Distance Coefficient Research Articles

Anterior chamber angle imaging with swept-source optical coherence tomography: comparison between CASIAII and ANTERION

This study compared the test–retest variabilities and measurement agreement of anterior chamber angle (ACA) dimensions measured by two anterior segment swept-source optical coherence tomography (SS-OCT)—the ANTERION (Heidelberg Engineering, Heidelberg, Germany) and CASIAII (Tomey, Nagoya, Japan). Thirty-eight subjects, 18 patients with primary angle closure and 20 healthy participants with open angles, were included. The mean age was 54.7 ± 15.8 years (range: 26–75 years). One eye of each subject was randomly selected for anterior segment imaging by ANTERION and CASIAII, using the same scan pattern (6 evenly spaced radial scans across the anterior segment for three times) in the same visit. The between- and within-instrument agreement and repeatability coefficients of angle open distance (AOD500), trabecular-iris space area (TISA500), lens vault (LV), scleral spur-scleral spur distance (SSD), anterior chamber depth (ACD), and pupil diameter (PD) were measured. The anterior and posterior boundaries of the cornea, iris, and lens were automatically segmented by the SS-OCT instruments; the scleral spur was manually located by a single masked observer. There were significant differences between ANTERION and CASIAII measurements; the SSD, PD, and ACD were smaller whereas AOD500 and TISA500 were greater in ANTERION compared with CASIAII (P < 0.001). Anterior segment measurements obtained from the two SS-OCT instruments showed strong associations (R2 ranged between 0.866 and 0.998) although the between-instrument agreement was poor; the spans of 95% limits of between-instrument agreement were ≥ 1.5-folds than the within-instrument agreement for either instrument. Whereas both SS-OCT instruments showed low test–retest measurement variabilities, the repeatability coefficients of AOD500, TISA500, ACD, and PD were slightly smaller for CASIAII than ANTERION (P ≤ 0.012).

Assessment of genetic variability of passion fruit using simple sequence repeat (SSR) markers

Purple passion fruit (Passiflora edulis Sims) is the third most important fruit crop in Kenya that is produced for both local and export markets. In Uasin Gishu County, passion fruit had recently emerged as an important cash crop for the small-holder farmers. Understanding the structure and diversity of species is very important in plant breeding and in conservation of genetic resources related activities. This study was set out in 2017-2018 to determine the genetic diversity of purple passion fruits genotypes grown in Uasin Gishu County, Kenya using SSR markers. Among the 50 purple passion fruit accessions used in this study, the genetic distance coefficients among accessions ranged from 0.24 to 0.72, with an average of 0.48. The results of STRUCTURE analysis suggested that the 50 accessions could be grouped into five sub-populations. The clustering was based on the unweighted pair-group method of arithmetic averages (UPGMA) where accessions were divided into three major clusters. The UPGMA dendrogram revealed that accessions from identical or adjacent areas were generally, but not entirely, clustered into the same cluster. Comparison of the UPGMA dendrogram and the Bayesian STRUCTURE analysis showed general agreement between the population sub-divisions and the genetic relationships among accessions. Principal coordinate analysis (PCoA) with SSR markers revealed a similar grouping of accessions to the UPGMA dendrogram and STRUCTURE analysis. Analysis of molecular variance (AMOVA) indicated that 16% of the total was attributed to the diversity among sub-populations, while 84% was associated with differences within sub-populations. Overall, there was a considerable amount of genetic variability among passion fruit accessions grown in Uasin Gishu County of Kenya. The study represents the comprehensive investigation of the genetic diversity of passion fruit accessions which would be valuable for germplasm collection, genetic improvement, and efficient utilization.

A Patient-Specific 3Dt Coronary Artery Motion Modeling Method Using Hierarchical Deformation with Electrocardiogram.

