The building edge detection plays a key role during building extraction, which is important and necessary for building description. The edges detected from aerial images have high horizontal accuracy and represent various edge shapes well. But the edge detection in images is often influenced by contrast, illumination and occlusion. LIDAR data are suitable for judging building regions, but miss ...

Many bacterial and archaeal lineages have a history of extensive and ongoing horizontal gene transfer and loss, as evidenced by the large differences in genome content even among otherwise closely related isolates. How ecologically cohesive populations might evolve and be maintained under such conditions of rapid gene turnover has remained controversial. Here we synthesize recent literature dem...

Using stochastic simulations we analyze how public pension structures spread the risks arising from demographic and economic shocks across generations. We consider several actual and hypothetical sustainable PAYGO pension structures, including: (1) versions of the US Social Security system with annual adjustments of taxes or benefits to maintain fiscal balance; (2) Sweden's Notional Defined Con...

We evaluate several actual and hypothetical sustainable PAYGO pension structures, including: (1) versions of the US Social Security system with annual adjustments of taxes or benefits to maintain fiscal balance; (2) Sweden’s Notional Defined Contribution system and several variants developed to improve fiscal stability; and (3) the German system, which also includes annual adjustments to mainta...

There is an error in the Materials and Methods section of this paper. Section 6, “Identification of Horizontal Gene Transfer (HGT) -derived Genes in Foc1 and Foc4,” should not appear. In addition, Lijia Guo is incorrectly designated as the corresponding author. The correct corresponding authors are: Junsheng Huang ([email protected]), Ming Peng ([email protected]), and Xiaodong Fang (fangxd@g...

Genetic control programs for scrapie in sheep build on solid knowledge of how susceptibility to scrapie is modulated by the prion protein genotype at the level of an individual sheep. In order to satisfactorily analyze the effectivity of control programs at the population level, insight is needed at the flock level, i.e., how the grouping of sheep in flocks affects the population-level transmis...