Nectar robbers are thought rarely to pollinate flowers, especially those with sexual organs hidden within corollas. In this study, we examined whether robbers pollinate flowers of distylous Primula secundiflora. Distylous plants have two floral morphs. Pin flowers have long styles and short stamens, and thrum flowers have short styles and long stamens. Flowers of P. secundiflora were commonly r...

The deepest problems we have to understand and resolve are in these relations of nature and livelihood.... [T]he central change we have to make is in the received and dominant concept of the earth and its life forms as raw materials for generalized production.... But in the equally necessary perspective of ... an apparently unmediated nature—the living world of rivers and mountains, of trees an...

New Zealand Journal of Ecology (1998) 22(2): 181-188 ©New Zealand Ecological Society quantities. More recent New Zealand studies (Fitzgerald, 1976; Warburton, 1978; Fitzgerald and Wardle, 1979; Leathwick, Hay and Fitzgerald, 1983; and Coleman, Green and Polson, 1985) have used microscopic analyses of the undigested plant cuticles in stomach contents or faecal material to identify the relative p...

this experiment was carried out in 2003-2004 to determine fruit set patterns in four pistachio cultivars (akbari, ahmad aghaie, kalle ghouchi and ohadi) to find out the correlation between final fruit set and embryonic sac development, and as well between primary fertility and final fruit set. in a field experiment, inflorescence schematic shape and position of flowers (on inflorescence on the ...

1. Neotropical migrant birds show a clear preference for stopover habitats with ample food supplies; yet, the proximate cues underlying these decisions remain unclear. 2. For insectivorous migrants, cues associated with vegetative phenology (e.g. flowering, leaf flush, and leaf loss) may reliably predict the availability of herbivorous arthropods. Here we examined whether migrants use the pheno...

Automatic synthesis of realistic images from text would be interesting and useful, but current AI systems are still far from this goal. However, in recent years generic and powerful recurrent neural network architectures have been developed to learn discriminative text feature representations. Meanwhile, deep convolutional generative adversarial networks (GANs) have begun to generate highly com...

The aim of this paper is to leverage foreground segmentation to improve classification performance on weakly annotated datasets – those with no additional annotation other than class labels. We introduce TriCoS, a new co-segmentation algorithm that looks at all training images jointly and automatically segments out the most class-discriminative foregrounds for each image. Ultimately, those fore...

abstract-manual harvesting of saffron as a laborious and exhausting job; it not only raises production costs, but also reduces the quality due to contaminations. saffron quality could be enhanced if automated harvesting is substituted. as the main step towards designing a saffron harvester robot, an appropriate algorithm was developed in this study based on image processing techniques to recogn...

We propose a new formulation for pruning convolutional kernels in neural networks to enable efficient inference. We interleave greedy criteria-based pruning with finetuning by backpropagation—a computationally efficient procedure that maintains good generalization in the pruned network. We propose a new criterion based on Taylor expansion that approximates the change in the cost function induce...