The authors address the problem of unsupervised ensemble ranking. Traditional approaches either combinemultiple ranking criteria into a unified representation to obtain an overall ranking score or to utilize certain rank fusion or aggregation techniques to combine the ranking results. Beyond the aforementioned “combine-thenrank” and “rank-then-combine” approaches, the authors propose a novel “r...

One of the major goals of the Sustainable Agriculture Farming initiatives at UC Davis is to provide information about the feasibility of adopting conservation tillage and cover cropping at the farm level. The project includes two tillage schemes: standard tillage (ST) and conservation tillage (CT), and three farming methods: conventional, organic, and winter legume cover crop. All three product...

Global biodiversity continues along a trajectory of decline despite enormous conservation efforts (Rands et al., 2010). This is also true in China, one of the most biodiversity-rich countries in the world (Liu and Raven, 2010; Ministry of Environmental Protection of China, 2010a). To fundamentally change this trajectory, it is essential to understand complex interactions among various forces af...

This paper regards the query keywords selection problem in source retrieval as learning a ranking model to choose the method of keywords extraction over suspicious document segments. Four basic methods are used in our ranking function: BM25, TFIDF, TF and EW. Then, a ranking model based on Ranking SVM is proposed to rank the query keywords group which is contributed to get the higher evaluation...

Despite their ambiguous historical record, conservation/development interventions the world over have remained a popular environmental governance tool. One of the latest global ‘trends’ are interventions to establish so-called ‘Transfrontier Conservation Areas’ (TFCAs): large contiguous spaces that are principally aimed at conserving biological diversity across national boundaries. In line with...

BACKGROUND Adequate use of different learning strategies is one of the most important prerequisites of academic success. The actual use of learning strategies is the result of an interaction between individual and situational variables. Against this background we conducted a longitudinal study with first year medical students to investigate whether individuals show different patterns in their u...