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Magister Scientiae (Biodiversity and Conservation Biology) / The last taxonomic treatment of the subtribe Anthosperminae Benth. (Rubiaceae, Rubioideae, Anthospermeae) was in 1986 by Puff., nevertheless, few attempts have been made to resolve the phylogeny and the inter- and infrageneric relationships within the subtribe. The genera Anthospermum L. (39 species) and Nenax Gaertn. (11 species) are considered the most difficult groups to distinguish. Anthospermum species are widely distributed in Sub-Saharan Africa and Madagascar with the highest concentration of taxa in southern Africa, while Nenax species are restricted to southern Africa, in the south-western Cape Floristic Region. The two genera share common morphological and anatomical characters such as the growth form, presence of hairs on the stem, leaf arrangement, presence of petioles, flowers formation, dehiscence and presence of carpophore in fruits. currently combination of characters, woody shrub, needle-like leaves, few-flowered inflorescence and dioecy are considered unique in Nenax. The most recent phylogenetic analysis based on molecular data indicated insights into generic relationships within the two genera and the subtribe Anthosperminae. The present study focussed on expanding the phylogenetic analysis of Anthospermum, Nenax and other genera within the subtribe, as well as assessing the value of selected morphological and anatomical characters for re-assesing generic circumscriptions. Phylogenetic relationships were analysed using Maximum Parsimony, Maximum Likelihood and Bayesian inference, and a Maximum Clade Credibility tree was produced. These analyses were based on both nuclear (ITS, ETS) and plastid (trnL-f, rps16, rpl32) datasets.

The current research built on Yan, Miller, Li, and Shu’s (2008) eye-tracking study, which examined how second grade native Chinese speakers focused on Pinyin and Chinese characters while reading sentences. This research also used eye-tracking to examine how Chinese foreign Language learners (CFL) fixated on Pinyin and Chinese characters to determine if Pinyin facilitated or distracted from character learning. Two groups participated in this research: first semester university students enrolled in a beginning level Chinese class, and third, fourth, and fifth grade students enrolled in Chinese dual language immersion (DLI). All participants were asked to read eight sentences in Chinese with Pinyin placed above the characters. These sentences included familiar, unfamiliar, and new characters based on the students’ curricula. Results indicated that the DLI students spent significantly more time and fixations on Pinyin than characters, whereas the first semester university students spent more time and fixations on unfamiliar and new characters than Pinyin. The students also completed a questionnaire about Pinyin, which showed that the majority of elementary students liked having Pinyin above the characters and did not think that Pinyin was distracting. A much smaller percentage of first semester university students liked having Pinyin above the characters, but the majority realized that it was distracting. It seems that the first semester university students used Pinyin as a tool, but the DLI students used it as a crutch. Pedagogical suggestions are provided.

This paper examined how well different levels of visual abstraction in 2D characters can be remediated into 3D, focusing on the viewer’s opinion of the character and perception of its role or personality. Artifacts of two characters—six artifacts in total—were used in order to examine this. Each character’s artifacts consisted of 1) a visually abstracted 2D design, 2) an abstraction-preserving 3D model, and 3) a non-abstraction-preserving 3D model. Six participants were interviewed, and were asked to state their opinion of each artifact as well as their interpretation of its role and personality. The results showed that a 2D to 3D remediation method aimed at preserving design choices either did not affect the viewer’sopinion of the character, or made them like the 3D character more than the 2D version. Furthermore, the perception of character personality had slight differences in the abstraction-preserving 3D model compared to the 2D image.

The assignment of genetic factors to definite loci in the hereditary mechanism has been a great step in the progress of biology. Of the cereal crops, barley (Hordeum sp.), a crop of economic importance, offers a superior opportunity for genetic studies. Its adaptation to wide varieties of conditions, with a wealth of easily differentiated characters and only seven pairs of chromosomes, the barley plant provides excellent material for linkage studies. Although there is a vast amount of literature dealing with inheritance in barley, yet knowledge of the subject is still very limited. The mode of inheritance of about one hundred characters has been studied and linkage relations of nearly thirty-five characters have been made. The location of a relatively large number of them is still unknown. All the seven linkage groups are established and distinct viable characters are available in six of them, although but few in some cases. The desirability of making further studies in this crop is quite apparent. This manuscript contains the results of observations and experiments with sixteen characters which include three new characters not reported in the literature. All character pairs in each cross studied were checked for possible linkages or independence. The importance of such a study in the future improvement of the barley crop needs no emphasis.

This research investigated issues related to normalizing punctuation marks from a text retrieval perspective. A punctuated-centric approach was undertaken by exploring changes in meanings, whitespaces, words retrievability, and other issues related to normalizing punctuation marks. To investigate punctuation normalization issues, various frequency counts of punctuation marks and punctuation patterns were conducted using the text drawn from the Gutenberg Project archive and the Usenet Newsgroup archive. A number of useful punctuation mark types that could aid in analyzing punctuation marks were discovered. This study identified two types of punctuation normalization procedures: (1) lexical independent (LI) punctuation normalization and (2) lexical oriented (LO) punctuation normalization. Using these two types of punctuation normalization procedures, this study discovered various effects of punctuation normalization in terms of different search query types. By analyzing the punctuation normalization problem in this manner, a wide range of issues were discovered such as: the need to define different types of searching, to disambiguate the role of punctuation marks, to normalize whitespaces, and indexing of punctuated terms. This study concluded that to achieve the most positive effect in a text retrieval environment, normalizing punctuation marks should be based on an extensive systematic analysis of punctuation marks and punctuation patterns and their related factors. The results of this study indicate that there were many challenges due to complexity of language. Further, this study recommends avoiding a simplistic approach to punctuation normalization.

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