We have long known that corvids are adaptively flexible in behavior, but have rarely tested their flexibility and creativity in solving problems outside the laboratory. Through a carefully controlled experiment conducted in the wild, I have found that Common Ravens (Corvus corax) fly toward gunshot sounds, presumably in order to locate animal gut piles left by hunters. This is the first conclus...

In order to study pressed pile test and ultimate bearing capacity character of large-diameter steel pipe pile, based on two high-piled wharfs of Zhanjiang Port, pressed pile test and numerical simulation of three large-diameter steel pipe piles are analyzed in this paper. Anchored pile method is used to pressed pile test, and the curves of Q-s and ultimate bearing capacity are attained. Then th...

The case studied in the paper proves that thickening the pile cap is an effective seismic retrofit alternative to strengthen a pile group foundation. Unlike the typical seismic retrofitting of foundation, the proposed method eliminates the need to drive long piles into existing bridge substructures, substantially reducing cost, construction time and traffic interruption. The method thickens the...

The demand for bioenergy caused an increased use of logging residues, branches and treetops that were previously left on the ground after harvesting. Residues are stored outdoors in piles and it is unclear to what extent fungi transform this material. Our objective was to quantify the amount of wood degrading fungi during storage using quantitative real-time PCR (qPCR) to detect basidiomycetous...

Grasping objects from unstructured piles is an important, but difficult task. We present a new framework to grasp objects composed of shape primitives like cylinders and spheres. For object recognition, we employ efficient shape primitive detection methods in 3D point clouds. Object models composed of such primitives are then found in the detected shapes with a probabilistic graph-matching tech...

The present paper investigates the reflection and transmission properties of piles of nonscattering sheets. Using a spectral prediction model, we perform a detailed analysis of the spectral and color variations induced by variations of the number of superposed sheets, the absorbance of the sheet material, the refractive index of the medium between the sheets, and the reflectance of the backgrou...

This paper presents the influence of non-linearity on the dynamic response of floating pile foundation subject to vertical vibration. A detailed theoretical investigation of stiffness and damping parameters is made for floating piles with different shear modulus reduction ratio of the weak zone soil. The accuracy of the non-linear analysis for predicting the dynamic response depends upon the ch...

This paper presents u-Photo which is an interactive digital still image including information of pervasive services associated with networked appliances and sensors in pervasive computing environment. U-Photo Tools can generate a u-Photo and provide methods for discovering contextual information about these pervasive services. Users can easily find out this information through the metaphor of ‘...

Desert seed-harvester ants, genus Pogonomyrmex, are central place foragers that search for resources collectively. We quantify how seed harvesters exploit the spatial distribution of seeds to improve their rate of seed collection. We find that foraging rates are significantly influenced by the clumpiness of experimental seed baits. Colonies collected seeds from larger piles faster than randomly...

Given non-negative integer a and b, let us consider the following game WY T (a, b). Two piles contain x and y matches. Two players take turns. By one move, it is allowed to take x′ and y′ matches from these piles such that 0 ≤ x′ ≤ x, 0 ≤ y′ ≤ y, 0 < x′ + y′, and [min(x′, y′) < b or |x′ − y′| < a]. The player who takes the last match is the winner (respectively, loser) in the normal (respective...