The percentage of the population with visual impairments is increasing rapidly. Every year, the number of visually impaired people grows by up to 2 million worldwide. The World Health Organization (WHO, 2011) estimates that there are 39 million blind people and 246 million visually impaired people internationally. In addition, visual impairments are closely associated with aging. About 65% of t...

The deficiency in existing sugar cane crystallization automatic control system is difficult to measure some key parameters on line, such as mother liquor supersaturation, mother liquor purity, crystal content and crystal size distribution. Controlling brix with PID can only reflect the massecuite concentration of sugar cane crystallization process, but it is hard to guarantee the crystal qualit...

Results of nine post-emergence herbicide phytotoxicity experiments are reported. The experiments were conducted on medium to heavy soils at Pongola in the northern irrigated part of the industry or on light soils at Shakaskraal on the Natal north coast. Tests were conducted using the recommended rates of herbicide combinations and double these rates, applied directly over the sugarqane foliage ...

For a number of years there has been an ever increasing interest in mechanisation on sugar farms and estates. The interest was originally directed towards cultivation and planting. More recently transport methods have changed and the develop. ment in this direction will continue beyond the cane loader in which great interest is being shown at the present time. In those countries where costs of ...

Understanding negative effects of native species on introduced taxa may suggest novel ways to control the invasive species by enhancing such effects. Previous studies have reported that the larvae of invasive cane toads (Rhinella marina) are suppressed by competition with the larvae of native anurans in Australia, but not in North America. We conducted laboratory trials to measure the effect of...

This paper proposes a method for multi-class classification problems, where the number of classes K is large. The method, referred to as Candidates v.s. Noises Estimation (CANE), selects a small subset of candidate classes and samples the remaining classes. We show that CANE is always consistent and computationally efficient. Moreover, the resulting estimator has low statistical variance approa...

Ionic liquids (ILs) are promising solvents for the pretreatment of lignocellulose as they are thermally stable, environmentally friendly, recyclable, and have low volatility. This study evaluated the effect of 1-ethyl-3-methylimidazolium acetate ([EMIM][OAc]) for the pretreatment of energy cane bagasse in terms of biomass composition, structural changes and enzymatic digestibility. Energy cane ...

Cane variety and age, month of harvest and the different constituents of the cane were selected for investigation. All these factors were found to influence the colour and phenolic levels. Time ofharvest generally had a large effect, with high colours at the beginning and end of the season. Clear evidence of varietal effects was also obtained and the results showed that the different constituen...

The increasing worldwide concern regarding environmental issues, in particular after the consistent reports published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – IPCC, has significantly stimulated the production of biofuels. Among these biofuels, the ethanol produced from sugar cane is considered to be of particular importance. Currently, Brazil is the world's largest producer of sugar c...

Seasonal prediction with dynamical models of El Niño events, and the associated changes in the Southern Oscillation and atmospheric circulation, has been an area of intense interest and effort for more than two decades. The early experimental forecasts of El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO) events (Cane and Zebiak 1985; Cane et al. 1986; Zebiak and Cane 1987; Battisti and Hirst 1989; Kleeman 19...