This paper used an electronic survey conducted in Texas to study the main factors affecting the frequency of purchase, measured in transactions per month, for ornamental plants. While we found several differences in demographic characteristics of respondents, the two major factors impacting the frequency of buying for ornamental plants were the purpose of the purchase (self use vs. gifts) and s...

Precedent historic styles were analysed and recovered by historicist revisionism revivalism during the nineteenth century. The lack of a style its century lead to eclecticism, trend that involved merging diverse ornamental repertories. Accordingly, eclectic garden design employed different origins. As cities grew, suburban gardens integrated within urban sprawl. Monforte Gardens in Valencia rep...

We present a Java applet that uses Constraint Processing (CP) to assist a human in playing the popular game Minesweeper. Our goal is to illustrate the power of CP techniques to model and solve combinatorial problems in a context accessible to the general public. Minesweeper is a video game that has been included with Microsoft Windows since 1989. In this game, the player is presented with a gri...

Common green ti plants (Cordyline fruticosa L.) in Hawaii can be infected by four recently characterized closteroviruses that are tentative members of the proposed genus Velarivirus. In this study, a reverse-transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) assay developed to detect and distinguish Cordyline virus 1 (CoV-1), CoV-2, CoV-3, and CoV-4 was used to determine: (i) the distribution of ...

Because of its popularity as an ornamental plant in East Asia, mei (Prunus mume Sieb. et Zucc.) has received increasing attention in genetic and genomic research with the recent shotgun sequencing of its genome. Here, we performed the genome-wide characterization of simple sequence repeats (SSRs) in the mei genome and detected a total of 188,149 SSRs occurring at a frequency of 794 SSR/Mb. Mono...

The problem of maximising the number of squares on a chess board which can be attacked by a configuration of the eight main pieces was first posed in 1849. We report on a computer search which proves that at most 63 squares can be simultaneously attacked, and we give results for other variations of the problem. Our search technique, which pruned the space of2.27x 10 positions to 1.03 x 10, is o...

Viruses of the genus Megalocytivirus have not been detected in wild populations of fish in Australia but circulate in imported ornamental fish. In 2012, detection of a megalocytivirus in healthy platys Xiphophorus maculatus was reported from a farm in Australia during surveillance testing as part of a research project undertaken at the University of Sydney. Confirmatory testing of the original ...

Most important breeding goals in ornamental crops are plant appearance and flower characteristics where selection is visually performed on direct offspring of crossings. We developed an image analysis toolbox for the acquisition of flower and petal images from cultivated carnation (Dianthus caryophyllus L.) that was validated by a detailed analysis of flower and petal size and shape in 78 comme...

Rectangle (square) packing problems involve packing all squares with sizes 1 × 1 to n × n into the minimum area enclosing rectangle (respectively, square). Rectangle packing is a variant of an important problem in a variety of real-world settings. For example, in electronic design automation, the packing of blocks into a circuit layout is essentially a rectangle packing problem. Rectangle packi...