Spearheads of the Keliysky Stone Box Burial Ground (Ingushetia Highlands)

For the first time, the paper publishes all 20 spearheads and one spear counter-weight, discovered as a result of excavations in 1987–1988, in Keliysky stone boxes burial ground of Highland Ingushetia. A brief description of the burials containing these artifacts is published. The main feature of this burial ground is that the burial structural stone boxes, despite being intended primarily for individual burials, were used for multiple (up to five times) subburials. And only a small part of the spearheads were revealed in the burials in situ, while the rest were either re-laid (together with the bone remains of the buried), moved to the end of the stone box, placed onto the stone box overlap or buried in the ground above the stone box. The authors of the paper assume that the population who made the stone-bearing burial ground (at least its significant part) is of a foreign cultural origin. Accordingly, the artifacts accompanying the buried, including of defensive and offensive weapon parts, are largely imported. The published collection of spearheads, containing a small variety of types, allows us to consider the Keliysky burial ground to be a reference monument for the spearheads typology in the North Caucasus of the 13th–14th centuries AD.

Retinal Blood Vessel Segmentation on Style-augmented Images

The average human lifespan increased dramatically in the second half of 20th century. It was mainly due to technological improvements, which were driven by the continuous war preparations, and while humans have got another 20 years to live, unfortunately there are some sad side effects added to the elderly life. Various diseases can attack the eye, our major organ responsible for receiving information, therefore many researches were devoted to examine these diseases, their early signs, and how could they be stopped. From the start of 21th century, methods aided by computer were more and more involved in these processes, up to the current trend of using Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs). While supervised methods, CNNs do achieve accuracy which can be compared to a skilled ophtalmologist, they require a tremendous amount of labeled data which is sparse in medical fields because the amount of time and resources needed to create them. One natural solution is to augment the data present, that is, copying the distribution while adding a small variety, like coloring an image differently. That is, what our paper aims to explore, whether a texturing algorithm, the Neural Style Transfery can be used to make a data set richer, and therefore helping a classifier CNN to achieve better results.

DEVELOPMENT OF FORAGE PEAR VARIETIES UNDER DIFFERENT WATER SALINITY LEVELS

This study aimed to evaluate the effect of different levels of water salinity in the development of two varieties of cactus pear (Opuntia and Nopalea). The spineless cactus is native from Mexico, but nowadays can be found in many places throughout the world. The experiment was performed at the Federal Institute of Ceará – IFCE/Campus Sobral. The experimental design was a randomized factorial 5 x 2, with five levels of salinity in the irrigation water (0.0; 5.0; 10; 15 and 20 dS m-1) and two varieties of cactus pear Small or sweet (Nopalea cochenillifera Salm-Dick) and ‘elephants ear’ (Opuntia sp) with four replications. Variables studied were: plant height (cm), length and circumference of the paddle (cm), cladode thickness (cm) fresh weight (g) and dry weight (g). The variety “elephants’ ear” is more suitable for cultivation under irrigation with saline water, because it presented a better vegetative performance compared to the small variety, being more tolerant to saline stress in different levels of salinity. The effect of the interaction between salinity and varieties showed a decrease for all variables analyzed, with reduction in forage development of palm varieties for higher salinity levels.

Adaptive tensegrity locomotion: Controlling a compliant icosahedron with symmetry-reduced reinforcement learning

Tensegrity robots, which are prototypical examples of hybrid soft–rigid robots, exhibit dynamical properties that provide ruggedness and adaptability. They also bring about, however, major challenges for locomotion control. Owing to high dimensionality and the complex evolution of contact states, data-driven approaches are appropriate for producing viable feedback policies for tensegrities. Guided policy search (GPS), a sample-efficient hybrid framework for optimization and reinforcement learning, has previously been applied to generate periodic, axis-constrained locomotion by an icosahedral tensegrity on flat ground. Varying environments and tasks, however, create a need for more adaptive and general locomotion control that actively utilizes an expanded space of robot states. This implies significantly higher needs in terms of sample data and setup effort. This work mitigates such requirements by proposing a new GPS -based reinforcement learning pipeline, which exploits the vehicle’s high degree of symmetry and appropriately learns contextual behaviors that are sustainable without periodicity. Newly achieved capabilities include axially unconstrained rolling, rough terrain traversal, and rough incline ascent. These tasks are evaluated for a small variety of key model parameters in simulation and tested on the NASA hardware prototype, SUPERball. Results confirm the utility of symmetry exploitation and the adaptability of the vehicle. They also shed light on numerous strengths and limitations of the GPS framework for policy design and transfer to real hybrid soft–rigid robots.

Nível de informação e consumo da população sobre produtos orgânicos em Santana do Livramento, Rio Grande do Sul

