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The attainment of the Millennium Development Goals is at severe risk, owing to rising malnutrition and high child stunting and mortality rates, greater poverty, a large increase in the incidence of noncommunicable diseases, and lack of progress in women's empowerment. Here, the role of vegetable home, school, community, and disaster recovery gardens as a pro-poor and pro-environment intervention in the developing world is reviewed. This includes the contribution of vegetable gardens in improving food and nutritional security, generating additional income, providing employment, contributing to better health, and helping to empower disadvantaged groups in society. The implications of global research in the tropics and subtropics over the last 20–30 years are assessed over a wide geographic and linguistic range. The effectiveness and sustainability of such interventions are considered in the light of their contribution to the attainment of the Millennium Development Goals. Suggestions for potential new direc...

An experimental Mandarin dictation machine for inputting Mandarin speech (spoken Chinese language) into computers is described. Because of the special characteristics of the Chinese language, syllables are chosen as the basic units for dictation. The machine is designed based on a hierarchical language recognition approach in which acoustic signals are first recognized as a sequence of syllables, possible word hypotheses are then formed from the syllables, and the complete sentences are finally obtained. This approach is implemented by two subsystems. The first recognizes the syllables using speech signal processing techniques, the second subsystem then identifies the exact characters from the syllable and corrects the errors in syllable recognition. The detailed syllable recognition algorithms, word formation rules, parser, grammar, and the syntactic checking algorithms are described. With newspaper text in the form of isolated syllables as input, the preliminary test results indicate that such a dictation machine is not only practically attractive, but technically feasible. >

It is shown how reinforcement learning can be made practical for complex problems by introducing hierarchical learning. The agent at first learns elementary skills for solving elementary problems. To learn a new skill for solving a complex problem later on, the agent can ignore the low-level details and focus on the problem of coordinating the elementary skills it has developed. A physically-realistic mobile robot simulator is used to demonstrate the success and importance of hierarchical learning. For fast learning, artificial neural networks are used to generalize experiences, and a teaching technique is employed to save many learning trials of the simulated robot. >

We have fabricated refractory superconducting NbNxCy thin films on unheated Si substrates with a low‐energy dual ion‐beam sputtering technique. Films fabricated with this technique have predominantly B1 crystal structure with maximum Tc ∼13.2 K, resistivity of 80–150 μΩ cm and residual resistance ratio ∼1.0. The use of low ion‐beam energies and the absence of substrate heating make this method well suited for producing NbNxCy films for superconducting microelectronic applications.

Superconducting NbN films have been deposited onto unheated substrates using a dual ion-beam technique. The NbN films produced have Tc up to 12 K and resistivities of ≳150µΩ-cm. The substrate temperature does not exceed 100 °C. TEM analysis of these films shows a random in-plane orientation of