The capability of bait lamina to assess biological activity of soil fauna in semi-arid zone was studied in a peri-urban area polluted by dieldrin. This method was compared to litter bags usually used in this savannah region to monitor the activity of soil macro-invertebrates. The study site is used for agriculture and the irrigation water contains known concentrations of dieldrin residues. Thre...

Since 2003, non-compliant aflatoxin concentrations have been detected in maize produced in Italy. The most successful worldwide experiments in aflatoxin prevention resulted from distribution of atoxigenic strains of Aspergillusflavus to displace aflatoxin-producers during crop development. The displacement results in lower aflatoxin concentrations in harvested grain. The current study evaluated...

Polymorphic expressed sequence tag - simple sequence repeat (EST-SSR) markers derived from major cereal crops were used to assess the genetic diversity of the USDA temperate bamboo collection consisting of 92 accessions classified in 11 separate genera and 44 species. A total of 211 bands were detected with a mean number of alleles per locus of 8.440. Phylogenetic relationships were determined ...

We consider a common problem in physics: How to estimate a smooth function given noisy measurements. We assume that the unknown signal is measured at N different times, {ti: i = 1, . . . N} and that the measurements, {yi}, have been contaminated by additive noise. Thus the measurements satisfy yi = g(ti) + i, where g(t) is the unknown signal and i are random errors. For simplicity, we assume th...

Several economical time series such as exchange rates US$/British Pound, USA Treasure Bonds rates and Warsaw Stock Index WIG have been investigated using the method of recurrence plots. The percentage of recurrence REC and the percentage of determinism DET have been calculated for the original and for shuffled data. We have found that in some cases the values of REC and DET parameters are about...

An 11-year field study was initiated in 1979 to monitor population development of Heterodera glycines. Fifty cysts of a race 5 population were introduced into plots in a field with no history of soybean production and that had been in sod for 20 years. Soybean cultivars either susceptible or resistant to H. glycines were grown either in monoculture or rotated with maize in a 2-year rotation. Du...

In this study, we investigated the feasibility of using a novel volatile organic compound (VOC)-based metabolic profiling approach with a newly devised chemometrics methodology which combined rapid multivariate analysis on total ion currents with in-depth peak deconvolution on selected regions to characterise the spoilage progress of pork. We also tested if such approach possessed enough discri...

To analyze computer systems or compare them to one another, measurements are taken as the program runs. This is called a performance trace, and it can involve large amounts of time series data. Currently, statistical tools are used for analysis but this approach loses information by ignoring the ordered nature of the data. We propose improving computer performance metrics by viewing the compute...

Traditional box plots, described by Tukey in 1977, can be biased representations of geographic or spatial variables, since they do not take into account the areas associated with the elements of geographic variables. To help solve this problem, we propose and evaluate a spatially (areally) weighted box plot, a “geographic box plot,” that can be used to describe a wide variety of geographic vari...

The scatter plot is a well-known method of visualizing pairs of two continuous variables. Scatter plots are intuitive and easy-to-use, but often have a high degree of overlap which may occlude a significant portion of the data. To analyze a dense non-uniform dataset, a recursive drill-down is required for detailed analysis. In this paper, we propose variable binned scatter plots to allow the vi...