<p class="CorpodoresumoIVCBM"><span>A preocupação com a contaminação dos alimentos por resíduos de agrotóxicos têm motivado mudanças nas técnicas de manejo agrícola, com destaque para a produção orgânica. Porém, uma grande parcela da população ainda desconhece a definição de alimento orgânico, seus benefícios e suas características, havendo muitas distorções acerca do assunto. Nesse contexto, objetivou-se realizar a avaliação do nível de conhecimento e consumo da população do município de Santana do Livramento, Rio Grande do Sul, sobre os produtos oriundos da agricultura orgânica, através de entrevista qualitativa e quantitativa a partir da aplicação de questionário fechado, direcionado a diferentes grupos sociais, como comerciários, estudantes e funcionários públicos da zona central. Os resultados evidenciaram que o perfil do consumidor de produtos orgânicos é predominantemente feminino (62,5%), com grau de escolaridade superior completo (32,5%), de classe social média (37,5%), que estão em busca de uma melhor qualidade de vida, preservação da saúde e por busca de um alimento saudável. Como entraves ao consumo, destaca-se o preço final no mercado de varejo, a falta de divulgação dos benefícios e a pequena variedade de alimentos orgânicos ofertados. Constata-se que no município existe um mercado promissor para a comercialização dos produtos orgânicos, que poderá ser melhor explorado via difusão de informações à população e melhor exposição nas gôndolas dos mercados e das feiras livres. </span></p><p align="center"><strong><em>Level of information and consumption of the population on organic products in Santana of the Livramento, Rio Grande do Sul</em></strong></p><p><strong>Abstract</strong><strong>: </strong>The preoccupation with the contamination of the foods for pesticides residues they have been causing changes in the techniques of agricultural handling, with distinction for the organic production. However, a great piece of the population still does not know the definition of organic food, his benefits and his characteristics, when many distortions are her around the subject. In this context, this inquiry had as I aim to carry out the evaluation of the level of knowledge and accomplish of the population of local authority of the Santana do Livramento, Rio Grande do Sul, on the products originating from the organic agriculture. The results showed up that the profile of the consumer of organic products is predominantly feminine (62,5 %), with complete degree of superior schooling (32,5 %), of middle social class (37,5 %), which are in search of a better quality of life, preservation of the health and for search of a healthy food. Since you should hamper to the consumption, the final price stands out in the market of retail trade, the lack of spread of the benefits and the small variety of offered organic foods. It is noticed that in the local authority there is a promising market for the marketing of the organic products, what will be able to be better explored he was seeing diffusion of informations to the population and better exhibition in the racks of the markets and of the markets.</p>

Structure and design of the British Law Report Corpus (BLRC) : a legal corpus of judicial decisions from the UK

The aim of this paper is to describe and justify the structure and design criteria to create a legal English corpus of judicial decisions. The authors, lecturers of this ESP variety, decided to engage into specific corpus design due to the small variety of teaching materials and corpora available. Judicial decisions are essential wheels in the legal machinery of common law systems and, precisely because of that fact, they are fundamental as a legal genre. This is why we intend to compile a 6m word legal corpus of UK judicial decisions in order to establish the core vocabulary of the genre and use it for further linguistic analysis and the elaboration of didactic materials.

All the Better to See You With

In the animal kingdom, eyes come in a relatively small variety of functional forms. When a new optical system is found, it usually is a variation of a known form. It is very rare to discover a novel form of an eye. Such a sensational discovery has been made by Annette Stowasser, Alexandra Rapaport, John Layne, Randy Morgan, and Elke Buschbeck. Using two different experimental approaches, they demonstrated an eye with a truly bifocal lens, something that has only been suggested for certain long-extinct trilobites

Vitamin A status in Cuban children aged 6–11 years

Objective and settingA nationwide study was performed in Cuba to assess vitamin A status and the intake of vitamin-A-providing foods in children aged 6–11 years.Design and subjectsThe sample comprised 1191 schoolchildren from first to sixth grade, both sexes, from municipalities randomly selected from the five eastern provinces of Cuba in 2002 (first semester) and from the four western and four central provinces in 2003 (first semester). A food-frequency questionnaire was completed by 2038 mother-and-child pairs.ResultsMean (±standard deviation) plasma retinol concentrations were 1.77 ± 0.48 μmol l−1in the western, 2.01 ± 0.56 μmol l−1in the central and 1.40 ± 0.41 μmol l−1in the eastern region. No child had plasma retinol concentration below 0.35 μmol l−1, indicative of a high risk of clinical deficiency. Subclinical deficiency, plasma retinol concentration of 0.35–0.7 μmol l−1, was seen in <2% of subjects in all three regions and was <5% even in the two provinces with the worst vitamin A status (Guantánamo, 4.6%; Las Tunas, 3.0%). Adequate status (>1.05 μmol l−1) was present in >90% of subjects in all western and central provinces, and in one of the eastern provinces (Holguín), whereas in the four remaining eastern provinces, adequate status was present in >75%. Only nine fruits and vegetables were consumed frequently (>3 times per week) by >50% of children. Thirty-seven per cent regularly consumed a supplement containing vitamin A.ConclusionsMost Cuban children aged 6–11 years had adequate vitamin A status. Consumption of foods rich in vitamin and provitamin A, especially vegetables, was frequent but limited to a small variety of foods.

The tetrapod fauna of the Upper Elliot and Clarens formations in the main Karoo Basin (South Africa and Lesotho)

In the main Karoo Basin (southern Africa), the “Stormberg Group” can be divided into at least two faunal zones on the basis of its palaeontological content. The upper one encompasses the Upper Elliot and Clarens formations (“Upper Stormberg Group”). It is well known for its prosauropod and cynodont fauna, but it has also yielded some ste-reospondyl remains, a turtle, at least one lepidosaur, a small variety of crocodylomorphs, rare theropod elements, and an assortment of ornithischians. The presence of pterosaurs is put forward on ichnological grounds, but aetosaur and rauisuchian representatives do not appear to be present. The age of the “Upper Stormberg Group” has been the subject of much speculation. Strong analogies with the skeletal and ichnological record of Lower Jurassic North American formations provide evidence that the Upper Elliot Formation is fundamentally Hettangian in age. The lower part of the Clarens Formation would essentially correspond to the Sinemurian whereas its upper part, which is poor in fossils, would be Pliensbachian in age.