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Assuming that two people do not have the same handwriting and do not write twice identically, handwriting can be considered a biometric characteristic of a person, frequently used in forensic document analysis. In the writer identification and verification scenario, the number of samples available for training is not always sufficient. Thus, in this work, we investigate the impact of the increase in the number of manuscript samples on the writer identification task, using synthetic samples generation inspired on a cognitive model. To better compare the proposed approach, we also performed experiments using a Gaussian Filter to generate new samples. Experiments were accomplished on the IAM and CVL databases, containing samples collected from 301 and 310 volunteer writers, respectively. From genuine samples of these databases, we generate new samples of images using the Duplicator approach. Feature vectors obtained using some well-known texture operators were used to feed an SVM classifier. Experiments showed that increasing the number of synthetic samples in the training set can be beneficial for the writer identification task, particularly when there are very few manuscript samples available for some writers. In the best scenario, the gain increased 31.7% in the identification rate using three genuine and fifteen duplicated samples at line-level.

Environmental degradation and global warming have become a considerable issue in recent years. The use of more environmentally friendly materials in geotechnical engineering is of preeminent importance. The steel slag aggregate has become an alternative to conventional natural aggregates in road paving works. Therefore, this research aims to evaluate the applicability of the steel slag aggregate as an aggregate for pavement supporting courses (base and subbases). The present research deals with the use of mixtures of steel aggregate and lateritic soil obtained at the site (BR 381/MG) were the subject of the study is located. The experimental program for geotechnical laboratory tests was defined, including the physical and mechanical characterization of the steel slag aggregate, lateritic soil, and three mixtures of these components: 70% steel slag aggregate +30% lateritic soil (M7030), 80% steel slag aggregate +20% lateritic soil (M8020), and 90% steel slag aggregate +10% lateritic soil (M9010). The results of the tests showed that the steel slag aggregate provides satisfactory characteristics to be used as paving material, as long as the expansion of the steel slag aggregate is restrained. The three mixtures of steel slag aggregate and soil, presented satisfactory performance, showing texture compliance, controlled expansion, and high values of California Bearing Ratio (CBR). Therefore, verifying that the steel slag aggregate mixtures can be applied as a base material for road pavements.

Export diversification, i.e. the degree to which the company pursues sales opportunities across different export markets, is a fundamental aspect of export strategy (Aulakh et al. 2000). However, research on the relationship between export diversification and export performance is limited. Additionally, while there have been few inroads regarding the study of the impact of export diversification on export performance (e.g. Aulakh et al. 2000), research on variables that can affect the usefulness of pursuing higher/lower export diversification levels on export performance is scant. This is an important research gap, as managers need to have information regarding factors which they can manipulate to leverage the advantages of diversification for export performance.

This chapter explores the strategies that merchant women of mixed Portuguese and African origin used to protect their wealth in nineteenth-century Luanda, the capital of Portuguese Angola. Drawing upon marriage petitions, contracts of marriage and registers of dowry, this chapter shows that Luso-African women in Luanda, upon marriage with immigrant men, used the benefits Portuguese legal codes conferred upon them to protect assets they had amassed through inheritances and their own entrepreneurial activities. These urban women drew upon contracts of marriage and self-endowments to exempt their wealth from becoming part of the couple’s joint estate. Their literacy and socio-economic status brought benefits, including the knowledge of their rights as Portuguese subjects as well as the means to hire the lawyers who advised them.

Since many \({\mathsf {NP}}\)-complete graph problems have been shown polynomial-time solvable when restricted to claw-free graphs, we study the problem of determining the distance of a given graph to a claw-free graph, considering vertex elimination as measure. Claw-free Vertex Deletion (CFVD) consists of determining the minimum number of vertices to be removed from a graph such that the resulting graph is claw-free. Although CFVD is \({\mathsf {NP}}\)-complete in general and recognizing claw-free graphs is still a challenge, where the current best deterministic algorithm consists of performing |V(G)| executions of the best algorithm for matrix multiplication, we present linear-time algorithms for CFVD on weighted block graphs and weighted graphs with bounded treewidth. Furthermore, we show that this problem can be solved in linear time by a simpler algorithm on forests, and we determine the exact values for full k-ary trees. On the other hand, we show that Claw-free Vertex Deletion is \({\mathsf {NP}}\)-complete even when the input graph is a split graph. We also show that the problem is hard to approximate within any constant factor better than 2, assuming the Unique Games Conjecture.

