This paper employs multiple regression analysis to evaluate the effectiveness of yieldraising techniques available to medieval farm managers (reeves) using a panel dataset of 49 manors held by the Bishop of Winchester from 1349-70. There are three main interesting findings. First, annual weather variation, modelled with climate reconstructions, was highly significant in explaining annual yield ...

The standard prediction process of SVM requires acquisition of all the feature values for every instance. In practice, however, a cost is associated with the mere act of acquisition of a feature, e.g. CPU time needed to compute the feature out of raw data, the dollar amount spent for gleaning more information, or the patient wellness sacrificed by an invasive medical test, etc. In such applicat...

Significant increases in National Institutes of Health (NIH) spending on medical research have not produced corresponding increases in new treatments and cures. Instead, laboratory discoveries remain in what has been termed the "valley of death," the gap between bench research and clinical application. Recently, there has been considerable discussion in the literature and scientific community a...

Related species with different diets are predicted to rely on different cognitive strategies: those best suited for locating available and appropriate foods. Here we tested two predictions of the niche-specific cognitive strategies hypothesis in bats, which suggests that predatory species should rely more on object memory than on spatial memory for finding food and that the opposite is true of ...

Over the years, our group, led by Bob Balzer, designed and implemented three domain-specific languages for use by outside people in real situations. The first language described the communication format of messages used by NATO to specify command-and-control messages between people and equipment; the processor we generated checked these messages for consistency. The second language was in part ...

MOTIVATION Gene clustering and gene set-based functional analysis are widely used for the analysis of expression profiles. The development of a comprehensive method jointly combining the two methods would allow for greater biological insights. RESULTS We developed a software package, PathCluster for gene set-based clustering via an agglomerative hierarchical clustering algorithm. The distance...

The coral reef ecosystem forms part of a 'seascape' that includes land-based ecosystems such as mangroves and forests, and ideally should form a complete system for conservation and management. Aquaculture, including artisanal fishing for fish and invertebrates, shrimp farming, and seaweed farming, is a major part of the farming and gleaning practices of many tropical communities, particularly ...

This article deals with the importance of finfish that are not sold on any market. We detail two major points of view: the ecological significance of larvae and juveniles for future harvests, and the importance of subsistence fisheries as a food supply, particularly in the tropics. In the first case, we show that larvae and juveniles of many commercially important species are linked to estuarin...

Winter feeding costs represent between 50 and 60 cents of every dollar spent on keeping a cow a year. Thus, any attempt to control or reduce costs of operating a cow herd must focus on controlling or reducing feed costs. However, attempts at controlling or reducing costs are highly dependent on the forage system that the cow-calf operation uses. Forage systems vary depending on a variety of fac...

James Paul Gee’s Unified Discourse Analysis: Language, Reality, Virtual Worlds, and Video Games not only offers a comprehensive theoretical framework that can be used to analyze discourse, video games, and action, but also explores the underlying commonalities that unite these seemingly disparate domains. The root of Gee’s theory is that “conversations” are not limited to talk, but also include...