The Growth of Radiata Pine On Lateritic Soils at Second Valley,South Australia

Factors involved in the growth of P. radiata (D. Don) on soils of a lateritic landscape have been examined by soil and foliar analysis and the measurement of ring width; this has given an appraisal of factors influencing growth in the past and at the present time.

Perched water tables, which often occurred in winter on the plateau where there were lateritic podzolic soils, did not depress growth. The addition of phosphate was essential, with responses lasting for about 8 years with superphosphate. Regression relationships between the annual growth increment (ΔV in cubic feet) and foliar levels of nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) were found for three different foliar sampling positions; these relationships had the form:

ΔV = 4.5%P + 0.28%N—0.47.

Considerable variation was found in the foliar levels of nitrogen, phosphorus, copper, zinc, boron, nickel, molybdenum, chromium and ash for different sample positions within the tree. Preliminary responses to nickel, copper and nitrogen were obtained on 15-year-old trees well supplied with phosphorus. Advisory foliar levels for nitrogen and phosphorus are given.     

Book Review

The relationship between variation in wood shrinkage and cellulose crystallite width determined by X-ray diffraction was assessed using SilviScan-2 (a system developed at CSIRO for rapid assessment of wood microstructure). Cellulose crystallite width, density and microfibril angle were determined for 600μm wide zones on small wood samples with known tangential shrinkage. The tangential shrinkage measurements included shrinkage to 12% moisture content after reconditioning (MC AR); and a shrinkage differential calculated from tangential shrinkage to 12% MC AR recorded for each zone; and the minimum shrinkage recorded in adjacent wood of similar cambial age. Spearman correlations and forward stepwise regressions showed that the cellulose crystallite width was a good predictor of the shrinkage measures and that density was a minor predictor. Together, cellulose crystallite width and density could explain 75% of the variation in tangential shrinkage for randomly selected locations throughout the tree, and 87% of the variation in tangential shrinkage in samples selected from the lower 5% of tree height. The results suggest that SilviScan-2 can be used to predict tangential shrinkage during drying in increment cores, and may therefore be useful in developing nondestructive sampling strategies in tree improvement programs for E. globulus.     

An assessment of the ability of tree guards to prevent browsing damage using captive swamp wallabies (Wallabia bicolor)

Tree guards made of wire, plastic mesh, plastic film and rigid plastic tubing were examined for their ability to prevent browsing by captive swamp wallabies. All plastic mesh guards guards were ineffective as were all guards less than 1.0 m high other than rigid plastic tubes. Wire mesh guards reduced browsing but installation was difficult and laborious.     

Measuring Study-Specific Heterogeneity in Meta-Analysis: Application to an Antecedent Biomarker Study of Alzheimer’s Disease

This article proposes several new indices that measure the heterogeneity for individual studies in a meta-analysis. These indices directly assess how inconsistent an individual study is compared to the rest of studies used in the meta-analysis, that is, how much impact the specific study has on the scientific conclusion of the meta-analysis and further on the generalization of the conclusion. The proposed indices can be intuitively interpreted as the proportion of total variance from all studies in a meta-analysis that can be accounted for by the heterogeneity from specific studies. Further, each proposed index over all the studies sums to the collective measure of heterogeneity for the meta-analysis. Therefore our proposed study-specific indices of heterogeneity can be regarded as a generalization of the collective index of heterogeneity in meta-analyses proposed by various authors. We examine the difference among the proposed study-specific measures of heterogeneity and assess the variation associated with each proposed index of heterogeneity through a large simulation study. Finally, we demonstrate the proposed methodology by assessing the effect of individual studies on the overall estimate to the difference of an antecedent biomarker of Alzheimer’s disease (AD) between different Apolipoprotein E (ApoE) genotypes.     

Prediction of spurious HLA class II typing results using probabilistic classification

While modern high-throughput sequence-based HLA genotyping methods generally provide highly accurate typing results, artefacts may nonetheless arise for numerous reasons, such as sample contamination, sequencing errors, read misalignments, or PCR amplification biases. To help detecting spurious typing results, we tested the performance of two probabilistic classifiers (binary logistic regression and random forest models) based on population-specific genotype frequencies. We trained the model using high-resolution typing results for HLA-DRB1, DQB1, and DPB1 from large samples of German, Polish and UK-based donors. The high predictive capacity of the best models replicated both in 10-fold cross-validation for each gene and in using independent evaluation data (AUC 0.820–0.893). While genotype frequencies alone provide enough predictive power to render the model generally useful for highlighting potentially spurious typing results, the inclusion of workflow-specific predictors substantially increases prediction specificity. Low initial DNA concentrations in combination with low-volume PCR reactions form a major source of stochastic error specific to the Fluidigm chip-based workflow at DKMS Life Science Lab. The addition of DNA concentrations as a predictor variable thus substantially increased AUC (0.947–0.959) over purely frequency-based models.     

