In this paper, we argue that the metaphor form of a comparison (i.e., a topic-vehicle pair) is preferred over, and more comprehensible than, the simile form when the interpretive diversity for that comparison is high. Interpretive diversity refers to the richness of the figurative meaning of a comparison; it is high to the extent that more features or properties are related to the figurative me...

In this paper, we introduce a patch connectivity index and analyse its changes in relation to ecotope diversity and human impact intensity. Land-use maps of the newly born wetland at the Yellow River Delta of 1984, 1991 and 1996 were produced by applying an unsupervised and a supervised classification algorithm to the corresponding three scenes of Landsat Thematic Mapper (TM) images. A model fo...

Morphological diversity is routinely used to infer ecological variation among species because differences in form underlie variation in functional performance of ecological tasks like capturing prey, avoiding predators, or defending territories. However, many functions have complex morphological bases that can weaken associations between morphological and functional diversification. We investig...

The identity of patients must be protected when patient data are shared. The two most commonly used models to protect identity of patients are L-diversity and K-anonymity. However, existing work mainly considers data sets with a single sensitive attribute, while patient data often contain multiple sensitive attributes (e.g., diagnosis and treatment). This article shows that although the K-anony...

Expressed sequence tags simple sequence repeats (EST-SSRs) are important sources for investigation of genetic diversity and molecular marker development. Similar to genomic SSRs, the EST-SSRs are useful markers for many applications in genetics and plant breeding such as genetic diversity analysis, molecular mapping and cross-transferability across related species and genera. In spite of low po...