The global stochastic optimization method, simulated annealing (SA), was adapted and applied to various problems in aircraft design. The research was aimed at overcoming the problem of finding an optimal design in a space with multiple minima and roughness ubiquitous to numerically generated nonlinear objective functions. SA was modified to reduce the number of objective function evaluations for an optimal design, historically the main criticism of stochastic methods. SA was applied to many CFD/MDO problems including: low sonic-boom bodies, minimum drag on supersonic fore-bodies, minimum drag on supersonic aeroelastic fore-bodies, minimum drag on HSCT aeroelastic wings, FLOPS preliminary design code, another preliminary aircraft design study with vortex lattice aerodynamics, HSR complete aircraft aerodynamics. In every case, SA provided a simple, robust and reliable optimization method which found optimal designs in order 100 objective function evaluations. Perhaps most importantly, from this academic/industrial project, technology has been successfully transferred; this method is the method of choice for optimization problems at Northrop Grumman.

The purpose of this paper is three-fold. We present two multidisciplinary applications of
global (stochastic) optimization problems in aerospace design which range from preliminary
to advanced design. One application involves the preliminary sizing code FLOPS, and the
other, high-fidelity aerodynamics and structural mechanics analyses codes. We look at the
viability of the stochastic optimization method, simulated annealing (SA) for these
applications. In the high-fidelity application, we use a proof-of-concept problem to …

All mammalian retinae contain rod photoreceptors for low-light vision and cone photoreceptors for daylight and color vision. Most nonprimate mammals have dichromatic color vision based on two cone types with spectrally different visual pigments: a short-wavelength-sensitive (S-)cone and a long-wavelength-sensitive (L-)cone. Superimposed on this basic similarity, there are remarkable differences between species. This article reviews some striking examples. The density ratio of cones to rods ranges from 1:200 in the most nocturnal to 20:1 in a few diurnal species. In some species, the proportion of the spectral cone types and their distribution across the retina deviate from the pattern found in most mammals, including a complete absence of S-cones. Depending on species, the spectral sensitivity of the L-cone pigment may peak in the green, yellow, or orange, and that of the S-cone pigment in the blue, violet, or near-ultraviolet. While exclusive expression of one pigment per cone is the rule, some species feature coexpression of the L- and S-pigment in a significant proportion of their cones. It is widely assumed that all these variations represent adaptations to specific visual needs associated with particular habitats and lifestyles. However, in many cases we have not yet identified the adaptive value of a given photoreceptor arrangement. Comparative anatomy is a fruitful approach to explore the range of possible arrangements within the blueprint of the mammalian retina and to identify species with particularly interesting or puzzling patterns that deserve further scrutiny with physiological and behavioral assays.

All mammalian retinae contain rod photoreceptors for low-light vision and cone photoreceptors for daylight and color vision. Most nonprimate mammals have dichromatic color vision based on two cone types with spectrally different visual pigments: a short-wavelength-sensitive (S-)cone and a long-wavelength-sensitive (L-)cone. Superimposed on this basic similarity, there are remarkable differences between species. This article reviews some striking examples. The density ratio of cones to rods ranges from 1:200 in the most nocturnal to 20:1 in a few diurnal species. In some species, the proportion of the spectral cone types and their distribution across the retina deviate from the pattern found in most mammals, including a complete absence of S-cones. Depending on species, the spectral sensitivity of the L-cone pigment may peak in the green, yellow, or orange, and that of the S-cone pigment in the blue, violet, or near-ultraviolet. While exclusive expression of one pigment per cone is the rule, some species feature coexpression of the L- and S-pigment in a significant proportion of their cones. It is widely assumed that all these variations represent adaptations to specific visual needs associated with particular habitats and lifestyles. However, in many cases we have not yet identified the adaptive value of a given photoreceptor arrangement. Comparative anatomy is a fruitful approach to explore the range of possible arrangements within the blueprint of the mammalian retina and to identify species with particularly interesting or puzzling patterns that deserve further scrutiny with physiological and behavioral assays. © 2005 Wiley-Liss, Inc.

