The pearl industry in French Polynesia is based on exploitation of natural stocks of the blacklip pearl oyster (Pinctada margaritifera). It generates an annual turnover of €90 million. Improvements in pearl quality need genetic studies to improve the populations. This pearl oyster is a protandric species, in which the sex ratio normally is biased toward males. There is an increasing interest in...

Japanese female pearl divers called Ama specialize in free diving in the cold sea for collecting foods and pearls in oysters. Exercising in the water combined with marked bradycardia and pressor responses provides a circulatory challenge to properly buffer or cushion elevated cardiac pulsations. Because Ama perform repeated free dives throughout their lives, it is possible that they may have ad...

PEARL MILLET Pearl millet is one of the two major crops grown to feed people living in the semi-arid, low input dryland agriculture regions of Africa and southeast Asia. People in northern Nambia are almost entirely dependent on pearl millet for food. Four countries in the Sahel of Africa, with a total population of 38 million, depend on pearl millet to provide over 1,000 calories per person pe...

Analysis by image synthesis using CG has attracted wide attention in machine vision. This paper proposes a method of modeling and synthesizing pearls that will be the central technique of a pearl quality evaluation system. Pearls manifest a specific optical phenomenon that is not dependent on the direction of the light source. To investigate this feature, we propose a physical model for multila...

628 Abstract: Sorghum (Sorghum bicolor (L.) Moench) and pearl millet (Pennisetum glaucum (L.) R. Br.), ranking fifth and sixth in global cereal hectarage, respectively, are the most important coarse-grain cereals in the semi-arid tropical regions of Asia and Africa. Pearl millet displays better adaptation to and is grown in relatively more marginal environments than sorghum. Under subsistence f...

Although understanding causation is an essential part of nearly every problem domain, it has resisted formal treatment in the languages of logic, probability, and even statistics. Autonomous artificially intelligent agents need to be able to reason about cause and effect. One approach is to provide the agent with formal, computational notions of causality that enable the agent to deduce cause a...