Recently, a welcome trend has emerged - in addition to the traditional studies on contents and states of consciousness, levels of consciousness have become a matter of research. However, there are some conceptual and methodological difficulties with this research - the labels used for empirical measurement of levels are ambiguous and underspecified while the research on neural correlates of con...

Simulation with integrated parameter optimization of a given model structure is a well-established technique today. However, with increasing system complexity and flexibility the number of possible structure variants increases. Therefore the potential benefit of automatic model structure optimization becomes significant. During optimization, the introduced framework supports automatic parameter...

Contents 1. Introduction 2. The problem in context — some of the man-made environmental problems with potentially catastrophic consequences for life on earth 3. How did we get here? Evolution of human attitude to nature and the natural environment 3.1.

Methods of storing, managing and presenting educational multimedia data are proposed. Application of these methods to interactive synchronous and asynchronous Distance Learning systems is discussed. An example system based on the proposed solution is presented in details. The system uses clean organization of educational material and enables storage, management, and presentation of various type...

We often eat heat-coagulated (H-C) food proteins, but there have been few studies on the allergenic activity of H-C proteins after digestion and absorption in vivo. To show that H-C protein is not an allergen after digestion, mice were used to investigate the digestion and absorption of the protein through the intestinal epithelium into portal blood employing immunoblotting and competitive inhi...

In this paper we describe the ongoing work on the Circumstantial Event Ontology (CEO), a newly developed ontology for calamity events that models semantic circumstantial relations between event classes, where we define circumstantial as explicit and implicit causal relations. The circumstantial relations are defined manually in the ontology for classes of events that involve a change to the sam...

Nutrient management has increasingly become important in producing quality medicinal plant materials. Vitex negundo is an perennial widely distributed tropical Asia and Africa. This study aimed to examine the effects of nitrogen (N) phosphorus (P) fertilization on biomass, polyphenol contents, essential oil yield composition field cultivated V. negundo. Two experiments were conducted; one was p...

Improved understanding of soil fertility factors limiting crop productivity is important to develop appropriate soil and nutrient management recommendations in sub-Saharan Africa. Diagnostic trials were implemented in Kenya, Malawi, Mali, Nigeria and Tanzania, as part of the African Soils Information Service (AfSIS) project, to identify soil fertility constraints to crop production across vario...

Excessive, long-term chemical fertilizer application adversely affects soil quality and maize yield. The combined of biochar with can increase yield improve fertility. A four-year field experiment was conducted to determine physio-biochemical properties under a soybean–maize rotation in the black soils Northeast China. There were five treatments, including no fertilization (CK), (NPK), + (15.75...