Since April 1997, CDC has received reports of outbreaks of cyclosporiasis in the United States and Canada (1,2). As of June 11, there have been 21 clusters of cases of cyclosporiasis reported from eight states (California, Florida, Maryland, Nebraska, Nevada, New York, Rhode Island, and Texas) and one province in Canada (Ontario). These clusters were associated with events (e.g., receptions, ba...

BACKGROUND AND AIMS Jatropha curcas is a drought-resistant tree whose seeds are a good source of oil that can be used for producing biodiesel. A successful crop establishment depends on a rapid and uniform germination of the seed. In this work we aimed to characterize the responses of J. curcas seeds to temperature and water availability, using thermal time and hydrotime analysis, METHODS The...

Predation affects life history traits of nearly all organisms and the population consequences of predator avoidance are often larger than predation itself. Climate change has been shown to cause phenological changes. These changes are not necessarily similar between species and may cause mismatches between prey and predator. Eurasian sparrowhawk Accipiter nisus, the main predator of passerines,...

When operationally significant weather affects the National Airspace System (NAS) a Severe Weather Avoidance Program (SWAP) is initiated. Each SWAP event is a unique mix of demand, weather conditions, traffic flow management (TFM) initiatives and traffic movement. Following a SWAP, the day’s events are reviewed and the TFM initiatives used are evaluated to understand their impact on the traffic...

We describe a vision-based obstacle avoidance system for off-road mobile robots. The system is trained from end to end to map raw input images to steering angles. It is trained in supervised mode to predict the steering angles provided by a human driver during training runs collected in a wide variety of terrains, weather conditions, lighting conditions, and obstacle types. The robot is a 50cm ...

The main challenge during night-time driving is the visibility of the road ahead. The major challenge rests in controlling accidents during night as the night conditions differ from the day in environment conditions, vehicle lighting etc. The reduced cost of cameras and optical devices helped in installing front-mounted intelligent systems for identifying forward collision avoidance and mitigat...

Modern driver assistance systems such as collision avoidance or intersection assistance need reliable information on the current environment. Extracting such information from camera-based systems is a complex and challenging task for inner city traffic scenarios. This paper presents an approach to combined scene segmentation and object detection using stereo and color information. The extracted...

New technology is appearing in vehicles that increasingly allow them to “know” where they are, their relationships to other vehicles on the road, and whether a crash is imminent. At the same time, and more quickly, drivers are becoming more connected to the world outside their cars through similar advances in electronic technology. The first trend promises to help drivers prevent crashes while ...