Between 1995 and 1997, we studied breeding birds in fragments of native tallgrass prairie in southwestern Missouri to determine the effect of habitat fragmentation on grassland bird populations. Data on density and nesting success collected in 13 prairie fragments of various sizes revealed three levels of area sensitivity. The most area-sensitive species, Greater Prairie-Chicken ( Tympanuchus c...

We have studied how contrast threshold sensitivity depends jointly on pattern and color. We measured sensitivity to colored Gabor patches from 0.5 to 8 c/deg. At each spatial frequency, we measured in many different color directions. We analyze the sensitivity measurements using a series of nested models. We conclude that a model consisting of three pattern-color separable mechanisms predicts d...

We describe a perceptual experiment whose goal is to compare perceptual sensitivity to pitch accent contrasts in nuclear and prenuclear positions. The material consists of Czech sentences which have been resynthesized with controlled intonation. The results show that changes in nuclear pitch accents are perceived more sharply than changes in prenuclear pitch accents, and that the H* accent is p...

Theories based on optimal sampling by the retina have been widely applied to visual ecology at the level of the optics of the eye, supported by visual behaviour. This leads to speculation about the additional processing that must lie in between-in the brain itself. But fewer studies have adopted a quantitative approach to evaluating the detectability of specific features in these neural pathway...

This study explored sensitivity to word-level phonotactic patterns in English and Japanese monolingual infants. Infants at the ages of 6, 12, and 18 months were tested on their ability to discriminate between test words using a habituation-switch experimental paradigm. All of the test words, neek, neeks, and neekusu, are phonotactically legitimate for English, whereas the first two words are cr...

Starting with the burst of social media, online encyclopedias and sharing resources online, performance testing is more important than ever before. Every venture knows that it should have a fast and a reliable system. Furthermore the business needs to optimize and prepare the system to meet a higher number of users as it grows. A poor performing system can face financial losses and it could als...

Real-ear directional sensitivity patterns were obtained from a group of eight subjects wearing in-the-ear and completely-in-the-canal-placed microphones to determine whether depth of microphone placement within the ear affects electroacoustic estimates of directionality. Both conventional and extended versions of the Unidirectional Index and the Directivity Index were used to estimate direction...

the need for more comparisons among models is widely recognized. this study aimed to compare three different modelling approaches for their capability to simulate and predict trends and patterns of winter wheat yield in western germany. the three modelling approaches included an empirical model, a process-based model (lintul2), and a metamodel derived from the process-based model. the models ou...

background: there is a conserved portion in the 16s rrna gene of bacteria which can be amplified by the universal pcr method. this fragment is 996 bp in length. in this method, only one set of universal primers is used for the amplification of the conserved region of the 16s rrna gene, in common bacterial pathogens. therefore, using the universal pcr method, these bacteria are detectable only b...

    Drug resistance enables cancer cells to break away from cytotoxic effect of anticancer drugs. Identification of resistant phenotype is very important because it can lead to effective treatment plan. There is an interest in developing classifying models of resistance phenotype based on the multivariate data. We have investigated a vibrational spectroscopic approach in order to characterize a...