background and aim: patients’ hospitalization is associated with family members’ anxiety. fulfilling family members’ needs such as providing them with information and helping them have physical contacts with their patients can alleviate their anxiety. this study was conducted to investigate the impacts of family members’ supportive presence in a neurological intensive care unit on their anxiety...

Bin management during apple harvest season is an important activity for orchards. Typically, empty and full bins are handled by tractor-mounted forklifts or bin trailers in two separate trips. In order to simplify this work process and improve work efficiency of bin management, the concept of a robotic bin-dog system is proposed in this study. This system is designed with a “go-over-the-bin” fe...

An ordinary circle of a set P of n points in the plane is defined as a circle that contains exactly three points of P. We show that if P is not contained in a line or a circle, then P spans at least [Formula: see text] ordinary circles. Moreover, we determine the exact minimum number of ordinary circles for all sufficiently large n and describe all point sets that come close to this minimum. We...

1 The MathWorks, Inc., Simulink Development, 3 Apple Hill Dr., Natick, MA 01760-2098, U.S.A. 2 The MathWorks, Inc., Application Engineering, 39555 Orchard Hill Place, Novi, MI 48375-5374, U.S.A. 3 The MathWorks, Inc., xPC Target Development, 3 Apple Hill Dr., Natick, MA 01760-2098, U.S.A. 4 The MathWorks, Inc., Technical Marketing, 39555 Orchard Hill Place, Novi, MI 48375-5374, U.S.A. 5 The Mat...

This study presents an evaluation of soil organic carbon (SOC) and stock (SOCstock) for the whole rooting depth (60 cm), spaced 55 months in two adjacent olive orchards with similar conditions but different tree densities: (i) intensive, planted 1996 at 310 ha−1; (ii) superintensive, 2000 1850 ha−1. was carried out to test hypothesis that plant densities will have rates accumulation SOC depth. ...

Video multicast is an important application for P2P networks, which can benefit from the load repartitioning and large scale distribution properties they have to offer. In this context, the Orchard algorithm was developed in 2007, with an aim to build a P2P system meeting video multicast requirements. However, Orchard suffers from a slow overlay construction and a potentially high end-to-end de...

Scattered trees support high levels of farmland biodiversity and ecosystem services in agricultural landscapes, but they are threatened by agricultural intensification, urbanization, and land abandonment. This study aimed to map and quantify the decline of orchard meadows (scattered fruit trees of high nature conservation value) for a region in Southwestern Germany for the 1968 2009 period and ...

Sensors, communication systems and geo-reference units are required to achieve an optimized management of agricultural inputs with respect to the economic and environmental aspects of olive groves. In this study, three commercial olive harvesters were tracked during two harvesting seasons in Spain and Chile using remote and autonomous equipment that was developed to determine their time efficie...

Mapping is a significant issue in mobile robot applications. Mobile robots can build a map or a model of the environment using different sensors. An orchard is a suitable agricultural environment for mobile robot applications since it is a semi-structured environment, where trees are planted in nominally straight rows. This paper presents a new method to extract features from the orchard enviro...

Functional diversity is crucial to ecosystem functioning in agricultural landscapes. Intensive agriculture has led habitat homogeneity and thus a decrease biodiversity the disappearance of useful epigeic fauna. This study investigated how local types an landscape affect assemblage parameters (abundance, species richness Shannon–Wiener index) life history traits ground beetles (Coleoptera: Carab...