Willa Cather's 1913 novel, O Pioneers! concludes with an unexpected moment of extreme violence as two young lovers, Emil Bergson and Marie Shabata, are murdered by Marie's husband in a mulberry orchard. Cather's novel is almost wholly devoted to the psychological interior of the protagonist, Alexandra Bergson, thereby rendering this violent interruption more dynamic as it essentially undercuts ...

We associate to certain symmetric or antisymmetric functions on the set ( E d+1 ) of (d+ 1)−subsets in a finite set E an equivalence relation on E and study some of its properties. 1 Definitions and main results We consider a finite set E and denote by (E d ) the set of subsets containing exactly d elements of E. In the sequel we move often freely from sets to sequences: we identify a subset {x...

15. Dillon JC, Weyman AE, Feigenbaum H, Eggleton RC, Johnston K: Cross-sectional echocardiographic examination of the interatrial septum. Circulation 55: 115, 1977 16. Lieppe W, Scallion R, Behar VS, Kisslo JA: Two-dimensional echocardiographic findings in atrial septal defect. Circulation 56: 447, 1977 17. Hagler DJ, Tajik AJ, Seward JB, Mair DD, Ritter DG: Realtime wide-angle sector echocardi...

When orchards reach the end of the productive cycle, the stumps removal becomes a mandatory operation to allow new soil preparation and to establish new cultivations. The exploitation of the removed stump biomass seems a valuable option, especially in the growing energy market of the biofuels; however, the scarce quality of the material obtained after the extraction compromises its marketabilit...

The south of Portugal is one the regions that will be most affected by impacts climate change (CC), with an expected increase in water scarcity. Irrigated super-intensive olive orchards occupy a large area used agricultural surface Alentejo region, Portugal, making it necessary to adapt this crop effects CC. This study assessed CC and defined adaptation measures concerning irrigation management...

Let P be a set of n points in the plane, not all on a line. We show that if n is large then there are at least n/2 ordinary lines, that is to say lines passing through exactly two points of P . This confirms, for large n, a conjecture of Dirac and Motzkin. In fact we describe the exact extremisers for this problem, as well as all sets having fewer than n−C ordinary lines for some absolute const...

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The measurement and control of soil moisture are the key technologies of precision agriculture. In order to real-time detect soil moisture content faster and more accurately, a portable soil moisture sensor based on NIR spectroscopy was developed. With the sixty soil samples collected from a winter jujube orchard, a linear regression model was established. The determination coefficients of the ...