Conversion of natural forests to plantations, particularly in the tropics, has drawn global attention and concern. Moreover, plantation forestry is on the rise, especially in tropical and sub-tropical regions where growth rates are rapid. Even in the United States where even-age silviculture is being de-emphasized on public land (only about 15Oh of all plantings in recent years), the area in ne...

The theoretical information threshold for the planted clique problem is $2\log_2(N)$, however no polynomial algorithm is known to recover a planted clique of size $O(N^{1/2-\epsilon})$, $\epsilon>0$. In this paper we will apply a standard method for the analysis of disordered models, the Parallel-Tempering (PT) algorithm, to the clique problem, showing numerically that its time-scaling in the h...

Spectral methods for clustering are now standard, and there are many toy examples in which they can be seen to yield more sensible solutions than classical schemes like vanilla k-means. A more rigorous analysis of these methods has proved elusive, however, and has so far consisted mostly of probabilistic analyses for random inputs with planted clusterings. Such an analysis, typically calls for ...

The bacterial communities in floodwater, from a rice-planted and an unplanted field were characterized at the beginning (flooding stage) and at the end (harvest stage) of the rice cropping cycle. Most probable number estimations and plate counts of aerobic and anaerobic heterotrophic bacteria and of several metabolic bacterial groups (methanogens, sulfate-reducers, anaerobic sulfur and nonsulfu...

We consider a robust analog of the planted clique problem. In this analog, a set S of vertices is chosen and all edges in S are included; then, edges between S and the rest of the graph are included with probability 12 , while edges not touching S are allowed to vary arbitrarily. For this semi-random model, we show that the information-theoretic threshold for recovery is Θ̃( √ n), in sharp contr...

Growing vegetables economically in the use of constructed wetland for wastewater treatment can play a role in overcoming water and food scarcity. Allium porrum L., Solanum melongena L., Ipomoea aquatica Forsk., and Capsicum annuum L. plants were selected to grow in hybrid constructed wetland (CW) under natural conditions. The impact of the ratio of nitrate to ammonium nitrogen on ammonium and n...

Blended refuge for transgenic plants expressing Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) toxins has been approved in the northern United States as a resistance management strategy alternative to a structured refuge. A three-year study (2012-2014) was conducted with 54 trials across nine states in the southern United States to evaluate plant injury from lepidopteran pests of corn and yield in a corn hybrid e...

We analyze the behavior of hill-climbing algorithms for the minimum bisection problem on instances drawn from the \planted bisection" ran-is one of the few problem distributions for which various popular heuris-tic methods, such as simulated annealing, have been proven to succeed. However, it has been open whether these sophisticated methods were necessary , or whether simpler heuristics would ...

Moisture availability is the factor that most commonly influences the discrimination against 13C fixation (∆) by C3 plants. Therefore, by changing the availability of moisture by way of controlling competing vegetation, ∆ in white spruce (Picea glauca (Moench) Voss) seedlings should be affected. The objective of this study was to determine the influence of manual brushing on ∆ in white spruce s...

In the planted partition problem, the n vertices of a random graph are partitioned into k “clusters,” and edges between vertices in the same cluster and different clusters are included with constant probability p and q, respectively (where 0 ≤ q < p ≤ 1). We give an efficient spectral algorithm that recovers the clusters with high probability, provided that the sizes of any two clusters are eit...