Encouraging natural enemies by growing attractive plants is considered an effective method of pest control in organic farming. However, it is important to identify which flowers best attract beneficial insects. In this study, relative attractiveness of 16 species of flowering plants to adult hoverflies was assessed by conducting timed observations of feeding-visit frequencies. The experiments w...

The Cosmic Evolution Survey (COSMOS) was initiated with an extensive allocation (590 orbits in Cycles 12-13) using the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) for high resolution imaging. Here we review the characteristics of the HST imaging with the Advanced Camera for Surveys (ACS) and parallel observations with NICMOS and WFPC2. A square field (1.8⊓⊔) has been imaged with single-orbit ACS I-F814W expos...

© 2008 American Institute of Physics, S-0031-9228-0811-020-1 Radioactive nuclei with extreme neutron-to-proton ratios—rare isotopes—often decay within fractions of a second. Typically, they are not found on Earth unless produced at an accelerator. Yet nature produces copious amounts of them in supernovae and other stellar explosions in which the rare isotopes, despite their fleeting existence a...

Gustavo Branco’s distinguished contributions include leading ones to neutrino physics, CP violation, and leptogenesis. To plan the future experimental exploration of some of the physics to which Prof. Branco has contributed, and which is near and dear to his heart, several studies focusing on neutrinos have been carried out. I would like to report on one of these, sponsored by four Divisions of...

BACKGROUND The 2-year internship period for medical graduates began in South Africa in 2005 and has never been formally evaluated. OBJECTIVE This study assessed the perceptions of community service medical officers (COSMOs) working at district hospitals (DHs) in KwaZulu-Natal (KZN) to determine whether the 2-year internship programme had adequately prepared them for community service (CS). ...

The aim of this study is to perform a thorough comparison of quantitative susceptibility mapping (QSM) techniques and their dependence on the assumptions made. The compared methodologies were: two iterative single orientation methodologies minimizing the l2, l1TV norm of the prior knowledge of the edges of the object, one over-determined multiple orientation method (COSMOS) and a newly proposed...

User/terminal mobility during service provisioning and high heterogeneity of wireless portable devices identify novel challenges for service delivery in ubiquitous pervasive environments. An emerging architecture solution in the wireless Internet is to have middleware components (mobile proxies) over the fixed network that follow the movements and act on behalf of the limited wireless clients. ...

There are several methods to create visualizations of speech data. All of them, however, lack the ability to remove microphone-dependent distortions. We examined the use of Principal Component Analysis (PCA), Linear Discriminant Analysis (LDA), and the COmprehensive Space Map of Objective Signal (COSMOS) method in this work. To solve the problem of lacking microphone independency of PCA, LDA, a...

Lee Lindblom, Benjamin J. Owen, and Duncan A. Brown Theoretical Astrophysics 130-33, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California 91125, USA Institute for Gravitation and the Cosmos, and Center for Gravitational Wave Physics, Department of Physics, The Pennsylvania State University, University Park, Pennsylvania 16802, USA Department of Physics, Syracuse University, Syracuse, New Yo...