- N and 27% of compost- N were transferred into vegetation after the experiment. The results from this study suggest that large amounts of nutrients have been lost from the returned excrement patches in the degraded grassland of Inner Mongolia, especially from sheep urine- N.

东天山后碰撞镁铁-超镁铁岩镍铜硫化物矿床PGE地球化学示踪与富集规律研究

Eastern Tianshan area, a Paleozoic complex trench-arc-basin system, experienced multi-period sudbuction and collision in geological history. A large number of Early Permian mafic-ultramafic intrusions emplaced along deep faults in post-collision extension tectonic stage and hosted a series of magmatic Cu-Ni sulfide deposits. This paper sets newly-discovered Tianyu magmatic Cu-Ni sulfide deposit related to small intrusion as an example. On basis of the study of ore-forming mechanism of Cu-Ni deposit, we compared PGE content and discussed enrichment mechanism and regularity of mafic-ultramafic rocks and ores in Jueluotage tectonic belt and Central Tianshan Massif. PGE and Cu, Ni, S contents correlate with each other. PGE is mainly controlled by S content.Samilar PGE distribution patterns of mafic-ultramafic show that complex originated from the same parental magma; Pd/Ir and Ni/Cu ratios indicate that high-Mg basaltic magma and deep sulfide segregation happened during magma evolution process. PGE and Cu-Ni ores are enriched in liquid sulfide and only individual samples completely control by monosulfide solid solution. Comparison of all control factors, early segregation of sulfide and quality of supply of magma may be the key factors leading to the Eastern Tianshan magmatic copper-nickel sulfide deposits don’t reach PGE grade, but we do not rule out the possibility of occurrence continuous mafic-ultramafic rocks and PGE-rich layer in deep.

非饱和膨胀土力学特性及其工程处置研究

The unsaturated expansive soil is a hotspot and difficulty in soil mechanics inland and outland. The expansive soil in our China is one of the widest in distributing and greatest in area, and the disaster of expansive soil happens continually as a result. The soil mechanics test, monitor, numerical simulation and engineering practice are used to research swell and shrinkage characteristic, edge strength characteristic and unsaturated strength characteristic of Mengzi expansive soil. The seep and stability of the slope for expansive soil associated with fissure are analyzed and two kinds of new technique are put forward to be used in expansive soil area, based on disaster mechnics proposed of the slope.The technique of reinforcement in road embankment is optimized also. Associated with engineering geology research of Mengzi expansive soil, mineral composition, chemical composition, specific area and cation content, dissolubility salt and agglutinate, microcosmic fabric characteristic, cause of formation and atmosphere effect depth are analyzed to explain the intrinsic cause and essence of swell and shrinkage for expansive soil. The rule between swell-shrinkage and initial state, namely initial water content, initial dry density and initial pressure, can be used to construction control. Does Response model is fit to simulate the rule, based on ternary regression analysis. It has great meaning to expansive soil engineering in area with salt or alkali. The mechanics under CD, CU and GCU of expansive soil is researched by edge surface theory to explain the remarkable effect of consolidation pressure, initial dry density, initial water content, cut velocity, drainage and reinforcement to the edge strength characteristic. The infirm hardening stress strain curves can be fitted with hyperbola model and the infirm softening curves can be fitted with exponential model. The normalization theory can be used to reveal the intrinsic unity of the otherness which is brought by different methods to the shear strength of the same kinds of samples. The unsaturated strain softening characteristic and strength envelope of remolding samples are researched by triaxial shear test based on suction controlled, the result of which is simulated by exponential function. The strength parameters of the unsaturated samples are obtained to be used in the unsaturated seep associated with rainfall. The elasticity and plasticity characters of expansive soil are researched to attain the model parameters by using modified G-A model. The humidification destroy characteristic of expansive soil is discussed to research the disaster mechanism of the slope with the back pressure increasing and suction decreasing under bias pressure consolidation. The indoor and outdoor SWCCs are measured to research the effect factors and the rule between different stress and filling environment. The moisture absorption curves can express the relationship between suction and water content in locale. The SWCCs of Mengzi expansive soil are measured by GDS stress path trixial system. The unsaturated infiltration function is gained to research seep and stability of the slope of expansive soil. The rainfall infiltration and ability of slope considering multifarious factors are studied by analyzing fissure cause of Mengzi expansive soil. The mechanism of the slope disaster is brought forward by the double controlling effect between suction and fissure. Two new kinds of technique are put forward to resolve disaster of expansive soil and the technique of reinforcement on embankment is optimized, which gives a useful help to solving engineering trouble.