Plants contain a vast array of compounds referred to as secondary metabolites that play no role in primary catabolic or biosynthetic pathways. Many of these metabolites influence important ecological interactions (e.g., deterring herbivores, protection against pathogens, allelopathy, symbiotic associations, seed germination of parasites, or interactions with pollinators). Others provide protection against ultraviolet radiation or high temperatures. We have already discussed some of these roles. In this chapter, we discuss the role of secondary compounds in allelopathic and plant-herbivore interactions. As an example of the metabolic versatility of plants, their responses to xenobiotics will be discussed in the context of phytoremediation. Plant-pathogen interactions are discussed in Chap. 14.

The evolution of cell walls allowed plants to solve the problem of osmoregulation in freshwater environments; however, cell walls restrict motility and place constraints on the evolution of long-distance transport systems. Tissues are too rigid for a heart-pump mechanism; instead, higher plants have two systems for long-distance transport. The dead elements of the xylem allow transport of water and solutes between sites of different water potentials. We discuss that transport system in Chap. 5. The other transport system, the phloem, allows the mass flow of carbohydrates and other solutes from a source region, where the hydrostatic pressure in the phloem is relatively high, to a sink region with lower pressure (Munch 1930).

Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a chronic disease stated by United Nations as one of the 10 most disabling illnesses and key factor in decreased quality of life. It affects millions of people around the world, reaching a population equivalent of countries like Germany or Mexico. One of most used and effective treatment is Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT) but, its failure rate can be as high as 30%. Games have been greatly incorporated to everyday lives of millions of people, and because of that, are becoming a useful tool to help in healthcare - becoming what is called Games for Health (GfH). This literature review seeks to research academic papers that demonstrate the use of games to treat OCD - as games standalone or in conjunction with CBT. The main objectives of this literature review are to summarize the previous published works and to gather base knowledge in the area for future research developments.

Around 75 years before Charles Darwin published his fundamental work on insectivorous plants, Scottish botanist Robert Brown observed that a small pitcher plant was an insect-catcher (Mithofer 2017). Six years later, Labillardiere described and named it as Cephalotus follicularis, the Albany pitcher plant, a species in its own genus and family, endemic to a small area in Southwest Australia (Cross et al. 2019).

The world population is expected to grow until the year 2100. Also, the number of senior individuals is expected to surpass the number of children and teens in the populations. This growth in the raw number and number of seniors creates huge challenges for countries - especially in cost terms. It’s well known that preventive healthcare could smooth those impacts through preventing disease. One of the most effective and easy to implement tools healthcare programs of this scope use is exercise. However, many individuals lack motivation for the practice. Since gaming is one of most used entertainment form, it seems a good way to attract and maintain people into exercise routines. Games of this type, that require the user movement as part of playing, are called ‘Exergames’. This paper is consequence of a larger research towards game design methods for this specific type. Since initial surveys showed some lack of information about this subject, the need for this project emerged. A problem found along the research development was which device would be used to conduct further testing with design methodologies. Therefore, this paper shows the process of using maker movement assets to create an open source device capable of transforming body movement through cycling into command input to a platform game.

Plants use a large portion of the carbohydrates that they assimilate each day in respiration in the same period (Table 3.1). If we seek to explain the carbon balance of a plant and to understand plant performance and growth in different environments, it is imperative to obtain a good understanding of respiration. Plant need dark respiration to produce energy and carbon skeletons to sustain plant growth; however, a significant part of respiration may proceed via a nonphosphorylating pathway. This is a cyanide-resistant pathway that generates less ATP than the cytochrome pathway, which is the primary energy-producing pathway in both plants and animals. We present several hypotheses in this chapter to explore why plants have a respiratory pathway that is not linked to ATP production (Del-Saz et al. 2018).

