Resistance of four brassica leafy vegetables: kale, Chinese cabbage, rape and Ethiopian mustard to cabbage aphid, Brevicoryne brassicae (L.) was studied in cage experiments at the Botswana College of Agriculture, Gaborone, Botswana. A completely randomised design with cultivars as treatments and four replicates per treatment was used. One newly laid nymph was placed on each of the four potted p...

Previous researchers have explored the role of race and respectability, independently, on attributions of responsibility; however, the interaction between race and respectability has not been analyzed in situations of acquaintance rape. Participants (N = 241) read a vignette detailing a case of acquaintance rape that manipulated the race of both the victim and the perpetrator and the respectabi...

This paper presents a new parallel programming environment called ParADE to enable easy, portable, and high-performance computing for SMP clusters. Different from the prior studies, ParADE separates the programming model from the execution model: it enables shared-address-space programming while it realizes hybrid execution of message-passing and shared-address-space. To overcome the poor perfo...

Despite growing concern about transgenes escaping from fields, few studies have analysed the genetic diversity of crops in an agroecosystem over several years. Accurate information about the dynamics and relationship of the genetic diversity of crops in an agroecosystem is essential for risk assessment and policies concerning the containment of genetically modified crops and their coexistence w...

The authors of this paper focus on Yamahoko parade in the Kyoto Gion Festival, which was inscribed on the UNESCO’s Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2009. We produce a content, combining motion and acoustics of Yamahoko floats, parade spectators and crews within a platform of Virtual Kyoto. Approximately 730 spectators are simulated in this virtual parade to...

he aim of this study is to analyze the impact of nepotism on the employee performance and to find out what kind of a strategic move can be nepotism in the presence of such a relation. Although personnel selection through nepotism which is also known as family or acquaintance partiality causes a certain amount of disadvantages, it is possible at the same time to have more loyal employees to the ...

Intense selection for specific seed qualities in winter oilseed rape breeding has had an inadvertent negative influence on seed germination performance. In a panel of 215 diverse winter oilseed rape varieties spanning over 50 years of breeding progress in winter-type rapeseed, we found that low seed erucic acid content and reduced seed glucosinolate content were significantly related with prolo...

This paper proposes a front-end processing method for automatic speech recognition (ASR) that employs a voice activity detection (VAD) method based on the periodic to aperiodic component ratio (PAR). The proposed VAD method is called PARADE (PAR based Activity DEtection). By considering the powers of the periodic and aperiodic components of the observed signals simultaneously, PARADE can detect...

A series of strict emission control measures were implemented in Beijing and surrounding regions to ensure good air quality during the 2014 Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit and 2015 Grand Military Parade (Parade), which led to blue sky days during these two events commonly referred to as "APEC Blue" and "Parade Blue". Here we calculated Multi-Axis Differential Optical Absorption ...