Cardiovascular-related diseases are one of the leading causes of death worldwide. An understanding of heart movement based on images plays a vital role in assisting postoperative procedures and processes. In particular, if shape information can be provided in real-time using electrocardiogram (ECG) signal information, the corresponding heart movement information can be used for cardiovascular analysis and imaging guides during surgery. In this paper, we propose a 3D+t cardiac coronary artery model which is rendered in real-time, according to the ECG signal, where hierarchical cage-based deformation modeling is used to generate the mesh deformation used during the procedure. We match the blood vessel’s lumen obtained from the ECG-gated 3D+t CT angiography taken at multiple cardiac phases, in order to derive the optimal deformation. Splines for 3D deformation control points are used to continuously represent the obtained deformation in the multi-view, according to the ECG signal. To verify the proposed method, we compare the manually segmented lumen and the results of the proposed method for eight patients. The average distance and dice coefficient between the two models were 0.543 mm and 0.735, respectively. The required time for registration of the 3D coronary artery model was 23.53 s/model. The rendering speed to derive the model, after generating the 3D+t model, was faster than 120 FPS.

FRIEND RECOMMENDATION USING GRAPH MINING ON SOCIAL MEDIA

Recommendation system is an important type of machine learning algorithm that provide precise suggestions to the users. Recommendation systems are used in innumerable types of areas such as generation of playlists, music and video services like Jio savaan, wynk, amazon prime music etc., and products recommendation for users in e-commerce applications and commercial applications. The recommendations that are provided by various types of applications increases the speed for identifying and makes easier to access the products that users are interested in. For each user, the recommendation system is capable of envisaging the future predilections on a set of items and recommend the top items. In several industries, recommendation systems are very useful as they generate huge amount of income and this type of industries can stand uniquely from competitors. Due to cumbersome number of items that each user can find in the web, the impact of recommendation system has been increased in the internet. Recommendation systems are used for custom-made navigation by getting huge amount of data particularly in social media domain for recommending friends. A recommendation system act as a subclass for the information filtering system that pursue to predict the rating. The similarity measures that are calculated in this research are Jaccard distance and Otsuka-Ochiai coefficient. The feature extractions that are used in this paper are Adar index, PageRank, Katz centrality, Hits score. Now a days many research people are implementing different types of algorithms in various domains for recommendation systems.

Fault Location Method Based on SVM and Similarity Model Matching

To locate the fault location accurately and solve the problem quickly is the key to improve the power supply capacity of power grid. This paper presents a fault location method based on SVM fault branch selection algorithm and similarity matching. Firstly, an SVM-based fault branch filter classifier was constructed based on the positive sequence component feature matrix data of each monitoring point, which can accurately select the branch where the current fault is located. Then, based on the positive sequence voltage distribution characteristics, the Euclidean distance and Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) are used to establish the similarity objective function of fault location. And then, the fault is accurately located by the objective function. Finally, the proposed method is validated by using an IEEE-14 node network. The results show that the proposed method is effective and accurate.

The distances measurement problem for an underwater robotic swarm: a semi-experimental trial, using power LEDs, in unknown sea water conditions

In a preceding paper, we have showed as swarm robotics displacement can be related to the deformation of a continuum material, discretized by a lattice network representing the swarm. To reach this aim, it is fundamental to know the swarm configuration, i.e., its shape; this can be computed from the knowledge of the relative distances between its elements and it is studied as a geometry distances problem. Typically, ultrasonic devices are employed to measure the distances. We propose a method based on light signal exchanged between the machines and the computing of the unknown water adsorption coefficient and distance. Aim of this paper is, therefore, to measure distances between underwater elements of the swarm using cheap power LEDs as light source and photodiode as receiver. The receiving photodiode produces a current we can correlate with distance and water adsorption coefficient; we can be able to estimate the two unknown parameters by moving the robots and stressing the emission conditions of the LED diode. Actual work is based on a previous paper where we stressed work conditions of a power LED in shallow water to change its emission characteristics; now, using these results, we can now perform a set of measurements leading to the knowledge of distances d and adsorption coefficient a(lambda ). The method we propose here can be a possible support to traditional ultrasonic devices

Study on Laser Propagation Characteristic of Downlink Channel in Non-uniform Seawater

