We evaluated the abundance of nonnative plants on fuel breaks and in adjacent untreated areas to determine if fuel treatments promote the invasion of nonnative plant species. Understanding the relationship between fuel treatments and nonnative plants is becoming increasingly important as federal and state agencies are currently implementing large fuel treatment programs throughout the United St...

The automatic recognition of foreign-accented Arabic speech is a challenging task since it involves a large number of nonnative accents. As well, the nonnative speech data available for training are generally insufficient. Moreover, as compared to other languages, the Arabic language has sparked a relatively small number of research efforts. In this paper, we are concerned with the problem of n...

Basic information on where nonnative plant species have successfully invaded is lacking. We assessed the vulnerability of 22 vegetation types (25 sets of four plots in nine study areas) to nonnative plant invasions in the north-central United States. In general, habitats with high native species richness were more heavily invaded than species-poor habitats, low-elevation areas were more invaded...

Biomolecular recognition entails attractive forces for the functional native states and discrimination against potential nonnative interactions that favor alternate stable configurations. The challenge posed by the competition of nonnative stabilization against native-centric forces is conceptualized as frustration. Experiment indicates that frustration is often minimal in evolved biological sy...

Proteins are minimally frustrated polymers. However, for realistic protein models, nonnative interactions must be taken into account. In this paper, we analyze the effect of nonnative interactions on the folding rate and on the folding free energy barrier. We present an analytic theory to account for the modification on the free energy landscape upon introduction of nonnative contacts, added as...

Automated Essay Scoring (AES) has been quite popular and is being widely used. However, lack of appropriate methodology for rating nonnative English speakers’ essays has meant a lopsided advancement in this field. In this paper, we report initial results of our experiments with nonnative AES that learns from manual evaluation of nonnative essays. For this purpose, we conducted an exercise in wh...

0006-3207/$ see front matter 2009 Elsevier Ltd. A doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2009.03.001 * Corresponding author. Tel.:+ 01 510 642 7304; fa E-mail addresses: [email protected] (J berkeley.edu (S.L. Stephens). Fuel reduction in the wildland–urban interface is a widely used international strategy for assisting human communities regarding wildfire threats, but very little research has examined ...

Automatic thesaurus extraction techniques are applied to computer-generated related word vocabulary questions. These questions assess and provide practice for an aspect of word knowledge found to be important for language learning. Automatic generation of such questions reduces the need for human authoring of practice materials. In evaluations with real teachers, most of the generated questions...