The effect of plant growth-promoting bacteria inoculation on plant growth and the sugar content in Agave americana was assessed. The bacterial strains ACO-34A, ACO-40, and ACO-140, isolated from the A. americana rhizosphere, were selected for this study to evaluate their phenotypic and genotypic characteristics. The three bacterial strains were evaluated via plant inoculation assays, and Azospi...

Groundwater long-term monitoring (LTM) is required to assess human health and environmental risk of residual contaminants after active groundwater remediation activities are completed. However, LTM can be costly because of the large number of sampling locations that exist at a site from previous site characterization and remediation activities. The cost of LTM may be reduced by identifying redu...

BACKGROUND Recent research has highlighted the role of emotion-based impulsivity (negative and positive urgency personality traits) for alcohol use and abuse, but has yet to examine how these personality traits interact with the brain's motivational systems. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), we tested whether urgency traits and mood induction affected medial prefrontal respons...

This study determined and compared the influences of various processing techniques including air circulating oven (ACO), dry heat (DHO) water bath (WB) on impact strength (IS) microhardness (HV) conventional cure acrylic resin (CHCAR) rubber reinforced (RRHCAR). Samples were fabricated using CHCAR (control Group A; n=114) RRHCAR (experimental B; n=114). A B further divided into subgroups accord...

We propose the subtree ranking approach to parse forest reranking which is a generalization of current perceptron-based reranking methods. For the training of the reranker, we extract competing local subtrees, hence the training instances (candidate subtree sets) are very similar to those used during beamsearch parsing. This leads to better parameter optimization. Another chief advantage of the...

We describe and motivate bottom-up beamsearch parsing, a probabilistic constituent parsing architecture that combines the advantages of best-first agenda parsing and bottom-up chart parsing into a unified framework. We also present Exponential Decay Pruning (EDP), a novel beam-width pruning technique that is simple and effective, increasing parsing speed up to 43% with no loss in accuracy. Usin...

In this paper a metaheuristic technique called Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is proposed to derive operating policies for a multi-purpose reservoir system. Most of the real world problems often involve non-linear optimization in their solution with high dimensionality and large number of equality and inequality constraints. Often the conventional techniques fail to yield global optimal solution...

BACKGROUND The accountable care organization (ACO) model being adopted across the United States aims to improve patient care and reduce costs. Little is known about whether commercial ACO contracts include accountability for prescription drug spending or how ACOs are engaging outpatient pharmacies and managing prescription drug use. OBJECTIVE To explore how ACOs are addressing drug spending a...

BACKGROUND The accountable care organization (ACO) is a new organizational form to manage patients across the continuum of care. There are numerous questions about how ACOs should be optimally structured, including compensation arrangements with primary care physicians. METHODS Using data from a national survey of physician practices, we compared primary care physicians' compensation between ...

<span>This study proposed a hybrid approach of firefly algorithm (FA) and ant colony optimization (ACO) for solving multi-depot multiple traveling salesman problem, TSP with more than one departure city. The FA is fast converging but easily trapped into the local optimum. ACO has great ability to search solution it converges slowly. To get better result convergence time, we integrate find...