Natural language processing is a difficult problem and is currently a technical barrier in building personal assistant agents that aim to interact with humans in natural language. One possible solution is to rely on humans to restrict or adapt their language into more computer friendly ways. We study the feasibility of this approach in the context of a personal assistant agent that parses email...

It is shown that there is a function g on the natural numbers such that a partial Steiner triple system U on u points can be embedded in a Steiner triple system V on v points, in such a way that all automorphisms of U can be extended to V , for every admissible v satisfying v > g(u). We find exponential upper and lower bounds for g.

M any of us envy and even view with awe the ease with which others write. Program directors and faculty educators often find writing to be uncomfortable, slow, and readily postponed. Yet with a dearth of useful information regarding successful, feasible, and affordable strategies to teach the next generation of physicians, educators must contribute to the national and international discussion. ...

Remote sensing indices of burn area and fire severity have been developed and tested for forest ecosystems, but not sparsely vegetated, desert shrub-steppe in which large wildfires are a common occurrence and a major issue for land management. We compared the performance of remote sensing indices for detecting burn area and fire severity with extensive ground-based cover assessments made before...

For the past several years, USGS has taken a multi-faceted approach to investigating the condition and trends in sagebrush steppe ecosystems. This recent effort builds upon decades of work in semi-arid ecosystems providing a specific, applied focus on the cumulative impacts of expanding human activities across these landscapes. Here, we discuss several on-going projects contributing to these ef...

Cand Ku-band scatterometer backscatter time series are analysed and compared to meteorological data for two biomes, the African Steppe and the Scandinavian Boreal Forest. Observed characteristics of large scale scattering are inferred and discussed.