Light scattering is related to the structural characteristics of fruit and hence is potentially useful for estimating fruit firmness. This research investigated hyperspectral scattering as a means for measuring peach fruit firmness. A hyperspectral imaging system was used to simultaneously acquire 153 spectral scattering profiles, generated by a broadband light beam, from ‘Red Haven’ and ‘Coral...

In general, the quality of fruits depends on local conditions experienced by the fruit during its development. In cotton, fruit quality, and more specifically the quality of the fibre in the fruit, depends on interactions between fruit position in the plant architecture, temperature and agronomic practices, such as sowing time, mulching with plastic film and topping of the plant's main stem and...

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) is concerned with learning from sets (bags) of feature vectors (instances), where the individual instance labels are ambiguous. In MIL it is often assumed that positive bags contain at least one instance from a so-called concept in instance space, whereas negative bags only contain negative instances. The classes in a MIL problem are therefore not treated in the...

The bag cell neurons of the marine mollusk, Aplysia, are a putative multitransmitter system that utilizes two or more peptide transmitters derived from a common precursor protein. Two putative transmitters are egg-laying hormone (ELH), a 36 amino acid peptide that induces egg laying and mediates bag cell-induced excitatory effects on certain abdominal ganglion neurons, and alpha-bag cell peptid...

The fruiting ecology of Osyris quadripartita (Santalaceae), a hemiparasitic evergreen shrub, was studied over a 4-yr period in a Mediterranean scrubland of southern Spain. In addition to describing the natural history of seed dispersal in this species, objectives of the study were (1) to document patterns of individual and annual variation in seed-dispersal-related traits (fruit characteristics...

OBJECTIVE To assess changes in carotenoid intake based on the variations in the consumption of fresh fruit and vegetables in the Spanish population over the period 1964-2004. DESIGN Consumption data of fresh fruit and vegetables from Family Budget Surveys carried out in 1964, 1980, 1990 and 2004. Consumption data (g per person per day) accounted for >90% of fruit and vegetable consumption at ...

INTRODUCTION Few studies have assessed how people's perceptions of their neighborhood environment compare with objective measures or how self-reported and objective neighborhood measures relate to consumption of fruits and vegetables. METHODS A telephone survey of 4,399 residents of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, provided data on individuals, their households, their neighborhoods (self-defined),...

Heterogeneity in fruit quality constitutes a major constraint in agri-food chains. In this paper the sources of the heterogeneity in pineapple in the field were studied in four experiments in commercial pineapple fields. The aims were to determine (a) whether differences in pineapple fruit quality among individual fruits are associated with differences in vigor of the individual plants within t...

Predicting student knowledge from text has become an increasingly common for automatic grading and assessment. Much of this work, however, hinges on natural language processing techniques that tend to neglect the relative locations of individual words by using a bag of words model. Instead of using this technique we segment text into a bag of utterances. We then use those utterances to examine ...

A prospective study was performed to evaluate four culture methods for the diagnosis of bacterial peritonitis in patients on continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis. Peritonitis was present in 44 of 85 patient admissions (52%). The overall sensitivity of the culture methods in detecting peritonitis was 66%. The sensitivities of the individual methods were as follows: bag culture method, 61%; ...