Concrete cover is the distance from the surface of the concrete to the surface of the reinforcing bars embedded in the concrete. Ensuring sufficient concrete cover is critical for the durability of some concrete structures subject to poor environment during their service life. Concrete cover can be measured using covermeters. In this paper, some factors affecting cover measurement were briefly ...

The Asiatic ibex (Capra sibirica) is typically found in the mountains of central Asia, studies on the habitat selection of this animal are few at present. We investigated the bedding and foraging sites selection by line census in the GuRenGuoLeng areas of Central Tianshan Moutains during summer, and assess how environmental factors affect their habitat use. Our results showed that there is no s...

Image hiding is a form of steganography that works by embedding data into a digital media for the purpose of identification, annotation, and copyrighting. This paper introduces a novel image steganography system, which embeds (RGB) secret image within (RGB) cover image chosen by an enhanced resilient back propagation neural network. The proposed system includes embedding and extraction phases. ...

A novel approach for steganography cover selection is proposed, based on image texture features and human visual system. Our proposed algorithm employs run length matrix to select a set of appropriate images from an image database and creates their stego version after embedding process. Then, it computes similarity between original images and their stego versions by using structural similarity ...

Endemic and emerging diseases are rarely uniform in their spatial distribution or prevalence among cohorts of wildlife. Spatial models that quantify risk-driven differences in resource selection and hunter mortality of animals at fine spatial scales can assist disease management by identifying high-risk areas and individuals. We used resource selection functions (RSFs) and selection ratios (SRs...

Evolutionary transitions from terrestrial to aquatic life modify selective forces on an animal's coloration. For example, light penetrates differently through water than air, and a new suite of predators and visual backgrounds changes the targets of selection. We suggest that an aquatic animal's coloration may also affect its susceptibility to algal fouling. In a colour-polymorphic field popula...

We investigated the movements and selection of settlement sites of translocated pygmy rabbits (Brachylagus idahoensis) in southeastern Oregon from June to December 2008. We captured, radio tagged, and translocated 59 pygmy rabbits across big sagebrush (Artemisia tridentata ssp.) habitat with 3 categories of landscape fragmentation. We used radio telemetry to track the movements and document the...

The optimal path cover problem is to find a minimum number of vertex disjoint paths which together cover all the vertices of the graph. Finding an optimal path cover for an arbitrary graph is known to be NP-complete [3]. However, polynornial-time algorithms exist for trees [4], cacti [4] and for interval graphs [9]. The solution presented in [2] For circular-arc graphs is known to be wrong. In ...

Predicting the effects of global climate change on species interactions has remained difficult because there is a spatiotemporal mismatch between regional climate models and microclimates experienced by organisms. We evaluated resource selection in a predominant ectothermic predator using a modeling approach that permitted us to assess the importance of habitat structure and local real-time air...