Symbiosis is the ‘living together’ of two or more organisms, often involving specialized structures. In its broadest sense, symbiotic associations include parasitic and commensal as well as mutually beneficial partnerships. It is common in the ecophysiological literature, however, to use the term symbiosis in a narrow sense to refer to mutually beneficial associations between plants and microorganisms. Mutual benefits may not always be easy to determine, particularly for the microsymbiont. In this chapter, benefits for the macrosymbiont (‘host’) are often expressed in terms of amount of accumulated biomass or acquired resources. In an ecological context, benefits in terms of ‘fitness’ may be more relevant, but these are rarely documented. In the mutually beneficial associations we discuss in this chapter, nutrients or specific products of the partners are shared between two or three partners; the macrosymbiont and the microsymbiont(s). Parasitic associations between plants are dealt with in Chap. 15; parasitic associations between microorganisms and plants are discussed briefly in this chapter, and more elaborately in Chap. 14.

Approximately 40% of a plant’s dry mass consists of carbon, fixed in photosynthesis. This process is vital for growth and survival of virtually all plants during the major part of their growth cycle. In fact, life on Earth in general, not just that of plants, totally depends on current and/or past photosynthetic activity. Leaves are beautifully specialized organs that enable plants to intercept light necessary for photosynthesis. The light is captured by a large array of chloroplasts that are in close proximity to air and not too far away from vascular tissue, which supplies water and exports the products of photosynthesis. In most plants, CO2 uptake occurs through leaf pores, the stomata, which are able to rapidly change their aperture (Sect. 5.5.4). Once inside the leaf, CO2 diffuses from the intercellular air spaces to the sites of carboxylation in the chloroplast (C3 species) or in the cytosol (C4 and CAM species).

Recently, Simple Propagation was introduced as an algorithm for belief update in Bayesian networks using message passing in a junction tree. The algorithm differs from other message passing algorithms such as Lazy Propagation in the message construction process. The message construction process in Simple Propagation identifies relevant potentials and variables to eliminate using the one-in, one-out-principle. This paper introduces Simple Propagation as a solution algorithm for influence diagrams with discrete variables. The one-in, one-out-principle is not directly applicable to influence diagrams. Hence, the principle is extended to cope with decision variables, utility functions, and precedence constraints to solve influence diagrams. Simple Propagation is demonstrated on an extensive example and a number of useful and interesting properties of the algorithm are described.

In previous chapters, we emphasized the integration among processes from molecular to whole-plant levels and considered the physiological consequences of interactions between plants and other organisms. In this chapter, we move up in scale, to consider relationships between plant ecophysiological processes and those occurring at ecosystem to global scales. Plant species differ substantially in their responses to environment and to other organisms. It is not surprising that these physiological differences among plants contribute strongly to functional differences among ecosystems.

Decomposition of plant litter involves the physical and chemical processes that reduce litter to CO2, water, and mineral nutrients. It is a key process in the nutrient cycle of most terrestrial ecosystems, and the amount of carbon returned to the atmosphere by microbial decomposition of dead organic matter is an important component of the global carbon budget (Sect. 19.2.6; Freschet et al. 2013). In arid and semi-arid ecosystems, litter decomposition is primarily controlled by photodegradation, rather than microbial breakdown (Austin and Vivanco 2006). When litter builds up, fire may play a key role in nutrient cycling (Cornelissen et al. 2017).

The number of malware variants released daily turned manual analysis into an impractical task. Although potentially faster, automated analysis techniques (e.g., static and dynamic) have shortcomings that are exploited by malware authors to thwart each of them, i.e., prevent malicious software from being detected or classified accordingly. Researchers then invested in traditional machine learning algorithms to try to produce efficient, effective classification methods. The produced models are also prone to errors and attacks. Novel representations of the “subject” were proposed to overcome previous limitations, such as malware textures. In this paper, our initial proposal was to evaluate the application of texture analysis for malware classification using samples collected in-the-wild in order to compare them with state-of-the-art results. During our tests, we discovered that texture analysis may be unfeasible for the task at hand, if we use the same malware representation employed by other authors. Furthermore, we also discovered that naive premises associated to the selection of samples in the datasets caused the introduction of biases that, in the end, produced unreal results. Finally, our tests with a broader unfiltered dataset show that texture analysis may be impractical for correct malware classification in a real world scenario, in which there is a great variety of families and some of them make use of quite sophisticate obfuscation techniques.