The objectives were to estimate (co)variance components and genetic parameters for lactation curve traits in Holstein dairy cows in Iran. The used data were records on Holstein cows collected during January 2003 to December 2012 by the Animal Breeding Center of Iran (Karaj, Iran). In order to describe the lactation curve, an incomplete gamma function was fitted to 691200 test-day records on 962...

Flight speed is expected to increase with mass and wing loading among flying animals and aircraft for fundamental aerodynamic reasons. Assuming geometrical and dynamical similarity, cruising flight speed is predicted to vary as (body mass)(1/6) and (wing loading)(1/2) among bird species. To test these scaling rules and the general importance of mass and wing loading for bird flight speeds, we u...

The planning of visually guided reaches is accomplished by independent specification of extent and direction. We investigated whether this separation of extent and direction planning for well practiced movements could be explained by differences in the adaptation to extent and directional errors during motor learning. We compared the time course and generalization of adaptation with two types o...

Timeand pitch-scale modifications of speech signals find important applications in speech synthesis, playback systems, voice conversion, learning/hearing aids, etc.. There is a requirement for computationally efficient and real-time implementable algorithms. In this paper, we propose a high quality and computationally efficient timeand pitch-scaling methodology based on the glottal closure inst...

Intracranial vault (ICV) volume, obtained from T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), is generally used to estimate premorbid brain size in imaging studies. T1-weighted sequences lack the signal characteristics for ICV measurements [they have poor contrast at the outer boundary of sulcal cranium scaling factor (CSF)] but are valuable in imaging studies due to their excellent gray vs. whi...

An adaptive Doppler-shift compensation scheme for wideband orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM) is proposed in this paper. This approach accommodates a time-varying Doppler, where the time scaling factor for each OFDM symbol is frequently estimated depending on the inherent periodicity of the cyclic-prefix and its preceding neighbours' values. The proposed technique relies on a sin...

This work introduces a new recombination and a new mutation operator for an accelerated evolutionary algorithm in the context of Pareto optimization. Both operators are based on a self-organizing map, which is actively learning from the evolution in order to adapt the mutation step size and improve convergence speed. Standard selection operators can be used in conjunction with these operators. ...

1 In Continuous Speech Recognition (CSR) systems, acoustic and Language Models (LM) must be integrated. To get optimum CSR performances, it is well-known that heuristic factors must be optimised. Due to its great effect on final CSR performances, the exponential scaling factor applied to LM probabilities is the most important. LM probabilities are obtained after applying a smoothing technique. ...

This study estimated the Malmquist Total Factor Productivity Index and its components. It attempted to examine patterns of change in these indices in periods leading up to and immediately following, the macroeconomic crisis in Pakistan in the year 2008. Bootstrapping procedure proposed by Simar and Wilsonwas employed to construct confidence intervals for efficiency estimates. For many banks, to...

Emergent properties of global political culture were examined using data from the World History Survey (WHS) involving 6,902 university students in 37 countries evaluating 40 figures from world history. Multidimensional scaling and factor analysis techniques found only limited forms of universality in evaluations across Western, Catholic/Orthodox, Muslim, and Asian country clusters. The highest...