Beef Improvement Federation (BIF) A federation of organizations, businesses, and individuals interested or involved in performance evaluation of beef cattle. The purposes of BIF are to bring about uniformity of procedures, development of programs, cooperation among interested entities, education of its members, and the ultimate of user performance evaluation methods. It also builds the confiden...

A quartz-pyroxene rock interpreted as a banded iron formation (BIF) from the island of Akilia, southwest Greenland, contains (13)C-depleted graphite that has been claimed as evidence for the oldest (>3850 million years ago) life on Earth. Field relationships on Akilia document multiple intense deformation events that have resulted in parallel transposition of Early Archean rocks and significant...

In this paper we improve the BIF algorithm which computes simultaneously the LU factors (direct factors) of a given matrix, and their inverses (inverse factors). This algorithm was introduced in [R. Bru, J. Maŕın, J. Mas and M. Tůma, SIAM J. Sci. Comput., 30 (2008), pp. 2302– 2318]. The improvements are based on a deeper understanding of the Inverse Sherman-Morrison (ISM) decomposition and they...

Iron in the early anoxic oceans of Archean age (4000-2500 million years ago) is believed to have been oxidized form banded iron formations (BIF). Previously, it has proposed that was either by free oxygen, H2O2, microbial oxidation, or photo-oxidation. However, these mechanisms are difficult reconcile with evidence for at time having largely devoid dissolved oxygen and oxidants, together rarity...

In this paper we deal with the problems of human age and facial expression estimation. We propose to use Biologically Inspired Features (BIF) as a facial descriptor in the both tasks to improve performance. We developed a complete pipeline for solving those problems including geometric normalization step and CLAHE method for photometric normalization. To the best of our knowledge using BIF for ...

This paper proposes a novel method to improve the accuracy of head pose estimation. Since biologically inspired features (BIF) have been demonstrated to be both effective and efficient for many visual tasks, we argue that BIF can be applied to the problem of head pose estimation. By combining the BIF with the well-known local binary pattern (LBP) feature, we propose a novel feature descriptor n...

We investigate robustness properties for a broad class of support vector machines with non-smooth loss functions. These kernel methods are inspired by convex risk minimization in infinite dimensional Hilbert spaces. Leading examples are the support vector machine based on the ε-insensitive loss function, and kernel based quantile regression based on the pinball loss function. Firstly, we propos...

Incomplete factorizations represent a class of algebraic preconditioners important from both theoretical and practical points of view. While state-of-the-art preconditioners of this kind can be very useful, very large problems, arising, e.g., from discretizations of complicated operators on unstructured grids typically, still may require more robust preconditioners. High-quality incomplete fact...

In treating individuals with disordered eating (DE) concerns, such as excessive dieting, bingeing, and purging, evidence shows that emotion/behavior regulation plays a principal role in the nature and treatment of DE. Body image flexibility (BIF) is a fairly new concept that reflects adaptive regulation processes in the context of DE. The purpose of this cross-sectional study is to investigate ...