Objectives: We conduct a revaluation of the Thornhill and Fincher research project on parasites using finelyresolved geographic data on parasite prevalence, individual-level sociocultural data, and multilevel Bayesian modeling. In contrast to the evolutionary psychological mechanisms linking parasites to human behavior and cultural characteristics proposed by Thornhill and Fincher, we offer a…
The closely related Camponotus renggeri and Camponotus rufipes (subgenus Myrmothrix) often live in sympatry in the Brazilian ‘cerrado’ savannah, and are distinguished by nuances in their blackish body colour and by the colour of the legs. Variation in morphological characters, however, makes species separation difficult and it has been suggested that the two species should be merged into…
The Permian and Triassic were key time intervals in the history of life on Earth. Both periods are marked by a series of biotic crises including the most catastrophic of such events, the end-Permian mass extinction, which eventually led to a major turnover from typical Palaeozoic faunas and floras to those that are emblematic for the Mesozoic and Cenozoic. Here we review patterns in Permian–T…
Neodryinus typhlocybae (Hymenoptera:Dryinidae) is a natural enemy of the planthopper Metcalfa pruinosa, which was introduced from North America into Europe and has become established in various regions as a pest species. Vibrational signals play a crucial role in the communication of M. pruinosa, which appears to be exploited by N. typhlocybae. Scanning and transmission electron microscopy have…
Arable weeds are one of the most endangered species groups in Europe. Modern agriculture and intensive land-use management are the main causes of their dramatic decline. However, besides the changes in land use, climate change may further challenge the adaptability of arable weeds. Therefore, we investigated the response pattern of arable weeds to different water potential and temperature regim…
1. Statistical approaches for testing hypotheses of heterogeneity in fitness functions are needed to accommodate studies of phenotypic selection with repeated sampling across study units, populations or years. In this study, we tested directly for among-population variation in complex fitness functions and demonstrate a new approach for locating the region of the trait distribution where var…
Mediterranean-type streams are characterized by great seasonal and annual variation in flow. We studied the biology of the freshwater mussel Unio tumidiformis in such a stream, the Vasc~ao River in southern Portugal, during a period of great interannual variation in hydrology. We studied growth patterns of the mussels between 2002–2008, and the reproductive cycle between 2005–2006. Life-his…
Rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations (e[CO2]) are presumed to have a significant impact on plant growth and yield and also on mineral nutrient composition, and therefore, on nutritional quality of crops and vegetables. To assess the relevance of these effects in future agroecosystems it is important to understand how e[CO2] interacts with other environmental factors. In the present study, we e…
The evolution of the middle ear from the cynodont craniomandibular bones is one of the key mammalian innovations, and the mechanics underlying this anatomical transformation represents an intriguing paradox. Because the jaw joint of nonmammalian cynodonts was functionally coupled to the inner ear, auditory performance would favor low joint reaction forces. However, this could not be achieved at…
This is the first of two books for teachers about the English language. We believe that all teachers, not just English teachers, share the responsibility for helping students develop their abilities to speak, read, and write. Students must learn to communicate appropriately about math, chemistry, history, and every other school subject. Teaching students these skills necessarily extends across …
In recent years, the Intermountain West (IM West), consisting of the mountains, basins, and plateaus lying between the Cascade Range and the Sierra Nevada on the west and the Rocky Mountains on the east, has changed dramatically. What was once a vast open area with barely enough population to qualify for statehood is still open and vast, but sparse settlements have metastasized into cities …
Yet another cell and molecular biology book? At the very least, you would think that if I was going to write a textbook, I should write one in an area that really needs one instead of a subject that already has multiple excellent and definitive books. So, why write this book, then? First, it’s a course that I have enjoyed teaching for many years, so I am very familiar with what a student …
Dare we question an established canon of practice when it seems so selfevidently good? Yes indeed. The word flexibility and its adjective root, flexible, have gained such popularity in higher-education discourse and marketing strategies over the past few decades that it is time to dig into these words anew, with reflective and critical intent. Being our own discourse archaeologists should help …
Quality control has an emerging importance in every field of life. Quality control is a process that is used to guarantee a certain level of quality in a product or service. It might include whatever actions a business deems necessary to provide for the control and verification of certain characteristics of a product or service. With the improvement of technology everyday we meet new and compli…
Concrete examples help to understand complex systems. In this report, the key point is to illustrate the basic mechanisms and properties of neocybernetic system models. Good visualizations are certainly needed. It is biological systems, or living systems, that are perhaps the most characteristic examples of cybernetic systems. This intuition is extended here to natural systems in general —…
The evolution of the middle ear from the cynodont craniomandibular bones is one of the key mammalian innovations, and the mechanics underlying this anatomical transformation represents an intriguing paradox. Because the jaw joint of nonmammalian cynodonts was functionally coupled to the inner ear, auditory performance would favor low joint reaction forces. However, this could not be achieved at…
The evolution of the middle ear from the cynodont craniomandibular bones is one of the key mammalian innovations, and the mechanics underlying this anatomical transformation represents an intriguing paradox. Because the jaw joint of nonmammalian cynodonts was functionally coupled to the inner ear, auditory performance would favor low joint reaction forces. However, this could not be achieved at…
1. In the face of natural complexities and multicollinearity, model selection and predictions using multiple regression may be ambiguous and risky. Confounding effects of predictors often cloud researchers’ assessment and interpretation of the single best ‘magicmodel’. The shortcomings of stepwise regression have been extensively described in statistical literature, yet it is still widely…
Geared toward advanced undergraduates and graduate students, this substantially revised and updated edition of a popular text offers a concise treatment that provides careful and complete explanations as well as numerous problems and solutions. Topics include elementary theory, general Cauchy theorem and applications, analytic functions, and prime number theorem.