Ao, J.; Zhai, D.Y., and Ma, C.B., 2020. Study on laser propagation characteristic of downlink channel in non-uniform seawater. In: Bai, X. and Zhou, H. (eds.), Advances in Water Resources, Environmental Protection, and Sustainable Development. Journal of Coastal Research, Special Issue No. 115, pp. 655-661. Coconut Creek (Florida), ISSN 0749-0208.In underwater optical communications, accurate evaluation concerning the optical propagation characteristic in seawater is crucial to the design of the communication system. The authors studied the distribution and loss properties of light traveling in seawater using Monte Carlo simulation method for the complex and changeable ocean communication channel. Assuming that the laser intensity is with Gaussian distribution, according to the Argo (Array for Real-time Geotropic Oceanography) data, the non-uniform seawater within 200 meters is layered vertically from the surface down, down, and the scattering and absorption of each layer is deduced. We studied the relation among the spot profile in receiving plane, emitted photons, transmission distance, and attenuation coefficient by using tracking the photon transmission process, and its correction is verified by using Monte Carlo simulation. Experimental results demonstrate that the scattering times of photons in seawater increase with the scattering distance and attenuation coefficient, and result in the enlargement of the receiving spot. Besides, if the seawater is considered as non-uniform, then the spot energy of the downlink is more concentrated than that in uniform seawater. In other words, the beam energy is more concentrated and suitable for long-distance transmission in a vertical direction. Therefore, considering the seawater as nonuniform medium and layering it vertically will make the evaluation of light transmission characteristic closer to practice.

A study of pedestrian evacuation model of impatient queueing with cellular automata

This paper proposes a pedestrian evacuation model for the crowd behavior of impatient queueing. Based on cellular automaton, this model simulates the impact of impatient queueing on evacuation performance by calculating the movement gain of the next targeting location of pedestrians based on the gains of floor field, impatience factor, and distance between exits. For further validating the model, simulation platform is established, focusing on the relationship between evacuation time, average movement velocity, pedestrian density, queue length and the number of impatient pedestrians, and their impacts on evacuation efficiency. As the experiment results imply, the queue length is negatively correlated with the exit capacity. Meanwhile, the number of impatient pedestrians in queue is positively correlated with pedestrian density and weight coefficient of queue length while it is negatively correlated with evacuation time and weight coefficient of distance between exits.

Cascaded Regression-Based Segmentation of Cardiac CT under Probabilistic Correspondences

The creation of 3D models for cardiac mapping systems is time-consuming, and the models suffer from issues with repeatability among operators. The present study aimed to construct a double-shaped model composed of the left ventricle and left atrium. We developed cascaded-regression-based segmentation software with probabilistic point and appearance correspondence. Group-wise registration of point sets constructs the point correspondence from probabilistic matches, and the proposed method also calculates appearance correspondence from these probabilistic matches. Final point correspondence of group-wise registration constructed independently for three surfaces of the double-shaped model. Stochastic appearance selection of cascaded regression enables the effective construction in the aspect of memory usage and computation time. The two correspondence construction methods of active appearance models were compared in terms of the paired segmentation of the left atrium (LA) and left ventricle (LV). The proposed method segmented 35 cardiac CTs in six-fold cross-validation, and the symmetric surface distance (SSD), Hausdorff distance (HD), and Dice coefficient (DC), were used for evaluation. The proposed method produced 1.88 ± 0.37 mm of LV SSD, 2.25 ± 0.51 mm* of LA SSD, and 2.06 ± 0.34 mm* of the left heart (LH) SSD. Additionally, DC was 80.45% ± 4.27%***, where * p &lt; 0.05, ** p &lt; 0.01, and *** p &lt; 0.001. All p values derive from paired t-tests comparing iterative closest registration with the proposed method. In conclusion, the authors developed a cascaded regression framework for 3D cardiac CT segmentation.

Transmit Antenna Selection in Offset Spatial Modulation Systems

In this letter, the idea of transmit antenna selection is combined with the offset spatial modulation (OSM) technique. Specifically, two novel transmit antenna selection schemes, termed as antenna selection based on grouped Euclidean distance (AS-GED) and channel coefficient (AS-CC), are developed toward a flexible tradeoff between system performance and computational complexity. Simulation results show that the proposed antenna selection schemes achieve significant performance improvement compared to traditional OSM systems.