Bell miner associated dieback: nutrient cycling and herbivore crown damage in Eucalyptus propinqua

Various interactions appear to be involved in bell miner associated dieback (BMAD) of eucalypts. Native bell miner birds (Manorina melanophrys) defend the psyllids from predation by other birds while a dense understorey (notably Lantana camara) appears to favour the bell miners. The understory is likely to influence soil nutrient availability to the trees by changing the carbon to nitrogen ratio. We investigated the link between soil and leaf nutrient status and crown health as measured by crown index (CI) for Eucalyptus propinqua. Study sites included Bald Knob State Forest (SF), Donaldson SF, Mt Lindesay SF around Woodenbong and two locations on a Toonumbar private property in north-eastern New South Wales. Comparison of E. propinqua leaf macro- and micronutrient status using the ‘paired data sign test’ detected leaf nutrient differences between lightly and severely BMAD-affected tree crowns. Single and multivariate analysis investigated nutrient association with CI. Sign test results across all sites indicated that leaf iron content in trees with low CI (less healthy trees) was significantly higher (P = 0.01) than in healthy trees. In the three SFs the affected crowns also had significantly higher nitrogen to potassium ratios (P = 0.02). Other elements correlated with low CI were low boron (P = 0.06) across all sites and high zinc (P = 0.09) and low sodium values (P = 0.09) for Toonumbar sites. The correlation between soil and leaf nutrients was not significant and we found no significant correlations between soil nutrients and CIs. We did not detect any clear association between understorey (L. camara) and soil nutrients. During leaf sampling we found few psyllids but many concealer moth caterpillars. The scarcity of psyllids during sampling, inconclusive nutrient cycling results and nutrient correlations with CI were likely to be due to drought. Resampling under normal weather conditions with more typical organic matter decomposition rates is recommended.     

Computer aided diagnosis system for the Alzheimer's disease based on partial least squares and random forest SPECT image classification

This letter shows a computer aided diagnosis (CAD) technique for the early detection of the Alzheimer's disease (AD) by means of single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) image classification. The proposed method is based on partial least squares (PLS) regression model and a random forest (RF) predictor. The challenge of the curse of dimensionality is addressed by reducing the large dimensionality of the input data by downscaling the SPECT images and extracting score features using PLS. A RF predictor then forms an ensemble of classification and regression tree (CART)-like classifiers being its output determined by a majority vote of the trees in the forest. A baseline principal component analysis (PCA) system is also developed for reference. The experimental results show that the combined PLS-RF system yields a generalization error that converges to a limit when increasing the number of trees in the forest. Thus, the generalization error is reduced when using PLS and depends on the strength of the individual trees in the forest and the correlation between them. Moreover, PLS feature extraction is found to be more effective for extracting discriminative information from the data than PCA yielding peak sensitivity, specificity and accuracy values of 100%, 92.7%, and 96.9%, respectively. Moreover, the proposed CAD system outperformed several other recently developed AD CAD systems.     

人眼追踪远距离裸眼立体视觉检测系统的研制和测试

目的应用人眼追踪技术研制裸眼随机点立体视觉检查系统（glasses-free random dot stereo-test-system,GFRDSS）,检测正常视力男性青年的5 m距离立体视锐度。方法在不同照度环境下检测230名正常视力、正常眼位男性青年的立体视锐度。观察组采用GFRDSS检测方法;对照组采用Distance Randot（DR）检测方法。结果GFRDSS可以检测视差范围40″~800″的5 m远距离立体视锐度。100~300 cd/m2照度下,与对照组[41.3%(95/230)]比较,观察组有83.91%（193/230)受检者立体视锐度达到正常水平（40″~60″）,差异有统计学意义(Z=-9.569,P<0.05)。350~600 cd/m2照度下,与对照组[75.22%(173/230)]比较,观察组有84.78%（195/230)受检者立体视锐度达到60″,差异有统计学意义(Z=-4.048,P<0.05)。结论采用人眼追踪技术GFRDSS可以实现5 m距离无辅助立体视锐度检测,正常人群测试结果显示GFRDSS敏感性高于DR,且可以有效避免环境照度对检测的干扰。