Experiments were conducted in controlled-environment cabinets to show the effect of temperature and light intensity on the growth and fruiting of snap beans. Leaf weights varied inversely with the temperature, but stem weights and numbers of nodes were not greatly affected by day temperature in the range of 75° to 95°F. Blossoming and pod set were similar at day temperatures of 75° and 85°F but were reduced at 95°F. When day temperature was 95°F, a 60°F night temperature resulted in increased blossoming and pod set compared to 80°F. When pods were harvested at marketable maturity, blossoming in bush beans was cyclic. Plants grown at a light intensity of 1900 foot-candles had a lower fresh and dry weight of leaves, stems, and pods, and fewer blossoms and pods set than plants grown at 2700 and 4000 foot-candles. Field experiments showed that planting dates after May 29 reduced the yield of pods in pole beans. Nitrogen level and row direction did not affect yield of pods in pole beans. Number of pods per plant in pole beans increased directly with the row spacing. Chemical sprays at blossoming caused no increase in yield of pods in pole beans, and only a slight increase in the yield of pods in bush beans. Differences in yields of pods between varieties of bush beans were due differences in the number of pods per plant. / Land and Food Systems, Faculty of / Graduate

The diploma thesis gives an outline of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) of the European Union and the Czech Republic, a member state of the EU. The definitions provided include principles, objectives and the nature and function of the CAP. Individual subchapters contain summary of the reform which the agricultural policy must have gone through throughout its development; also the summary explains the system of how the EU is funding and have funded the CAP in the course of history and today. Further, the thesis dwells on analyzing the agricultural development in the Czech Republic before and after the CAP principles have been applied. The analysis focuses on the agricultural sector from the point of view of employment of labour, soil fund, and selected commodities. Next, the thesis describes the Rural Development Policy in the Czech Republic as outlined and implemented for the period between 2007-2013. The comparative analysis comprises selected products of livestock production carried out in the Czech Republic and in the EU. The last chapter analyzes commodities that include wine and grape-vine, and common agricultural organization of the European wine market, and the Czech wine market itself.

Implementation of previous U.S. standards-based education initiatives has been challenging due to, among other issues, the lack of common and consistent meaning of ‘proficiency’ among states. Implementing new education standards for educators means undertaking actions to understand the skills to be taught, develop curriculum, make curriculum more accessible to students, and effectively assess the skills being taught. This single-site qualitative collective case study investigated how three secondary in-service teachers and one secondary student teacher navigated implementation of the Common Core State Standards in a Midwestern rural secondary school.

Viruses are unique organisms that lack the protein machinery necessary for its propagation (like polymerase) yet possess other proteins that facilitate its propagation (like host cell anchoring proteins). This study explores seven different frameworks to assist rapid visualization of proteins that are common to viruses residing in a given host. The proposed frameworks rely only on protein sequence information. It was found that the sequence similarity-based framework with an associated profile hidden Markov model was a better tool to assist visualization of proteins common to a given host than other proposed frameworks based only on amino acid composition or other amino acid properties. The lack of knowledge of profile hidden Markov models for many protein structures limit the utility of the proposed protein sequence similarity-based framework. The study concludes with an attempt to extrapolate the utility of the proposed framework to predict viruses that may pose potential human health risks.

These diploma thesis is focussed on process modyfying of radial outlet drilling of Common Rail System. Introductory part koncern with theoretical system analysis from the point of historical and technical view. It follow elaborate validation plan for assigned problem. Next point is Practically elaborate solution. Final part include evaluation from the point of economical view.

No abstract available / Dissertation (LLM)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Mercantile Law / unrestricted

Drought causes considerable reduction of legume productivity and significantly threatens the food security, and this situation is expected to be aggravated due to climate change. In soybean and common bean, water resource capturing through plant root architectural plasticity and the role of symbiotic nitrogen fixation have not been investigated in greater detail yet. This study was therefore conducted to identify and apply useful morphological and physiological performance markers (traits) for selection of drought-tolerant common bean and soybean cultivars under both controlled phytotron and field conditions that might be applicable as markers in future legume breeding programs. In soybean, traits related to above ground performance, such as photosynthesis, biomasses, and stomatal conductance, were related to parameters for nitrogen acquisition in nodules. The ability to maintain vigorous shoot growth under drought-induced nitrogen limitation was identified as an important trait that can be used to select for improved drought tolerance. Further, experiments carried out growing different common bean inbred lines under controlled phytotron conditions revealed the importance of growth and gas exchange parameters as well as nitrogen fixing ability as performance markers to select superior performing bean lines for growth under drought. As a further result, the strong association of symbiotic nitrogen fixation with CO2 assimilation and stomatal conductance was also ascertained. In field experiments the effective use of water through enhanced lateral root development and maintaining the water status of the plant was found to be crucial for enhanced productivity under drought, with root morphology traits (root length, area and volume) as well as root architectural traits (first whorl angle, basal root number and adventitious root branching density) significantly related to seed yield. Measurement of these traits might be added to future bean varietal improvement programs. Further, a direct relationship between both water use efficiency (WUE) estimated using carbon isotope discrimination (CID) and nitrogen fixation (15N abundance) with root morphological and architectural traits (root length, area and volume, basal root number, 1st as well as 2nd whorl angles) was identified. CID (WUE) and 15N abundance (SNF ability) had a direct relationship with each other and also with productivity traits (seed yield and pod harvest index). Soybean field experiments verified the importance of root system architecture and morphology for providing drought tolerance with root architectural traits, tap and lateral roots (diameter and branching density) and morphological traits (root length, surface area and volume) contributing to better performance under drought. Moreover, the strong association of CID (WUE) with ä15N (SNF), root traits as well as seed yield in soybean exposed to drought was ascertained. Findings suggested that higher performance in CID under drought stress may be due to higher CO2 assimilation and better N2 fixation resulting in better root system architecture and morphology of the drought-tolerant cultivar through maintenance of the water status of the plant for efficient biological activity. Overall the study has generated new knowledge about the use of physiological markers (traits) that can be used widely for legume evaluation under drought suitable for both phytotron and field studies. / Thesis (PhD)--University of Pretoria, 2012. / Plant Science / unrestricted