Optimization study of a clustering algorithm for cosmic-ray muon scattering tomography used in fast inspection

Cosmic-ray muon scattering tomography (MST) technology is a new radiation imaging technology with unique advantages. As the performance of its image reconstruction algorithm has a crucial influence on the imaging quality, researches on this algorithm are of great significance to the development and application of this technology. In this paper, a fast inspection algorithm based on clustering analysis for the identification of the existence of nuclear materials is studied and optimized. Firstly, the principles of MST technology and a binned clustering algorithm were introduced, and then several simulation experiments were carried out using Geant4 toolkit to test the effects of exposure time, algorithm parameter, the size and structure of object on the performance of the algorithm. Based on these, we proposed two optimization methods for the clustering algorithm: the optimization of vertical distance coefficient and the displacement of sub-volumes. Finally, several sets of experiments were designed to validate the optimization effect, and the results showed that these two optimization methods could significantly enhance the distinguishing ability of the algorithm for different materials, help to obtain more details in practical applications, and was therefore of great importance to the development and application of the MST technology.

Estimating and minimizing embodied carbon of prefabricated high-rise residential buildings considering parameter, scenario and model uncertainties

Carbon emissions associated with high-rise buildings are expected to grow with the increasing population in high-density cities. As an environmentally friendly construction method, prefabrication should lead to reduced buildings' emissions. However, few studies have considered the uncertainty caused by errors in input parameters, scenario assumptions and choices of analytical uncertainty models when examining the embodied carbon of prefabricated high-rise buildings, leading to the misinterpretation of results. To address this, a five-level framework is developed for assessing the deterministic embodied carbon of prefabricated buildings using the process-based method. A Data Quality Index based Monte Carlo Simulation is applied for the uncertainty analysis using SimaPro 9.0 software. A typical prefabricated high-rise residential building in Hong Kong is examined. Seven scenarios are developed by varying system boundaries, materials used, partition wall thickness, waste rate, prefabrication rate, transportation distance, and analytical uncertainty model's transformation coefficients, to examine the influences of the scenario and model uncertainty. Results indicate that the embodied carbon of the case averages 561 kg CO2/m2. When considering both deterministic results and parameter uncertainty, the key processes are identified as being the production of concrete, steel and timber, as well as transportation activities. The results reveal that 31.6% of the embodied carbon can be possibly reduced by combining the pre-defined scenarios. The selection of transformation coefficients in analytical uncertainty model significantly affects the variances of the results and should be carefully examined. This paper can better facilitate the uncertainty measurement of prefabricated buildings' embodied carbon assessment for improving the reliability of results.

Automatic Verification of Beam Apertures for Cervical Cancer Radiation Therapy

PurposeAutomated tools can help identify radiation treatment plans of unacceptable quality. To this end, we developed a quality verification technique to automatically verify the clinical acceptability of beam apertures for 4-field box treatments of patients with cervical cancer. By comparing the beam apertures to be used for treatment with a secondary set of beam apertures developed automatically, this quality verification technique can flag beam apertures that may need to be edited to be acceptable for treatment. Methods and MaterialsThe automated methodology for creating verification beam apertures uses a deep learning model trained on beam apertures and digitally reconstructed radiographs from 255 clinically acceptable planned treatments (as rated by physicians). These verification apertures were then compared with the treatment apertures using spatial comparison metrics to detect unacceptable treatment apertures. We tested the quality verification technique on beam apertures from 80 treatment plans. Each plan was rated by physicians, where 57 were rated clinically acceptable and 23 were rated clinically unacceptable. ResultsUsing various comparison metrics (the mean surface distance, Hausdorff distance, and Dice similarity coefficient) for the 2 sets of beam apertures, we found that treatment beam apertures rated acceptable had significantly better agreement with the verification beam apertures than those rated unacceptable (P < .01). Upon receiver operating characteristic analysis, we found the area under the curve for all metrics to be 0.89 to 0.95, which demonstrated the high sensitivity and specificity of our quality verification technique. ConclusionsWe found that our technique of automatically verifying the beam aperture is an effective tool for flagging potentially unacceptable beam apertures during the treatment plan review process. Accordingly, we will clinically deploy this quality verification technique as part of a fully automated treatment planning tool and automated plan quality assurance program.

