Modeling inter-individual variability in plant populations is a key issue to enhance the predictive capacity of plant growth models at field level. In sugar beet, this variability is well illustrated by the phyllochron (thermal time elapsing between two successive leaf appearances): even if the mean phyllochron remains stable within a given variety, there is a high heterogeneity between individ...

We present a network friendly bandwidth measurement method, TOPP, that is based on active probing and includes analysis by segmented regression. This method can estimate two complementing available bandwidth metrics in addition to the link bandwidth of the congested link. Contrary to traditional packet pair estimates of the bottleneck link bandwidth, our estimate is not limited by the rate at w...

Computer simulation and modelling of the human body and its behaviour are very useful tools in situations where it is either too risky to perform an invasive procedure or too costly for in vivo experiments or simply impossible for ethical reasons. In this paper we describe a method to model the electrical behaviour of human brain from segmented MR images. The aim of the work is to use these mod...

We provide new evidence on the effect of the unemployment insurance (UI) weekly benefit amount on unemployment insurance spells based on administrative data from the state of Missouri covering the period 2003-2013. Identification comes from a regression kink design that exploits the quasi-experimental variation around the kink in the UI benefit schedule. We find that UI durations are more respo...

This paper studies inference on nondifferentiable functions using methods based on numerical differentiation. First we show that for an appropriately chosen sequence of step sizes, numerical derivative based delta methods provide consistent inference for functions of parameters that are directionally differentiable. Examples of directionally differentiable functions arise in a variety of econom...

Recent climate change is substantially affecting the spatial pattern of geographical zones, and the temporal and spatial inconsistency of climatic warming and drying patterns contributes to the complexity of the shifting of temperature and aridity zones. Eastern Inner Mongolia, China, located in the interface region of different biomes and ecogeographic zones, has experienced dramatic drying an...

This study presents an advanced remote sensing-based steady-state flood model to improve flood management strategies. The REFIX (Regression and Elevation based Flood Information eXtraction) model is based on regression analysis and uses a remotely sensed flood extent and a high-resolution floodplain DEM (Digital Elevation Model) to estimate water heights for a given flood event. In some cases, ...

Introduction: Diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) in the abdomen has proven useful for various pathologies, including liver lesion characterization [1-4] and simple vessel suppression, diagnosis of diffuse renal disease [5-8], and detection of metastatic spread to lymph nodes [9,10]. However, image distortions arising from the use of EPI has shown to be problematic. We have recently applied DW ‘Sh...

A critical threshold exists when the relationship between the amount of suitable habitat and population density or probability of occurrence exhibits a sudden, disproportionate decline as habitat is lost. Critical thresholds are predicted by a variety of modeling approaches, but empirical support has been limited or lacking. We looked for critical thresholds in two pool-breeding amphibians that...