Near the end of his life Ramón y Cajal (1933) summarized aspects of his view of the retina and, under the section heading “The paradox of vertebrate retinal horizontal cells” admitted defeat in understanding their role in visual processing. By then, horizontal cells had been identified and studied anatomically for more than six decades; today, six decades later, they are still amongst the most enigmatic neurons (historical reviews, e.g., Wässle et al., 1978a; Gallego, 1986; Piccolino, 1986, 1988). Numerous studies, using an ever-increasing arsenal of methods, have modified some of Cajal’s observations and added many new ones. For technical reasons, there has been a concentration on horizontal cell physiology and cellular biology in non-mammalian vertebrate retinae (reviewed in Dowling, 1987; Djamgoz et al., 1995; Kamermans & Spekreijse, 1995), and the results have been generalized to deduce mammalian horizontal cell function. Most recently, however, an increasing number of studies are examining mammalian horizontal cells with physiological and immunocytochemical approaches; and comparative anatomical studies are demonstrating previously unsuspected differences between species. More specific questions can now be asked although, as yet, answers are still scant. This review summarizes some earlier views of mammalian horizontal cell morphology and connectivity, then focuses on how some of the newer findings have modified the issues, and tries to suggest where answers may be sought.

Near the end of his life Ramón y Cajal (1933) summarized aspects of his view of the retina and, under the section heading “The paradox of vertebrate retinal horizontal cells” admitted defeat in understanding their role in visual processing. By then, horizontal cells had been identified and studied anatomically for more than six decades; today, six decades later, they are still amongst the most enigmatic neurons (historical reviews, e.g., Wässle et al., 1978a; Gallego, 1986; Piccolino, 1986, 1988). Numerous studies, using an ever-increasing arsenal of methods, have modified some of Cajal’s observations and added many new ones. For technical reasons, there has been a concentration on horizontal cell physiology and cellular biology in non-mammalian vertebrate retinae (reviewed in Dowling, 1987; Djamgoz et al., 1995; Kamermans & Spekreijse, 1995), and the results have been generalized to deduce mammalian horizontal cell function. Most recently, however, an increasing number of studies are examining mammalian horizontal cells with physiological and immunocytochemical approaches; and comparative anatomical studies are demonstrating previously unsuspected differences between species. More specific questions can now be asked although, as yet, answers are still scant. This review summarizes some earlier views of mammalian horizontal cell morphology and connectivity, then focuses on how some of the newer findings have modified the issues, and tries to suggest where answers may be sought.

Successful livestock improvement programmes focusing on low-input smallholder production systems though rare, are possible using community-based approaches. This paper outlines important design and implementation components of a goat improvement programme undertaken by FARM Africa in the eastern highlands of Kenya. Through strong capacity building initiatives at grass-roots level, producers were empowered to undertake a goat genetic improvement programme that benefitted them in several ways. This resulted in the farmers forming their own umbrella organizations to cater for their interests as producers in accessing animal health and breeding services, production inputs, and marketing goats and goat products. In seven years, the population of improved goats in one of the project areas increased from 2100 to 5500, and the livelihoods of the participating farmers improved. Income from sales of milk and improved breeding and slaughter stock increased, while food security improved as a result of daily milk consumption and improved crop yields resulting from use of the rich goat manure. The project has, however, faced challenges arising mainly from the popularity of the improved goats within the Eastern Africa region, which has resulted in sale of a large number of the young animals, leaving few replacements within the project area. Uptake of goat breeding by private commercial farmers to provide breeding stock and replacement animals is currently lacking. Further research and evaluation is required on how to strengthen collective-action based institutions to improve services within smallholder farmer communities.

Equi-transmitting scattering matrices are studied. A complete description of such matrices up to order five is given. It is shown that the standard matching conditions matrix is essentially the only equi-transmitting matrix for orders 3 and 5. For orders 4 and 6, there exists other equi-transmitting ones but all such matrices have zero trace

The orthography of many resource-scarce languages includes diacritically marked
characters. Falling outside the scope of the standard Latin encoding, these characters are
often represented in digital language resources as their unmarked equivalents. This renders
corpus compilation more difficult, as these languages typically do not have the benefit of
large electronic dictionaries to perform diacritic restoration.