Modified Minimum Approach Distance Formula for Five Working Used for 500kV Insulated Aerial Vehicles with Double Circuits on the Same Tower

500kV double circuits on the same tower can effectively improve the natural transmission power and reduce the width of the line corridor, but the electromagnetic environment under the conductor is deteriorated. In order to ensure the safety of the workers in the insulated aerial vehicles and equipment during the live working, this paper firstly calculates the electric field distribution on the operating surface of the 500kV double-circuits truck with the actual line parameters, and then defines the distance coefficient. The existing minimum safe distance formula is modified, and a reference calculation method of the distance coefficient is given in combination with the data in the paper. Finally, the simulation data is used to verify.

Image Interpolation via Gradient Correlation-Based Edge Direction Estimation

This paper introduces an image interpolation method that provides performance superior to that of the state-of-the-art algorithms. The simple linear method, if used for interpolation, provides interpolation at the cost of blurring, jagging, and other artifacts; however, applying complex methods provides better interpolation results, but sometimes they fail to preserve some specific edge patterns or results in oversmoothing of the edges due to postprocessing of the initial interpolation process. The proposed method uses a new gradient-based approach that makes an intelligent decision based on the edge direction using the edge map and gradient map of an image and interpolates unknown pixels in the predicted direction using known intensity pixels. The input image is subjected to the efficient hysteresis thresholding-based edge map calculation, followed by interpolation of low-resolution edge map to obtain a high-resolution edge map. Edge map interpolation is followed by classification of unknown pixels into obvious edges, uniform regions, and transitional edges using the decision support system. Coefficient-based interpolation that involves gradient coefficient and distance coefficient is applied to obvious edge pixels in the high-resolution image, whereas transitional edges in the neighborhood of an obvious edge are interpolated in the same direction to provide uniform interpolation. Simple line averaging is applied to pixels that are not detected as an edge to decrease the complexity of the proposed method. Applying line averaging to smooth pixels helps to control the complexity of the algorithm, whereas applying gradient-based interpolation preserves edges and hence results in better performance at reasonable complexity.

Inclusive J/ψ and ηc production in ϒ decay at O(αs5) in nonrelativistic QCD factorization

We study $J/\psi$ and $\eta_c$ inclusive production in $\Upsilon$ decay within the framework of nonrelativistic-QCD (NRQCD) factorization. In the latter case, for which no experimental data exist so far, we also include the $h_c$ feed-down contribution. We calculate the short distance coefficients completely through $\mathcal{O}(\alpha_s^5)$. The NRQCD predictions for the branching fraction $\mathcal{B}(\Upsilon\to J/\psi+X)$ via direct production, evaluated with different sets of long-distance matrix elements (LDMEs), all agree with the experimental data in a reasonable range of renormalization scale. Using $\eta_c$ and $h_c$ LDMEs obtained from $J/\psi$ and $\chi_c$ ones via heavy-quark spin symmetry, we find that the bulk of $\mathcal{B}(\Upsilon\to\eta_c+X)$ via prompt production arises from the $c\bar{c}({}^3\!S_1^{[8]})$ Fock state. The experimental study of this decay process would, therefore, provide a particularly clean probe of the color octet mechanism of heavy-quarkonium production.

Comments on Economic Integration and Network Trade: A Comparison of East Asia and the European Union