Pose-Invariant Face Recognition Using Real and Virtual Views

The problem of automatic face recognition is to visually identify a person in an input image. This task is performed by matching the input face against the faces of known people in a database of faces. Most existing work in face recognition has limited the scope of the problem, however, by dealing primarily with frontal views, neutral expressions, and fixed lighting conditions. To help generalize existing face recognition systems, we look at the problem of recognizing faces under a range of viewpoints. In particular, we consider two cases of this problem: (i) many example views are available of each person, and (ii) only one view is available per person, perhaps a driver's license or passport photograph. Ideally, we would like to address these two cases using a simple view-based approach, where a person is represented in the database by using a number of views on the viewing sphere. While the view-based approach is consistent with case (i), for case (ii) we need to augment the single real view of each person with synthetic views from other viewpoints, views we call 'virtual views'. Virtual views are generated using prior knowledge of face rotation, knowledge that is 'learned' from images of prototype faces. This prior knowledge is used to effectively rotate in depth the single real view available of each person. In this thesis, I present the view-based face recognizer, techniques for synthesizing virtual views, and experimental results using real and virtual views in the recognizer.

Computer Recognition of Prismatic Solids

An investigation is made into the problem of constructing a model of the appearance to an optical input device of scenes consisting of plane-faced geometric solids. The goal is to study algorithms which find the real straight edges in the scenes, taking into account smooth variations in intensity over faces of the solids, blurring of edges and noise. A general mathematical analysis is made of optimal methods for identifying the edge lines in figures, given a raster of intensities covering the entire field of view. There is given in addition a suboptimal statistical decision procedure, based on the model, for the identification of a line within a narrow band on the field of view given an array of intensities from within the band. A computer program has been written and extensively tested which implements this procedure and extracts lines from real scenes. Other programs were written which judge the completeness of extracted sets of lines, and propose and test for additional lines which had escaped initial detection. The performance of these programs is discussed in relation to the theory derived from the model, and with regard to their use of global information in detecting and proposing lines.

A produção integrada de soja.

O que é produção integrada? A regulamentação da produção integrada; Situação atual da produção integrada no Brasil; Resultados obtidos no projeto produção integrada de soja na safra 2006/07; Monitoramento da fertilidade do solo; Monitoramento da matéria orgânica e atributos físicos do solo; Manejo de invasoras; Manejo integrado de doenças; Manejo integrado de pragas; Análise de micotoxinas em grãos de soja; Análise de resíduos de agrotóxicos em grãos de soja.

Avaliação de danos de uma exploração florestal em área de reserva legal no projeto de colonização Pedro Peixoto, Acre.

A Embrapa Acre iniciou, em meados de 1995, um projeto de manejo florestal sustentado para pequenas propriedades, tendo como principal característica a prescrição de uma intervenção de baixo impacto sobre a floresta por meio de "métodos artesanais" de exploração de madeira. Estes métodos consideram os poucos recursos materiais de que dispõem os pequenos produtores.

The Jews in the Modern World : A History Since 1750

Rubinstein, William, et al., The Jews in the Modern World: A History Since 1750 (London: Hodder and Arnold, 2002), pp.xiv+449 RAE2008

Seven years among the Freedmen [electronic resource] / M. Waterbury

http://www.archive.org/details/sevenyearsamong00waterich/

The day-breaking, if not the sun-rising of the Gospell with the Indians in New-England.

University of California Libraries

Explaining World Wide Web Traffic Self-Similarity

Recently the notion of self-similarity has been shown to apply to wide-area and local-area network traffic. In this paper we examine the mechanisms that give rise to self-similar network traffic. We present an explanation for traffic self-similarity by using a particular subset of wide area traffic: traffic due to the World Wide Web (WWW). Using an extensive set of traces of actual user executions of NCSA Mosaic, reflecting over half a million requests for WWW documents, we show evidence that WWW traffic is self-similar. Then we show that the self-similarity in such traffic can be explained based on the underlying distributions of WWW document sizes, the effects of caching and user preference in file transfer, the effect of user "think time", and the superimposition of many such transfers in a local area network. To do this we rely on empirically measured distributions both from our traces and from data independently collected at over thirty WWW sites.

Visible Volume: a Robust Measure for Protein Structure Characterization

We propose a new characterization of protein structure based on the natural tetrahedral geometry of the β carbon and a new geometric measure of structural similarity, called visible volume. In our model, the side-chains are replaced by an ideal tetrahedron, the orientation of which is fixed with respect to the backbone and corresponds to the preferred rotamer directions. Visible volume is a measure of the non-occluded empty space surrounding each residue position after the side-chains have been removed. It is a robust, parameter-free, locally-computed quantity that accounts for many of the spatial constraints that are of relevance to the corresponding position in the native structure. When computing visible volume, we ignore the nature of both the residue observed at each site and the ones surrounding it. We focus instead on the space that, together, these residues could occupy. By doing so, we are able to quantify a new kind of invariance beyond the apparent variations in protein families, namely, the conservation of the physical space available at structurally equivalent positions for side-chain packing. Corresponding positions in native structures are likely to be of interest in protein structure prediction, protein design, and homology modeling. Visible volume is related to the degree of exposure of a residue position and to the actual rotamers in native proteins. In this article, we discuss the properties of this new measure, namely, its robustness with respect to both crystallographic uncertainties and naturally occurring variations in atomic coordinates, and the remarkable fact that it is essentially independent of the choice of the parameters used in calculating it. We also show how visible volume can be used to align protein structures, to identify structurally equivalent positions that are conserved in a family of proteins, and to single out positions in a protein that are likely to be of biological interest. These properties qualify visible volume as a powerful tool in a variety of applications, from the detailed analysis of protein structure to homology modeling, protein structural alignment, and the definition of better scoring functions for threading purposes.

