Search results for "selection"
showing 10 items of 1940 documents
Behavior adaptation and selection.
2010
6 pages; The evolutionary approach to behavior is concerned with the evolutionary origin and adaptive function of behavioral traits. Like any other part of the phenotype, behavior can be shaped by natural selection to produce adaptations. However, behavior often shows large phenotypic variation and flexibility, and can be both – subject to selection and a major agent of selection. Therefore, the study of adaptation and evolution of behavior is a particularly complex one, involving a wide range of methodologies and techniques, including mathematical modeling, comparative methods, phenotypic engineering, quantitative genetics, genetic dissection, and artificial selection.
Real-Time Routing Selection in Flexible Manufacturing Systems
1993
Routing flexibility is one of the main peculiarities of Flexible Manufacturing Systems. This paper proposes three methods for real-time routing selection. The first one makes decisions comparing the current workload of machines in each alternative path. The second method considers the current workloads at the bottleneck machines in each allowed route. The third approach makes real-time decisions minimizing a merit index that represents a measure of the still required resource amount. The index is computed by short discrete-event simulation runs. Some case studies evaluate and compare the proposed approaches.
Study of aerobic granular sludge stability in a continuous-flow membrane bioreactor.
2015
A granular continuous-flow membrane bioreactor with a novel hydrodynamic configuration was developed to evaluate the stability of aerobic granular sludge (AGS). Under continuous-flow operation (Period I), AGS rapidly lost their structural integrity resulting in loose and fluffy microbial aggregates in which filamentous bacteria were dominant. The intermittent feeding (Period II) allowed obtaining the succession of feast and famine conditions that favored the increase in AGS stability. Although no further breakage occurred, the formation of new granules was very limited, owing to the absence of the hydraulic selection pressure. These results noted the necessity to ensure, on the one hand the…
Converging paths to Notes
1995
The nature of the information systems needed in a networked firm is not well known: nor is the process leading to particular solutions. Describes a small computer‐consulting company which works as a network of independent consultants, and analyses the slow and circuitous path from recognizing its IS/IT needs to its commitment to a particular solution as seven steps; using ideas of structuration theory as a focus. During the selection process, participants formed new interpretations of the firm, of technology, and of the appropriate process towards a feasible solution. New resources – both material and symbolic – were acquired to enable the search. Existing “norms” provided boundaries for th…
A genome‐wide comparison between selected and unselected Valle del Belice sheep reveals differences in population structure and footprints of recent …
2023
About three decades of breeding and selection in the Valle del Belìce sheep are expected to have left several genomic footprints related to milk production traits. In this study, we have assembled a dataset with 451 individuals of the Valle del Belìce sheep breed: 184 animals that underwent directional selection for milk production and 267 unselected animals, genotyped for 40,660 single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs). Three different statistical approaches, both within (iHS and ROH) and between (Rsb) groups, were used to identify genomic regions potentially under selection. Population structure analyses separated all individuals according to their belonging to the two groups. A total of fo…
Life History Trade-Offs and Relaxed Selection Can Decrease Bacterial Virulence in Environmental Reservoirs
2012
Pathogen virulence is usually thought to evolve in reciprocal selection with the host. While this might be true for obligate pathogens, the life histories of opportunistic pathogens typically alternate between within-host and outside-host environments during the infection-transmission cycle. As a result, opportunistic pathogens are likely to experience conflicting selection pressures across different environments, and this could affect their virulence through life-history trait correlations. We studied these correlations experimentally by exposing an opportunistic bacterial pathogen Serratia marcescens to its natural protist predator Tetrahymena thermophila for 13 weeks, after which we meas…
Seasonal changes in predator community switch the direction of selection for prey defences
2014
Insect communities consist of aposematic species with efficient warning colours against predation, as well as abundant examples of crypsis. To understand such coexistence, we here report results from a field experiment where relative survival of artificial larvae, varying in conspicuousness, was estimated in natural bird communities over an entire season. This takes advantage of natural variation in the proportion of naive predators: naivety peaks when young birds have just fledged. We show that the relative benefit of warning signals and crypsis changes accordingly. When naive birds are rare (early and late in the season), conspicuous warning signals improve survival, but conspicuousness b…
The Educational Multimedia Clip as a Tool for Students’ Self-learning on Concept Mapping
2016
It has been already justified that concept mapping is an exceptionally suitable tool for formative assessment of structural knowledge. However, before the implementation of such type of assessment, the teacher should decide on a reasonable students’ training strategy, its implementation way, and content to be delivered. The paper focuses especially on the last mentioned issue - the selection of the content and its representational forms for an educational multimedia clip that has been developed as a main tool for students’ self-learning on concept mapping before the regular concept map based formative assessment of structural knowledge in one of the author’s taught study courses. Content re…
Advantage of rare infanticide strategies in an invasion experiment of behavioural polymorphism
2012
Killing conspecific infants (infanticide) is among the most puzzling phenomena in nature. Stable polymorphism in such behaviour could be maintained by negative frequency-dependent selection (benefit of rare types). However, it is currently unknown whether there is genetic polymorphism in infanticidal behaviour or whether infanticide may have any fitness advantages when rare. Here we show genetic polymorphism in non-parental infanticide. Our novel invasion experiment confirms negative frequency-dependent selection in wild bank vole populations, where resource benefits allow an infanticidal strategy to invade a population of non-infanticidal individuals. The results show that infanticidal beh…
Early detection of mechanical damage in mango using NIR hyperspectral images and machine learning
2014
Mango fruit are sensitive and can easily develop brown spots after suffering mechanical stress during postharvest handling, transport and marketing. The manual inspection of this fruit used today cannot detect the damage in very early stages of maturity and to date no automatic tool capable of such detection has been developed, since current systems based on machine vision only detect very visible damage. The application of hyperspectral imaging to the postharvest quality inspection of fruit is relatively recent and research is still underway to find a method of estimating internal properties or detecting invisible damage. This work describes a new system to evaluate mechanically induced da…