Fukunari Kimura, Keio University and Economic Research Institute for ASEAN and East Asia: The comparison between East Asia (EA) and the European Union (EU) in the development of network trade is an important topic to be investigated. Nguyen and Wu conducted a gravity equation exercise with the global trade data and with EA/EU regional export data (to the world), focusing on trade in intermediate goods based on Broad Economic Categories (BEC) categories. The careful introduction of variables for “economic mass” and “multilateral resistance” may be a methodological contribution to the literature.The major findings from the regression analysis are as follows. First, with the global trade data, trade in intermediate goods is more sensitive to distance and further influenced by the economic mass of exporters and importers than the total trade. Although the sensitivity in distance has already been detected by many authors, including one of my papers with old-fashioned gravity (Kimura, Takahashi, and Hayakawa 2007), the confirmation of the result with new analytical technique is meaningful. Second, in comparison with the EU, intra-EA trade in intermediate goods is less sensitive to distance and further influenced by the economic mass of exporters and importers. This may give us a clue for examining differences between the two regions.I believe that the interpretation of these results can be more general than the authors claim. As for the first point, the authors note that trade in intermediate goods is more sensitive to “trade barriers,” but distance may mean more than trade barriers, including physical difficulty due to geographical distance. Furthermore, we have to be careful that a larger coefficient for distance does not necessarily mean higher physical and policy barriers if the scope of traded intermediate goods is expanded. As for the second point, the interpretation of the authors is that EA is still strongly dependent on outside regions. However, less sensitivity to distance, together with coefficients for remoteness, may also come from biases in traded intermediate goods. EA has become a strong exporter of electronic parts and components, which is easily traded in distance beyond the region by air. On the other hand, in the EU, we observe a massive trade in automobile parts, which is traded by trucks in relatively short distance. This would thus indicate the international competitiveness of EA rather than the “dependency” on outside regions. The authors could investigate these points further by more thoroughly expanding regression analyses.Unfortunately, the authors did not seem to follow my comments at the Asian Economic Panel Meeting on the basic data handling. First, it is customary to use mirror import data, rather than directly using export data, in gravity equation exercises, but the revised version of the paper still seems to use export data. We know that the quality of data is much better for imports than exports. Second, it is safer to merge the trade data of China (Hong Kong) and China (Macao) with the data of mainland China, though the authors do not seem to recognize the importance of such a treatment. I am also wondering why Taiwan is included in the East Asian group even though UN Comtrade does not provide its data. Finally, this was also pointed out in my original comments but is not clear whether the authors responded properly or not in the revised version: in using time series data, the authors should apply deflators or alternatively introduce year dummies. Because of these elementary problems in data handling, the regression results became somewhat dubious.It is again a pity that the authors did not follow another comment of mine; they did not decompose “intermediate goods” into two distinctive categories. The first category includes intermediate goods in food processing, light industries, and the energy sector, which are traded relatively slowly in a traditional manner. Baldwin (2016) would call it “the first unbundling.” The second category contains intermediate goods in machinery industries, the trade of which is time-sensitive, synchronized, and sometimes based on relation-specific transactions or “the second unbundling.” Buyer-driven production networks and producer-driven production networks, as Athukorala (2019) argues, roughly correspond to these two categories. The nature of international division of labor and international trade is quite different between these two categories. Therefore, in BEC categories, it is worth classifying into two categories: 111+121+21+22+32 and 42+53.Lastly, we can easily imagine that the difference between EA and the EU is substantially due to industrial biases, particularly electronics for EA and automobiles for the EU. We may also want to see overtime changes in the trade pattern, which can be explored with this data set.Overall, although the paper still leaves ample room for the improvement, it is successful in setting up a good starting point for further research on the topic.

Estimation of geometrical spreading, quality factor and kappa in the zagros region

We have investigated the attenuation characteristics of the S-wave of 129 earthquakes recorded by 180 accelerometers in the Zagros region of Iran. A total number of 1641 Fourier amplitude spectra were used for a step by step estimation of the high-frequency attenuation, geometrical spreading parameters and the frequency dependence of S-wave quality factor. Two different criteria for isolating the S-wave window were examined in order to assess the effect of window selection on the estimated parameters. For the horizontal and vertical zero-distance, kappa values of 0.043 and 0.033 were obtained, respectively. The S-wave window selection method does not affect the estimated kappa values. We used Bayesian approach to estimate the tri-linear geometrical spreading parameters. The hinge positions of the tri-linear model (63 ± 5 and 124 ± 18 km) and the geometrical spreading coefficient (−0.8) for distances smaller than 63 km were found to be independent of frequency and window type. Both spreading coefficients for distances beyond the first hinge are highly frequency dependent, while at distances beyond 124 km, the coefficients at all frequencies are sensitive to the window type. The frequency-independent spreading coefficients were estimated by simultaneous inversion of all frequencies, and the absolute value of the coefficients at longer distances were found to be larger for longer S-wave windows. The average of the coefficients over both windows for the second and third hinges are −0.17 and −0.55, respectively. The S-wave quality factor is influenced by window type only at frequencies larger than 5 Hz. The frequency dependence of the quality factor at lower frequencies was determined as 141f0.84.

