BACKGROUND Cultivated bananas and plantains are giant herbaceous plants within the genus Musa. They are both sterile and parthenocarpic so the fruit develops without seed. The cultivated hybrids and species are mostly triploid (2n = 3x = 33; a few are diploid or tetraploid), and most have been propagated from mutants found in the wild. With a production of 100 million tons annually, banana is a...

We are considering the problem of measuring and analyzing customer satisfaction concerning a product or a service evaluated on multiple criteria. The proposed methodology generalizes the MUSA (MUlticriteria Satisfaction Analysis) method. MUSA is a preference disaggregation method that, following the principle of ordinal regression analysis, finds an additive utility function representing both t...

The d evelopment effort for interactive Web applications is continuously increasing, because multiple clients with widely varying user interface (UI) capabilities have to be supported. In addition, personalization features render the task more complex. The MUSA (Multiple User Interfaces, Single Application) system addresses that issue by decoupling the application logic from the UI logic. The a...

MUSA is a multi-user authoring system, planned as an application in the Views system. MUSA’s aim is to support concurrent development of ‘products’ being produced by several people cooperatively or by one person alone. The products are documents in a wide sense: articles, books, software, drawings, etc. This article presents the methodology behind MUSA. 1991 Mathematics Subject Classification: ...

The most challenging applications in heterogeneous cloud ecosystems are those that are able to maximise the benefits of the combination of the cloud resources in use: multi-cloud applications. They have to deal with the security of the individual components as well as with the overall application security including the communications and the data flow between the components. In this paper we pr...

We describe ongoing work on sentence summarization in the European MUSA project and the Flemish ATraNoS project. Both projects aim at automatic generation of TV subtitles for hearing-impaired people. This involves speech recognition, a topic which is not covered in this paper, and summarizing sentences in such a way that they fit in the available space for subtitles. The target language is equa...

We show how the mechanism recently proposed by Alexander, Peskin, and Sheikh-Jabbari, in which the observed cosmic matter-antimatter asymmetry comes from the contribution of the cosmological tensor perturbations to the gravitational anomaly in the Standard Model, does not work. This holds when taking into account the commutation relations for the creation-annihilation operators associated to th...

Tropical Southeast Asia, which harbors most of the Musaceae biodiversity, is one of the most species-rich regions in the world. Its high degree of endemism is shaped by the region's tectonic and climatic history, with large differences between northern Indo-Burma and the Malayan Archipelago. Here, we aim to find a link between the diversification and biogeography of Musaceae and geological hist...

The production of bananas is threatened by rapid spreading of various diseases and adverse environmental conditions. The preservation and characterization of banana diversity is essential for the purposes of crop improvement. The world's largest banana germplasm collection maintained at the Bioversity International Transit Centre (ITC) in Belgium is continuously expanded by new accessions of ed...