Small angle scattering characterisation of micellar systems and templated architectures

The work described in this thesis reports the structural changes induced on micelles under a variety of conditions. The micelles of a liquid crystal film and dilute solutions of micelles were subjected to high pressure CO2 and selected hydrocarbon environments. Using small angle neutron scattering (SANS) techniques the spacing between liquid crystal micelles was measured in-situ. The liquid crystals studied were templated from different surfactants with varying structural characteristics. Micelles of a dilute surfactant solution were also subjected to elevated pressures of varying gas atmospheres. Detailed modelling of the in-situ SANS experiments revealed information of the size and shape of the micelles at a number of different pressures. Also reported in this thesis is the characterisation of mesoporous materials in the confined channels of larger porous materials. Periodic mesoporous organosilicas (PMOs) were synthesised within the channels of anodic alumina membranes (AAM) under different conditions, including drying rates and precursor concentrations. In-situ small angle x-ray scattering (SAXS) and transmission electron microscopy (TEM) was used to determine the pore morphology of the PMO within the AAM channels. PMO materials were also used as templates in the deposition of gold nanoparticles and subsequently used in the synthesis of germanium nanostructures. Polymer thin films were also employed as templates for the directed deposition of gold nanoparticles which were again used as seeds for the production of germanium nanostructures. A supercritical CO2 (sc-CO2) technique was successfully used during the production of the germanium nanostructures.

Identification of RNA editing in the human exome and development of DARNED DatabaseSF

RNA editing is a biological phenomena that alters nascent RNA transcripts by insertion, deletion and/or substitution of one or a few nucleotides. It is ubiquitous in all kingdoms of life and in viruses. The predominant editing event in organisms with a developed central nervous system is Adenosine to Inosine deamination. Inosine is recognized as Guanosine by the translational machinery and reverse-transcriptase. In primates, RNA editing occurs frequently in transcripts from repetitive regions of the genome. In humans, more than 500,000 editing instances have been identified, by applying computational pipelines on available ESTs and high-throughput sequencing data, and by using chemical methods. However, the functions of only a small number of cases have been studied thoroughly. RNA editing instances have been found to have roles in peptide variants synthesis by non-synonymous codon substitutions, transcript variants by alterations in splicing sites and gene silencing by miRNAs sequence modifications. We established the Database of RNA EDiting (DARNED) to accommo-date the reference genomic coordinates of substitution editing in human, mouse and fly transcripts from published literatures, with additional information on edited genomic coordinates collected from various databases e.g. UCSC, NCBI. DARNED contains mostly Adenosine to Inosine editing and allows searches based on genomic region, gene ID, and user provided sequence. The Database is accessible at http://darned.ucc.ie RNA editing instances in coding region are likely to result in recoding in protein synthesis. This encouraged me to focus my research on the occurrences of RNA editing specific CDS and non-Alu exonic regions. By applying various filters on discrepancies between available ESTs and their corresponding reference genomic sequences, putative RNA editing candidates were identified. High-throughput sequencing was used to validate these candidates. All predicted coordinates appeared to be either SNPs or unedited.

REQUIRED VIOLA REPERTOIRE FOR THE PRIMROSE COMPETITION AND THE TERTIS COMPETITION

William Primrose (1903-1982) and Lionel Tertis (1876-1975) made the viola a grand instrument for public performances of solo and chamber music throughout their long and active lives characterized by a common passion for the viola. I, too, have been deeply inspired by their passion for the viola. I chose, therefore, for my doctoral performance project to feature works for viola from the required repertoire of the William Primrose and Lionel Tertis competitions of 2001 and 2003, respectively. For purposes of the performances, I divided selections from the combined repertoire for the William Primrose and Lionel Tertis competitions into three recitals. The first recital included Sonata, Opus 120, No.2 in E-flat Major (1894) by Johannes Brahms; Sonata, Opus 147 (1975) by Dmitri Shostakovich; and Sonata (1919) by Rebecca Clarke. These pieces represent standard components of the general repertoire for both the Primrose and Tertis competitions. The second recital was comprised of two works dedicated by their composers to Primrose: Lachrymae, Opus 48 (1950) by Benjamin Britten; and Concerto (1945) by Bela Bartok. The third recital included three pieces dedicated by their composers to Tertis: Sonata (1922) by Arnold Bax; Sonata in C Minor (1905) by York Bowen; and Sonata (1952) by Arthur Bliss. The goal of my preparation for these recitals was to emphasize a variety of techniques and, also, the unique timbre of the viola. For example, the works I selected emphasized high-position technique, which was not much used before the nineteenth century, and featured the lowest string (the C-string), which provides a beautifully somber and austere sonority characteristic of the viola. For these reasons, the selected works provided not only attractive and interesting pieces to study and perform but were also of educational merit.