Genetic Diversity and Infraspecific Relationships of Trifolium fragiferum L. in Iran

Trifolium L. has around 255 species worldwide. Strawberry clover is one of the most valuable forage crops of the genus Trifolium with two varieties in Iran. In the current study, 40 individuals of eight natural populations of Trifolium fragiferum varieties were examined to reveal genetic diversity and infraspecific relationships with microsatellite markers. Based on five primer sets, a total of 11 alleles were obtained with an average of 2.2 alleles per locus. The polymorphic information content ranged from 0.0 to 0.517 with an average of 0.328. The observed and effective heterozygosity across all loci changed from 0 to 1 and 0 to 0.596, respectively. The gene diversity among the loci varied from 0 to 0.530. Unweighted pair group method with arithmetic mean analyses based on Gower’s distance coefficient grouped accessions into five major clusters but did not separate 40 individuals of T. fragiferum var. fragiferum and T. fragiferum var. pulchellum in distinct groups. Results did not show any clear association between clusters and the geographical origin of varieties. Analysis of molecular variance indicated 84% of the total variation within populations. Genetic differentiation was low in the total population (FST = 0.1), while a high level of gene flow (Nm = 2.247) was estimated among populations. Microsatellite markers evidence suggests that two varieties should not remain separated.

An Investigation of Secondary School Seventh Grade Students’ Implicit and Explicit Knowledge about the Concept of Citizen

The conceptual understanding related to being a citizen involves not only the explicit knowledge acquired through explicit instruction and course books but also the implicit, experiential knowledge acquired in socio-cultural and political environments. Explicit and implicit conceptual knowledge we have acquired about being a citizen affects our values, attitudes and behaviours we demonstrate as citizens. The purpose of this study is to investigate secondary school seventh grade students’ implicit and explicit knowledge about the concept of citizen. The study adopted a convergent parallel mixed method. 27 students were chosen using typical case sampling for the identification of implicit knowledge, and 124 students were chosen using simple random sampling method for the identification of explicit knowledge. Data were collected from secondary school seventh grade students who were enrolled in three state schools, who had their parents’ consent and who volunteered to participate in the study. Implicit knowledge about the concept of citizen was identified using the repertory grid technique, and explicit knowledge was identified using the “Explicit Knowledge Test” about the concept of citizen including seven open-ended questions. Qualitative data obtained for implicit knowledge were analyzed using content analysis methods and Idiogrid 2.4 program. Students’ answers given in the explicit knowledge test were analyzed using a holistic rubric. Analysis of the data included the use of frequencies, percentages, arithmetic means, standard deviation, t-test, and one-way ANOVA. An analysis of implicit knowledge about the concept of citizen showed that the students interpreted the concept of citizen mostly as “being a good person ” and least as “ an individual who has rights ”. According to the students’ eigenvalue (Euclidean distance coefficient) that reflected the difference between the “Me as a citizen” and “What kind of citizen do I want to be”, “ Me as a citizen compared to other people in my environment”, “What kind of a citizen do I have to be? central elements showed that majority of the students had high eigenvalues (self perceptions) as citizens. Majority of the students were found to have “ first level - insufficient ” explicit knowledge about the concept of citizen; a small number of students had “ second level - partially sufficient” knowledge; and there were no students who had “third level-mostly sufficient” and “ fourth level - sufficient ”. Students’ explicit knowledge test scores displayed significant differences according to mother’s education level, having friends with different cultural characteristics, and the languages spoken at home variables; no significant differences were determined according to gender, the location of the school, father’s education level, and mother language variables.