Know your Garden Microbes : Nostoc As gardeners, we often focus on the macro aspects of our garden such as the plants, trees, and shrubs. But, what about the tiny microbes that play a vital role in the health of our gardens? Today, we are going to focus on a particular type of bacteria that is often overlooked: Nostoc. What is Nostoc? N ostoc is a jelly-like microorganism commonly found growing on soggy lawns. While the discovery of the creature might be frightening for some gardeners, it poses no threat to plants or animals in the environment. Because the Nostoc grows in places where grass does not, it is likely to fill in any gaps left by the grass. Evidence of an imbalance in the ratio of fungus to bacteria can be easily identified. Figure 1: Nostoc Growing in the Garden. It was once believed that these strange-looking masses of matter came from the dust of shooting stars, which gave rise to the nicknames star jelly, star shot, and star slime beca...
Building a ground truth image is an important task in many image classification projects, especially in medical imaging or in projects that require expertise in labeling objects. However, for many other tasks, such as classifying vegetation in an image, building a labeled image can be easy and simple with the help of unsupervised learning models. Ground truth refers to a set of measurements or conditions that serve as a benchmark or target for a classification system or machine learning algorithm. Here are some examples of what ground truth can mean in different contexts: In object recognition, ground truth can refer to a set of labeled images that have been manually annotated by human experts. These label...