Understanding the spatio-temporal dynamics of land surface phenology is important to understanding changes in landscape ecological processes of semi-arid savannas in Southern Africa. The aim of the study was to determine the influence of variation in tree cover percentage on land surface phenological response in the semi-arid savanna of Southern Africa. Various land surface phenological metrics...

Vegetation dynamics are an important topic in the field of global environment change, which is of great significance to monitor temporal–spatial variability of desertification at regional or global scales. Following the reported desertification reversion in the late 1990s in the Horqin Sandy Land, an issue was concerned for desertification control by decreased water availability. To detect the ...

The residential earthquake insurance of 2002 created additional protected residential earthquake insurance plan, under which residential earthquake insurance is available to individuals from insurance industry in Taiwan. Earthquake damages that occurrence in Taiwan remain largely uninsured losses despite the efforts of governmental and private insurance programs. Spatial Econometrics has been r...

Gene expression study is well known to focus on finding association between expression levels of particular genes and some interesting variables, for example, a disease state. In such studies, besides the primary variable of interest, some other covariates are usually measured and included in the model of association tests. However, it is not possible to measure all the variables related to gen...

We present 1.4 GHz VLA observations of the variability of radio sources in the Lockman Hole region at the level of ≥ 100µJy on timescales of 17 months and 19 days. These data indicate that the areal density of highly variable sources at this level is < 5 × 10 −3 arcmin −2. We set an upper limit of 2% to the fraction of 50 to 100µJy sources that are highly variable (∆S ≥ 50%). These results impl...

The goal of imitation learning is to mimic expert behavior without access to an explicit reward signal. Expert demonstrations provided by humans, however, often show significant variability due to latent factors that are typically not explicitly modeled. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm that can infer the latent structure of expert demonstrations in an unsupervised way. Our method, bui...

The Barnes maze is a spatial memory task that requires subjects to learn the position of a hole that can be used to escape the brightly lit, open surface of the maze. Two experiments assessed the relative importance of spatial (extra-maze) versus proximal visible cues in solving the maze. In Experiment 1, four groups of mice were trained either with or without a discrete visible cue marking the...

The identifiability of spatial variable coefficients for vibration string and EulerBernoulli beam are considered. It is shown that the coefficients can be determined by means of boundary control and observation in finite time duration. These results can be considered as the generalization of infinite time coefficients identifiability through the application of InghamBeurling theorem.

A novel Shape Memory Alloy (SMA) actuator consisting of several thin NiTi bers woven in a counter rotating helical pattern around supporting disks is rst described. This structure accomplishes a highly eecient transformation between force and displacement overcoming the main mechanical drawback of shape memory alloys, that being limited strain. Time domain open loop experiments were then conduc...

In the nD case, a relationship between control viewed as system interconnection and trajectory control can be obtained in terms of the notion of extended interconnection. Such an interconnection corresponds to the introduction of latent variables in the descriptions of the relevant behaviors. In this paper we define different types of extended interconnections and characterize the corresponding...