Alternative energy sources have become a hot topic in recent years. The supply of fossil fuel, which provides about 95 percent of total energy demand today, will eventually run out in a few decades. By contrast, biomass and biofuel have the potential to become one of the major global primary energy source along with other alternate energy sources in the years to come. A wide variety of biomass …
Objectives: The association between blood levels of hemoglobin (B-hgb) and blood pressure (BP) has been widely investigated in Caucasians and Asians but there is a paucity of data in rural black Africans. The objective was to investigate the association between B-hgb and BP in a rural black African population. Methods: A cross-sectional study was conducted in three districts in Kenya (Bondo, K…
Linear drain current degradation of a field-gate p-channel lateral extended drain MOS (FG-pLEDMOS) transistor for different ac hot-carrier stress conditions has been experimentally investigated in this paper. It is noted that hot-carrier degradation strongly depends on the time of the rising and falling edges of the gate signal pulse. Faster rising and falling edges of the gate pulse will indu…
Time-calibrated phylogenies that contain only living species have been widely used to study the dynamics of speciation and extinction. Concerns about the reliability of phylogenetic extinction estimates were raised by Rabosky (2010), where I suggested that unaccommodated heterogeneity in speciation rate could lead to positively biased extinction estimates. In a recent article,Beaulieu and O’M…
Ecologists frequently use a supertree method to generate phylogenies in ecological studies. However, the robustness of research results based on phylogenies generated with a supertree method has not been well evaluated. Here, we use the angiosperm tree flora of North America as a model system to test the robustness of phylogenies generated with a supertree method for studies on the relations…
Fothergilla (Hamamelidaceae) consists of Fothergilla gardenii (4x) from the coastal plains of the southeastern USA, F. major (6x) from the piedmont and mountains of the same region, and a few allopatric diploid populations of unknown taxonomic status. The objective of this study was to explore the relationships of the polyploid species with the diploid plants. Genotyping by sequencing (GBS) …
The topics of succession and post-disturbance ecosystem recovery have a long and convoluted history. There is extensive redundancy within this body of theory, which has resulted in confusion, and the links among theories have not been adequately drawn. This review aims to distil the unique ideas from the array of theory related to ecosystem change in response to disturbance. This will help to r…
The year 2014 marked the 25th International Conference on Arabidopsis Research. In the 50 yr since the first International Conference on Arabidopsis Research, held in 1965 in G€ottingen,Germany, > 54 000 papers that mention Arabidopsis thaliana in the title, abstract or keywords have been published.Wepresent herein a citational network analysis of these papers, and touch on some of the import…
This paper develops a doubly-fed induction machine model for steady-state harmonic studies. The model is based on the well-known steady-state induction machine model, considering nonsinusoidal voltage sources on the stator and rotor sides of the machine. The results obtained with the proposed model match those obtained from real lab measurements and with a complete induction machine model for …
This paper considers a customer order scheduling problem with product type splitting property in the unrelated parallel machine environment. Product type splitting property refers to the case where each customer order consists of several product types and the workload of all associated product types can be arbitrarily split among machines. The objective is to minimize the total completion time…
Human activity is among the critical information for a context-aware energy saving system since knowing what activities are undertaken is important for judging if energy is well spent. Most of the prior works on energy saving do not make the best of context-awareness especially in a multiuser environment to assist the energy saving system. In addition, they often ignore whether appliances are …
In this paper, a new method is proposed to evaluate the performance of concurrent systems. A concurrent system consisting of multiple processes that communicate via message passing mechanisms is modeled by a Petri net, which is in turn represented by a set of ordinary differential equations (ODEs)of a restricted type. The equations describe the system state changes, and the solutions, also call…
In the last decade, taxonomic studies have drastically increased the number of species known to inhabit the Arabian deserts. While ongoing phylogenetic studies continue to identify new species and high levels of intraspecific genetic diversity, few studies have yet explored the biogeographic patterns in this arid region using an integrative approach. In the present work, we apply different phyl…
This paper studies magnet eddy-current losses in permanent-magnet (PM) machines with concentrated winding. First, space harmonics of magnetomotive force (MMF) and their influence on magnet losses in electrical machines are investigated. Second, an analytical model of magnet volume losses is developed by studying the interaction between MMF harmonics wavelengths and magnet pole dimensions. Diff…
This paper deals with the design and the experimental validation in scale-lab test benches of an energy management algorithm based on feedback control techniques for a flywheel energy storage device. The aim of the flywheel is to smooth the net power injected to the grid by a wind turbine or by a wind power plant. In particular, the objective is to compensate the power disturbances produced by …
A generic state-vector transition (SVT) model is suggested, including a flexible synchronous composition involving both shared variables and events. This model is analyzed, focusing on properties that are important for supervisor synthesis. A synthesis procedure is then developed for the SVT model, where supervisor guards are generated that guarantee a controllable, nonblocking and maximally pe…
