Puparia Cleaning Techniques for Forensic and Archaeo-Funerary Studies

Diptera puparia may represent both in forensic and archaeo-funerary contexts the majority of the entomological evidence useful to reconstruct the peri and post-mortem events. Puparia identification is quite difficult due to the lack of identification keys and descriptions. In addition, external substances accumulated during the puparia permanence in the environment make the visualization of the few diagnostic characters difficult, resulting in a wrong identification. Six different techniques based on physical and chemical treatments have been tested for the removal of external substances from puparia to make identification at species level feasible. Furthermore, the effects of these methods on successful molecular analyses have also been tested as molecular identification is becoming an important tool to complement morphological identifications. The results of this study indicate that cleaning via warm water/soap, the sonication and treatment with a sodium hydroxide solution are the best methods to achieve a good quality of the samples.

Human Consensus-Oriented Image Captioning

Image captioning aims to describe an image with a concise, accurate, and interesting sentence. To build such an automatic neural captioner, the traditional models align the generated words with a number of human-annotated sentences to mimic human-like captions. However, the crowd-sourced annotations inevitably come with data quality issues such as grammatical errors, wrong identification of visual objects and sub-optimal sentence focus. During the model training, existing methods treat all the annotations equally regardless of the data quality. In this work, we explicitly engage human consensus to measure the quality of ground truth captions in advance, and directly encourage the model to learn high quality captions with high priority. Therefore, the proposed consensus-oriented method can accelerate the training process and achieve superior performance with only supervised objective without time-consuming reinforcement learning. The novel consensus loss can be implemented into most of the existing state-of-the-art methods, boosting the BLEU-4 performance by maximum relative 12.47% comparing to the conventional cross-entropy loss. Extensive experiments are conducted on MS-COCO Image Captioning dataset demonstrating the proposed human consensus-oriented training method can significantly improve the training efficiency and model effectiveness.

Gait Recognition as Non-Intrusive Biometric Using View Invariant Methods in Multi Temporal Images

Gait patterns have been used widely in recent years to authenticate users. Because it doesn’t require user intrusion, it is often used as a biometric to make authentication processes easier and hassle free. But there are various issues with this process. To start with, the viewing angle has to be constant which is quite difficult to achieve with limited number of cameras. Speed too can alter the way a person walks and cause inconsistencies in identification. Furthermore, complications might arise if the subject is carrying something. The weight can affect his walking pattern. Besides, a recent accident could also transform a person’s walking pattern and lead to wrong identification. Other biometrics such as face detection can be combined with this technique to reduce the issues leading to erroneous identification. In this paper, we propose a system to overcome the viewing angle discrepancies. The system takes in walking sequences as input and processes them to create images. This is converted into 3D images by means of stereovision algorithms. Using which, we can effectively match the real-time image with various image sequences in the database. Side face detection can enhance the accuracy further..

Multilocus phylogeny reveals taxonomic misidentification of the Schizopora paradoxa (KUC8140) representative genome

Schizoporaparadoxa, current name Xylodonparadoxus, is a white-rot fungus with certain useful biotechnological properties. The representative genome of Schizoporaparadoxa strain KUC8140 was published in 2015 as part of the 1000 Fungal Genomes Project. Multilocus phylogenetic analyses, based on three nuclear regions (ITS, LSU and rpb2), confirmed a misidentification of S.paradoxa strain KUC8140 which should be identified as Xylodonovisporus. This wrong identification explains the unexpected geographical distribution of S.paradoxa, since this species has a European distribution, whereas the strain KUC8140 was recorded from Korea, Eastern Asia.

mparison of model-based identification methods for reserve-capacity assessment of existing bridges

The goal of model-based structural identification is to find suitable values of parameters that affect structure behaviour. To this end, measurements are often compared with predictions of finiteelement models. Although residual minimization (RM) is a prominent methodology for structural identification, it provides wrong parameter identification when flawed model classes are adopted. Error-domain model falsification (EDMF) is an alternative methodology that helps identify candidate models – models that are compatible with behaviour measurements – among an initial model population. This study focuses on the comparison between RM and EDMF for the structural identification of a steel bridge in Exeter (UK). Advantages and limitations of both methodologies are discussed with reference to parameter identification and prognosis tasks such as quantification of reserve capacity. Results show that the employment of RM may lead to wrong identification and unsafe estimations of reserve capacity.

New woodland beetle species (Coleoptera) in Estonian fauna. 2.

