Eagles currently occur in the Hawaiian Islands only as vagrants, but Quaternary bones of Haliaeetus eagles have been found on three of the major islands. A previous study of a ∼3500-year-old skeleton from Maui found its mtDNA more similar to White-tailed (H. albicilla) than to Bald (H. leucocephalus) Eagles, but low intraspecific resolution of the markers and lack of comparative data from mainl...

In this paper, we present ADOM, a dataset in Arabic language describing the conference domain. This dataset was created for two purposes (1) analysis of the behavior of matchers specially designed for Arabic language, (2) integration with the multifarm dataset of the Ontology Alignment Evaluation Initiative (OAEI). The multifarm track evaluates the ability of matching systems to deal with ontol...

Ancestral relationships between populations separated by time represent an often neglected dimension in population genetics, a field which historically has focused on analysis of spatially distributed samples from the same point in time. Models are usually straightforward when two time-separated populations are assumed to be completely isolated from all other populations. However, this is usual...

Meroitic is the still undeciphered language of the ancient civilization of Kush. Over the years, various techniques for decipherment such as finding a bilingual text or cognates from modern or other ancient languages in the Sudan and surrounding areas has not been successful. Using techniques borrowed from information theory and natural language statistics, similar words are paired and attempts...

Ancient DNA is a field of molecular evolutionary biology that usesDNA sequence data recovered frompoorly preserved organisms, usually deceased for hundreds to hundreds of thousands of years. Ancient DNA data can provide unique snapshots in time to better understand how populations and species evolve. The field was born in the early 1980s,when thefirst ancientDNAsequences were recovered from pre...

Despite the fact that erosion undermines productivity in the Ethiopian highlands, adoption of fertility enhancing techniques remained very minimal. The objectives of this study is to examine factors affecting adoption of fertilize and manure use and their interrelationships using plot and household level data collected from 211 farm households. A two-stage probit model results revealed a negati...

Ancient DNA studies have revolutionized the study of extinct species and populations, providing insights on phylogeny, phylogeography, admixture and demographic history. However, inferences on behaviour and sociality have been far less frequent. Here, we investigate the complete mitochondrial genomes of extinct Late Pleistocene cave bears and middle Holocene brown bears that each inhabited mult...

Amajor problem with dialectal Arabic acoustic modeling is due to the very sparse available speech resources. In this paper, we have chosen Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA) as a typical dialect. In order to benefit from existing Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) resources, a cross-lingual acoustic modeling approach is proposed that is based on supervised model adaptation. MSA acoustic models were ada...

Some small-holders are able to generate reliable and substantial income flows through small-scale dairy production for the local market; for others, a set of unique transactions costs hinders participation. Cooperative selling institutions are potential catalysts for mitigating these costs, stimulating entry into the market, and precipitating growth in rural communities. Trends in cooperative o...

Extinctions and declines of large marine vertebrates have major ecological impacts and are of critical concern in marine environments. The Caribbean monk seal, Monachus tropicalis, last definitively reported in 1952, was one of the few marine mammal species to become extinct in historical times. Despite its importance for understanding the evolutionary biogeography of southern phocids, the rela...