Process optimization is one of the most important activities in today's competitive industries. the rather high cost of research and development has necessitated the development of experimental methods by which the factors affecting processes&#10could be determined with minimum number of experiments. Over the last two decades, various types of experimental designs have been used. Among the diff...

The response of Michigan male obliquebanded leafroller, Choristoneura rosaceana, moths to females from three different geographical regions was studied in replicated field trials during 1999. Our goal was to determine the optimal pheromone blend for monitoring the phenology and abundance of this insect in Michigan apples. Traps were baited with either a rubber septum loaded with synthetic phero...

BACKGROUND Sex pheromones are essential in moth mate communication. Information on pheromone biosynthetic genes and enzymes is needed to comprehend the mechanisms that contribute to specificity of pheromone signals. Most heliothine moths use sex pheromones with (Z)-11-hexadecenal as the major component in combination with minor fatty aldehydes and alcohols. In this study we focus on four closel...

The corn- and rice-strains of Spodoptera frugiperda exhibit several genetic and behavioral differences and appear to be undergoing ecological speciation in sympatry. Previous studies reported conflicting results when investigating male attraction to pheromone lures in different regions, but this could have been due to inter-strain and/or geographic differences. Therefore, we investigated whethe...

We consider fourteen kinds of two-dimensional triangle hypersurface singularities, and consider what kinds of combinations of rational double points can appear on small deformation fibers of these triangle singularities. We show that possible combinations can be described by Gabriélov graphs and Dynkin graphs. 1. Review of results by Russian mathematicians In this article we assume that every v...

This paper investigates the evolution of prices and returns in the art market since the middle of the previous century. We first compile a comprehensive list of more than 10,000 artists and then build a dataset that contains information on more than 1.1 million auction sales of paintings, prints, and works on paper. We perform an extensive hedonic regression analysis that includes unique price-...

We prove that the moduli space Alev 11 of (1, 11)-polarized abelian surfaces with level structure of canonical type is birational to Klein’s cubic hypersurface in P. Therefore, Alev 11 is unirational but not rational, and there are no Γ11-cusp forms of weight 3. The same methods also provide an easy proof of the rationality of Alev 9 . Classical results of Tai, Freitag and Mumford and newer res...