Do birds differentially distribute antimicrobial proteins within clutches of eggs?

Brood parasites lay eggs matching the appearance of host clutches.

Interspecific brood parasitism represents a prime example of the coevolutionary arms race where each party has evolved strategies in response to the other. Here, we investigated whether common cuckoos (Cuculus canorus) actively select nests within a host population to match the egg appearance of a particular host clutch. To achieve this goal, we quantified the degree of egg matching using the a...

The Shapes of Birds' Eggs

The Shapes of Birds' Eggs: Mathematical Aspects

--In the Handbook o! North American birds the description of egg sizes, and more particularly of egg shapes, proceeds on somewhat different lines from those of previous works. The present paper explains the methods of measuring and methods of "reducing" the observations. The elements actually measured are the conventional average length and breadth, plus the (unconventional) radii of the blunt ...

Stackelberg Scheduling Strategies (DRAFT – DO NOT DISTRIBUTE)

We study the problem of optimizing the performance of a system shared by selfish, noncooperative users. We consider the concrete setting of scheduling jobs on a set of shared machines with loaddependent latency functions specifying the length of time necessary to complete a job; we measure system performance by the total latency of the system. Assigning jobs according to the selfish interests o...

Draft – Please Do Not Distribute with Permission

As graph models are applied to more widely varying fields, researchers struggle with tools that are at times too general or too specific for their needs. The Zoomgraph system attempts to address this issue by allowing users to define graphs with complex node and edge attributes, and providing a command and scripting language to manipulate and explore these graphs. The tool, which is publicly av...