Classical logic has a serious limitation in that it cannot cope with the issues of vagueness and uncertainty into which fall most modes of human reasoning. In order to provide a foundation for human knowledge representation and reasoning in the presence of vagueness, imprecision, and uncertainty, fuzzy logic should have the ability to deal with linguistic hedges, which play a very important rol...

Landscape-wide mass-flowering of oilseed rape (canola Brassica napus) can considerably affect wild bee communities and pollination success of wild plants. We aimed to assess the impact of oilseed rape on the pollination of wild plants and bee abundance during and after oilseed-rape bloom, including effects on crop-noncrop spillover at landscape and adjacent-field scales. We focused on two shrub...

Most West Indian snakes of the family Dipsadidae belong to the Subfamily Xenodontinae and Tribe Alsophiini. As recognized here, alsophiine snakes are exclusively West Indian and comprise 43 species distributed throughout the region. These snakes are slender and typically fast-moving (active foraging), diurnal species often called racers. For the last four decades, their classification into six ...

Importance Schizophrenia is associated with an increased risk of type 2 diabetes. However, it is not clear whether schizophrenia confers an inherent risk for glucose dysregulation in the absence of the effects of chronic illness and long-term treatment. Objective To conduct a meta-analysis examining whether individuals with first-episode schizophrenia already exhibit alterations in glucose ho...

Examination of amino acids in particulate samples from a variety of marine environments (fresh phytoplankton to deep-sea sediments) revealed systematic compositional changes upon progressive degradation. These consistent trends have been used to derive a quantitative degradation index (DI) that is directly related to the reactivity of the organic material, as indicated by its lability to enzyma...

We propose an algorithm for constraint solving over hedges and contexts built over individual, sequence, function, and context variables and flexible arity symbols, where the admissible bindings of sequence variables and context variables can be constrained to languages represented by regular hedge or regular context expressions. We identify sufficient syntactic restrictions that enable to solv...