This paper presents the modeling approach for a quasi-2-D tubular anode-supported solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC) for real-time control implementation. The proposed system considers a multidomain electrochemical, fluidic, and thermal dynamic modeling and it is experimentally validated against a SOFC real world implementation. Implicit iterative algebraic equations have been introduced and impleme…
A popular clustering algorithm for biological networks which was proposed by Hartuv and Shamir [5] identifies nonoverlapping highly connected components. We extend the approach taken by this algorithm by introducing the combinatorial optimization problem HIGHLY CONNECTED DELETION, which asks for removing as few edges as possible from a graph such that the resulting graph consists of highly conn…
The rapid development of gene ontology (GO) and huge amount of biomedical data annotated by GO terms necessitate computation of semantic similarity of GO terms and, in turn, measurement of functional similarity of genes based on their annotations. In this paper we propose a novel and efficient method to measure the semantic similarity of GO terms. The proposed method addresses the limitations i…
A new graph based constrained semi-supervised learning (G-CSSL) framework is proposed. Pairwise constraints (PC) are used to specify the types (intra- or inter-class) of points with labels. Since the number of labeled data is typically small in SSL setting, the core idea of this framework is to create and enrich the PC sets using the propagated soft labels from both labeled and unlabeled data b…
In this paper, various new models of double-regulated Kaplan turbines are proposed, whose parameters are determined on the basis of field measurement data acquired during normal operating conditions. The model being identified is an extension of the nonlinear single-regulated turbine model obtained through an approximation function that defines the relationship between the wicket gate opening …
Mobile cloud computing (MCC) improves the computational capabilities of resource-constrained mobile devices. On the other hand, the mobile users demand a certain level of quality-of-service (QoS) provisioning while they use services from the cloud, even if the interfacing gateway changes due to the mobility of the users. In this paper, we identify, formulate, and address the problem of QoS-guar…
We address the problem of providing users with the ability to assess the integrity of join results produced by external computational providers and computed over externally stored databases. Our approach relies on different mutually supporting techniques offering strong integrity protection guarantees at a limited cost. The application of the approach is completely transparent to the computatio…
Power efficiency is one of the main issues that will drive the design of data centers, especially of those devoted to provide Cloud computing services. In virtualized data centers, consolidation of Virtual Machines (VMs) on the minimum number of physical servers has been recognized as a very efficient approach, as this allows unloaded servers to be switched off or used to accommodate more load,…
Ananalysis for net power characterization of a proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) system is developed with Ballard 1.2-kW Nexa power module. A net power control (NPC)strategy based on the linear matrix inequality (LMI) approach is proposed to achieve optimal oxygen excess ratio (OER). The H∞ suboptimal control problem is solved by LMI and the simulations are carried out under differe…
1. Predicting space use patterns of animals from their interactions with the environment is fundamental for understanding the effect of habitat changes on ecosystem functioning. Recent attempts to address this problem have sought to unify resource selection analysis,where animal space use is derived from available habitat quality, andmechanistic movement models, where detailedmovement proces…
Prerequisites for conservation planning are inventories of species, which are often recognised and described using morphological clues (The House of Lords 2003; The Royal Society 2003; Mace 2004). However, taxa identification using morphological criteria may be challenging, especially in simple organisms that present few discriminant synapomorphies and high phenotypic plasticity, such as cni…
Amniote vertebrates, the group consisting of mammals and reptiles including birds, possess various mechanisms of sex determination. Under environmental sex determination (ESD), the sex of individuals depends on the environmental conditions occurring during their development and therefore there are no sexual differences present in their genotypes. Alternatively, through the mode of genotypic …
The 1.5 Gbp/2C genome of pedunculate oak (Quercus robur) has been sequenced. A strategy was established for dealing with the challenges imposed by the sequencing of such a large, complex and highly heterozygous genome by a whole-genome shotgun (WGS) approach, without the use of costly and time-consuming methods, such as fosmid or BAC clone-based hierarchical sequencing methods. The sequencin…
We defined the somatic environment in which female germinal cells develop, and performed ultrastructural analyses of various somatic cell types, with particular reference to muscle cells and follicle cells, that reside within the ovary at different stages of oogenesis. Our findings show that ovarian wall of the crayfish is composed of long muscle cells, blood cells, blood vessels and hemal s…
Plant sexual systems can be affected by various environmental factors, and thus show a range of morphological differences. The associations between plant sexual systems and morphology are unique, for example, the subnival belt of the Hengduan Mountains has harsh climatic conditions, but hosts remarkable biodiversity. However, these associations have received surprisingly little attention. We…