BACKGROUND Camellia sinensis is the source of tea leaves and it is an economic crop now grown around the World. Tea seed oil has been used for cooking in China and other Asian countries for more than a thousand years. Tea is the most widely consumed beverages after water in the world. It is mainly produced in Asia, central Africa, and exported throughout the World. Some engineering properties (...

We revisit the task of learning a Euclidean metric from data. We approach this problem from first principles and formulate it as a surprisingly simple optimization problem. Indeed, our formulation even admits a closed form solution. This solution possesses several very attractive properties: (i) an innate geometric appeal through the Riemannian geometry of positive definite matrices; (ii) ease ...

Given a complex matrix H, we consider the decomposition H=QRP∗ where Q and P have orthonormal columns, and R is a real upper triangular matrix with diagonal elements equal to the geometric mean of the positive singular values of H. This decomposition, which we call the geometric mean decomposition, has application to signal processing and to the design of telecommunication networks. The unitary...

Bisection (of a real interval) is a well known algorithm to compute eigenvalues of symmetric matrices. Given an initial interval [a, b], convergence to an eigenvalue which has size much smaller than a or b may be made considerably faster if one replaces the usual arithmetic mean (of the end points of the current interval) with the geometric mean. Exploring this idea, we have implemented geometr...

An attractive candidate for the geometric mean of m positive definite matrices A1, . . . , Am is their Riemannian barycentre G. One of its important properties, monotonicity in the m arguments, has been established recently by J. Lawson and Y. Lim. We give a much simpler proof of this result, and prove some other inequalities. One of these says that, for every unitarily invariant norm, |||G||| ...

The soil degradation caused by conventional tillage in rain-fed areas of northwest China is known to reduce the water-use efficiency and crop yield because of reduced soil porosity and the decreased availability of soil water and nutrients. Thus, we investigated the effects of straw incorporation on soil aggregates with different straw incorporation rates in semiarid areas of southern Ningxia f...