The Songnen Plain of the Northeast China is one of the three largest soda saline-alkali regions worldwide. To better understand soil alkalinization and salinization in this important agricultural region, it is vital to explore the distribution and variation of soil alkalinity and salinity in space and time. This study examined soil properties and identified the variables to extract soil alkalin...

An analytical form of relationship between spectral vegetation indices (VI) is derived in the context of cross calibration and translation of vegetation index products from different sensors. The derivation has been carried out based on vegetation isoline equations that relate two reflectance values observed at different wavelength ranges often represented by spectral band passes. The derivatio...

PVS is one of the most powerful proof assistant systems and its libraries of formalized mathematics are among the most comprehensive albeit under-appreciated ones. A characteristic feature of PVS is the use of a very rich mathematical and logical foundation, including e.g., record types, undecidable subtyping, and a deep integration of decision procedures. That makes it particularly difficult t...

In cases of densely occluded urban scenes, it is effective to determine the visibility of scenes, since only small parts of the scene are visible from a given cell. In this paper, we introduce a new visibility preprocessing method that efficiently computes potentially visible objects for volumetric cells. The proposed method deals with general 3D polygonal models and invisible objects jointly b...

We analyse the respective benefits and drawbacks of ground–based and space–based transit surveys for extrasolar planets. Based on simple but realistic assumptions about the fraction of lower main sequence stars harboring telluric and giant planets within the outer limit of the habitable zone, we predict the harvests of fictitious surveys with three existing wide field optical and near–IR camera...

For n n complex matrices A and an n n Hermitian matrix S, we consider the S-numerical range of A and the positive S-numerical range of A de ned by WS(A) = hAv; viS hv; viS : v 2 I Cn; hv; viS 6= 0

Group-ware is about group-work. It is about developing technologies that support the way people communicate and collaborate to accomplish work goals in the context of personal,managerial and organizational imperatives. In contrast to single user applications which support peoples’ tasks, groupware supports peoples’ work. Tasks are often explicit, observable and concrete. Work is often tacit...

We prove the Avrunin-Scott theorem for quantum complete intersections; the rank variety of a module is isomorphic to its support variety.

Social Desirability Bias (SDB) is the tendency in respondents to answer questions untruthfully in the hope of giving good impression to others. SDB occurs when the survey question is highly sensitive or personal, and responses cause sample statistics to systematically over-or underestimate corresponding population parameters. The Randomized Response Technique (RRT) is one of several methods to ...

The official end of Walter Scott’s often barely concealed anonymity as a novelist came with his putting his name to the ‘Introduction’ of the first volume of his Chronicles of the Canongate in 1827, where ‘The Author of Waverley’ and its successors finally dropped his mask and admitted what so many of his readers had long known. After admitting no obvious reason for his choice of remaining anon...