One of the long-standing problems in artificial intelligence is the development of intelligent agents with complete visual understanding. Understanding entails recognition of scene attributes such as actors, objects and actions as well as reasoning about the common semantic structure that combines these attributes into a coherent description. While significant milestones have been achieved in the field of computer vision, majority of the work has been concentrated on supervised visual recognition where complex visual representations are learned and a few discrete categories or labels are assigned to these representations. This implies a closed world where the underlying assumption is that all environments contain the same objects and events, which are in one-to-one correspondence with the ground evidence in the image. Hence, the learned knowledge is limited to the annotated training set. An open world, on the other hand, does not assume the distribution of semantics and requires generalization beyond the training annotations. Increasingly complex models require massive amounts of training data and offer little to no explainability due to the lack of transparency in the decision-making process. The strength of artificial intelligence systems to offer explanations for their decisions is central to building user confidence and structuring smart human-machine interactions. In this dissertation, we develop an inherently explainable approach for generating rich interpretations of visual scenes. We move towards an open world open-domain visual understanding by decoupling the ideas of recognition and reasoning. We integrate common sense knowledge from large knowledge bases such as ConceptNet and the representation learning capabilities of deep learning approaches in a pattern theory formalism to interpret a complex visual scene. To be specific, we first define and develop the idea of contextualization to model and establish complex semantic relationships among concepts grounded in visual data. The resulting semantic structures, called interpretations allow us to represent the visual scene in an intermediate representation that can then be used as the source of knowledge for various modes of expression such as labels, captions and even question answering. Second, we explore the inherent explainability of such visual interpretations and define key components for extending the notion of explainability to intelligent agents for visual recognition. Finally, we describe a self-supervised model for segmenting untrimmed videos into its constituent events. We show that this approach can segment videos without the need for supervision - neither implicit nor explicit. Combined, we argue that these approaches offer an elegant path to inherently explainable, open domain visual understanding while negating the need for human supervision in the form of labels and/or captions. We show that the proposed approach can advance the state-of-the-art results in complex benchmarks to handle data imbalance, complex semantics, and complex visual scenes without the need for vast amounts of domain-specific training data. Extensive experiments on several publicly available datasets show the efficacy of the proposed approaches. We show that the proposed approaches outperform weakly-supervised and unsupervised baselines by up to 24% and achieves competitive segmentation results compared to fully supervised baselines. The self-supervised approach for video segmentation complements this top-down inference with efficient bottom-up processing, resulting in an elegant formalism for open-domain visual understanding.

Kunskapsbaserade stöd får en allt mer central roll inom vård och omsorg. De viktigaste rekommendationerna som idag finns är de nationella riktlinjerna som Socialstyrelsen har tagit fram. Som det ser ut idag används dessa i olika utsträckning inom primärvården runt om i Sverige och många landsting har sina egna varianter på kunskapsstöd. Därför ska ett nationellt kunskapsstöd utvecklas som alla kan ta del av för möjliggörande av att patienten får den bästa möjliga vården, vilket också ska leda till en mer jämlik vård i hela Sverige. I denna studie samlades information in om hur ett sådant stöd skulle kunna utformas via 8 intervjuer med läkare där resultatet sedan användes för att utforma en enkät som 16 personer inom primärvården från olika landsting besvarade. Enkäten behandlade frågor om hur de ville att informationen skulle presenteras och vilka huvudrubriker de ansåg vara viktigast i ett kunskapsstöd. Det visade sig att Behandling var den viktigaste huvudrubriken, att lättanvänt och pålitligt är viktiga egenskaper hos ett kunskapsstöd och att informationen ska presenteras kortfattat så att läkaren snabbt kan få en överblick av informationen då läkare ofta har tidsbrist.

Ensyeh Sarikhani Soil microbial communities in agroecosystems and natural habitats contributing to resistance and resilience of the soil environment. Summary The control of common scab of potatoes (CS) includes resistant varieties (cultivars), precise fertilization, increase of soil moisture, and chemical treatments. Yet, these management practices do not have common or reproducible results at differing sites. A monitoring study was done in 32 sites to evaluate the relation between CS and biological/chemical soil parameters. Correlations were observed between scab severity and content of nutrients such as Fe, N, and Ca in soil and periderm, and between disease severity and abundance of actinobacteria and total bacteria, together with the pathogenicity determinant, txtB gene (biosynthetic gene of thaxtomin) in both soil and periderm of potatoes. The findings led to novel conclusions, which can help to understand relationships applicable in scab control. Peat and DTPA chelated iron were supplemented to pots filled with soil conducive for CS in order to determine the effects of soil organic matter, iron and pH on CS development. The results were compared with data obtained for a suppressive soil from a nearby field with naturally low CS severity. Both peat and iron supplements decreased CS and the combination...