This paper describes a proof-of-the-principle experiment in which maximum entropy
learning is used for the automatic induction of shallow morphological features for the
resourcescarce Bantu language of Gıkuyu. This novel approach circumvents the limitations
of typical unsupervised morphological induction methods that employ minimum-edit
distance metrics to establish morphological similarity between words. The experimental
results show that the unsupervised maximum entropy learning approach compares

Even though the Bantu language of Swahili is spoken by more than fifty million people in
East and Central Africa, it is surprisingly resource-scarce from a language technological
point of view, an unfortunate situation that holds for most, if not all languages on the
continent. The increasing amount of digitally available, vernacular data has prompted
researchers to investigate the applicability of corpus-based approaches to African language
technology. In this vein, the SAWA corpus project attempts to collect and deploy a parallel

Abstract Research in data-driven methods for Machine Translation has greatly benefited
from the increasing availability of parallel corpora. Processing the same text in two different
languages yields useful information on how words and phrases are translated from a source
language into a target language. To investigate this, a parallel corpus is typically aligned by
linking linguistic tokens in the source language to the corresponding units in the target
language. An aligned parallel corpus therefore facilitates the automatic development of a

Research in machine translation and corpus annotation has greatly benefited from the increasing availability of word-aligned parallel corpora. This paper presents ongoing research on the development and application of the sawa corpus, a two-million-word parallel corpus English-Swahili. We describe the data collection phase and zero in on the difficulties of finding appropriate and easily accessible data for this language pair. In the data annotation phase, the corpus was semi-automatically sentence and word-aligned and morphosyntactic information was added to both the English and Swahili portion of the corpus. The annotated parallel corpus allows us to investigate two possible uses. We describe experiments with the projection of part-of-speech tagging annotation from English onto Swahili, as well as the development of a basic statistical machine translation system for this language pair, using the parallel corpus and a consolidated database of existing English-Swahili translation dictionaries. We particularly focus on the difficulties of translating English into the morphologically more complex Bantu language of Swahili.

The 8th International Workshop of the ISCA Special Interest Group on Speech and
Language Technology for Minority Languages (SALTMIL) 1 and the Fourth Workshop on
African Language Technology (AfLaT2012) 2 is held as a joint effort as part of the 2012
International Language Resources and Evaluation Conference (LREC 2012). Entitled
“Language technology for normalisation of less-resourced languages”, the workshop is
intended to continue the series of SALTMIL/LREC workshops on computational language

HTQO VJG increasing availability of parallel corpora. Processing the same text in two
different languages yields useful information on how words and phrases are translated from
a source language into a target language. To investigate this, a parallel corpus is typically
aligned by linking linguistic tokens in the source language to the corresponding units in the
target language. An aligned parallel corpus therefore facilitates the automatic

Conservation agriculture is widely promoted for soil conservation and crop productivity increase,
although rigorous empirical evidence from sub-Saharan Africa is still limited. This study aimed to quantify
the medium-term impact of tillage (conventional and reduced) and crop residue management (retention
and removal) on soil and crop performance in a maize–soybean rotation. A replicated field trial
was started in sub-humid Western Kenya in 2003, and measurements were taken from 2005 to 2008.
Conventional tillage negatively affected soil aggregate stability when compared to reduced tillage, as
indicated by lower mean weight diameter values upon wet sieving at 0–15 cm (PT < 0.001). This suggests
increased susceptibility to slaking and soil erosion. Tillage and residue management alone did not affect
soil C contents after 11 cropping seasons, but when residue was incorporated by tillage, soil C was higher
at 15–30 cm (PT*R = 0.037). Lack of treatment effects on the C content of different aggregate fractions
indicated that reduced tillage and/or residue retention did not increase physical C protection. The weak
residue effect on aggregate stability and soil C may be attributed to insufficient residue retention. Soybean
grain yields tended to be suppressed under reduced tillage without residue retention, especially
in wet seasons (PT*R = 0.070). Consequently, future research should establish, for different climatic zones
and soil types, the critical minimum residue retention levels for soil conservation and crop productivity.
Keywords: Reduced tillage, Crop residue management, Soil aggregate stability, Crop yields, Soil organic, carbon, Sub-Saharan Africa