The article presents an annotated list of 99 new beetle species for Estonia (mainly woodland ones) along with their faunistic data. Most of the material has been collected by the author using trunk window traps within the framework of various research and monitoring projects in 2011–2015. In addition, the work comprises a number of unpublished new species, which were revealed in the material of older collections. These originate mainly from the coleopterologist J. Miländer’s beetle collection preserved at the Estonian University of Life Sciences (finds from the period of 1930–1982) and from the private collection of zoosemiotist A. Turovski. 13 species are new for the fauna of the whole Baltic region. Three species are new for Northern Europe: Triplax carpathica Rtt. (Erotylidae), Phloiotrya subtilis (Rtt.) (Melandryidae) and Carpophilus truncatus Murray (Nitidulidae). Triplax carpathica Rtt. (Erotylidae) and Clypeorhagus clypeatus (Hampe) (Eucnemidae), each known only from a single locality, belong to the European IUCN Red List. Two discovered species, Airaphilus perangustus Lindberg (Silvanidae) and Ochthebius czwalinai Kuwert (Hydraenidae), are known for their very restricted spreading area in Europe. For a large part of the new species (36 out of 99) Estonia lies on the northern edge of their areal. These species have not yet been recorded north of Estonia in Finland, where the beetle fauna is studied better. For two Nitidulidae species, Carpophilus marginellus Motsch. and Glischrochilus quadrisignatus (Say), fast spreading over Estonia was registered in the last five years. Somewhat earlier, a species closely related to the latter, Glischrochilus grandis (Tournier), showed the same tendency of fast spreading in Estonia. Six species, Pityophthorus glabratus Eichhoff (Curculionidae), Dirrhagofarsus attenuatus (Mäklin) (Eucnemidae), Hypebaeus flavipes (F.) (Malachiidae), Dacne notata (Gmelin) (Erotylidae), Aulonothroscus brevicollis (Bonv.) (Throscidae) and Carpophilus dimidiatus (F.) (Nitidulidae) have to be excluded from the list of Estonian fauna due to wrong identification.

Use of rbcL sequences for DNA barcoding and authentication of plant drugs used in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Traditional Chinese medicine has become increasingly popular in Europe and North America.There is evidence that quality control in terms of species authentication is sometimes inappropriate. Repeated incidents of adulterations and wrong identification, some even with serious consequences have occurred recently. The necessity of a quality control for TCM drugs to avoid these incidents is given since many years. DNA barcoding was used in this study to authenticate drugs which are often used in Chinese herbal medicine. 37 plants from 28 families were identified using nucleotide sequences of the rbcL gene. Only one adulteration could be detected. Both the advantages and limitations of rbcL as a marker gene for identification were analysed and discussed. We could show that DNA barcoding is a valid and fast method to identify medicinal herbs, showing some advantages over chemical profiling because of its universal application even for unknown plant species.

Use of rbcL sequences for DNA barcoding and authentication of plant drugs used in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Traditional Chinese medicine has become increasingly popular in Europe and North America.There is evidence that quality control in terms of species authentication is sometimes inappropriate. Repeated incidents of adulterations and wrong identification, some even with serious consequences have occurred recently. The necessity of a quality control for TCM drugs to avoid these incidents is given since many years. DNA barcoding was used in this study to authenticate drugs which are often used in Chinese herbal medicine. 37 plants from 28 families were identified using nucleotide sequences of the rbcL gene. Only one adulteration could be detected. Both the advantages and limitations of rbcL as a marker gene for identification were analysed and discussed. We could show that DNA barcoding is a valid and fast method to identify medicinal herbs, showing some advantages over chemical profiling because of its universal application even for unknown plant species.

The Engineering Accident Analysis of Cast-In Situ Bored Pile

Cast-in situ bored pile is a common form of pile foundation and widely used in road and bridge engineering in China. Because of complex cast-in situ bored pile construction process, high technical content requirement, vulnerable to the impact of human and environmental factors, cast-in situ bored piles prone to various kinds of quality problems in the construction process, such as drilling deflection, drilling hole collapse and diameter reduction, wrong identification of pile-end’s bearing stratum, catheter tube blockage, reinforcement cage floating, pile breaking, pile silted, etc. These problems often make it difficult to meet the design requirements into a pile formation, and difficultly to remedy. In this paper, Zhoutian Zhenjiang bridge at Shaoguan City, Qujiang to Nanxiong highway A03 contract bid package cast-in situ bored pile foundation engineering encountered in the construction collapsed hole, inclined hole, catheter tube blockage and other issues for example to analyzes the cause of cast-in situ bored pile engineering accident, made appropriate preventive measures and processing method.