Soybean physical and chemical properties changed by size (from 4.8 to 8.8 mm diameter), but soybean size and seed density did not affect the protein and oil determination accuracy of three near-infrared transmission analyzers. Corn samples were also separated by size and kernel density. Changes in corn kernel density and size introduced small errors in near-infrared transmission protein, oil, a...

The perianth persists after flowering in many plants, yet its post-floral functionality has been little investigated, and the few studies available provide ambiguous evidence. This paper tests the hypothesis that the green persistent sepals of the perennial herb, Helleborus foetidus, contribute to the plant's fitness by enhancing seed number and/or size. Post-floral contribution of the calyx to...

This work evaluated the effect of seed size and morphology on the development and biomass of durum wheat seedlings. Three different seed-grading sizes selected by sieving were used in glasshouse experiments, and a set of three developmental and 23 biomass-related indices were measured on eight genotypes, at two moisture levels. The influence of seed size on seedling development was studied at h...

Influence maximization is the problem of finding a small set of seed nodes in a social network that maximizes the spread of influence under a certain diffusion model. The Greedy algorithm for influence maximization first proposed by Kempe, later improved by Leskovec suffers from two sources of computational deficiency: 1) the need to evaluate many candidate nodes before selecting a new seed in ...

Climate change is accelerating plant developmental transitions coordinated with the seasons in temperate environments. To understand the importance of these timing advances for a stable life history strategy, we constructed a full life cycle model of Arabidopsis thaliana. Modelling and field data reveal that a cryptic function of flowering time control is to limit seed set of winter annuals to ...

Web spam pages use various techniques to achieve higher-than-deserved rankings in a search engine’s results. While human experts can identify spam, it is too expensive to manually evaluate a large number of pages. Instead, we propose techniques to semi-automatically separate reputable, good pages from spam. We first select a small set of seed pages to be evaluated by an expert. Once we manually...

Seed sampling is critical in semi-supervised learning. This paper proposes a clusteringbased stratified seed sampling approach to semi-supervised learning. First, various clustering algorithms are explored to partition the unlabeled instances into different strata with each stratum represented by a center. Then, diversity-motivated intra-stratum sampling is adopted to choose the center and addi...

The event of partly grain-free ear is a crucial problem which can result in severe reductions in corn yield. In a two year field investigation, during 2003-2004, an experiment was conducted to determine the effect of  boron (B) and zinc (Zn) application on yield and yield components of corn (Zea mays L.) plants grown in a B and Zn-deficient calcareous soil (fine, carbonatic, thermic, Typic Hapl...

Sudan is a large country with an area of 1.88 million Km2, and has the second largest animal population in Africa consisting of 52.08 million sheep, 43.44 million goats, 41.76 million cattle and 4.62 million camels (MARF, 2013). The majority of animal wealth is concentrated in western Sudan (40%), followed by central Sudan (23%) (MARF, 2011). Minerals are divided into two groups, macro-minerals...