RNA virus evolution is generally considered to be highly unpredictable, but tests of determinism in the evolution of competing populations during viral infections have not been performed. Here we study the fate of two closely related evolving quasispecies of vesicular stomatitis virus, by determining the relative concentration of a wild-type clone and a surrogate marked virus subclone (MARM-C) ...

Environmental fluctuations have important consequences in the organization of ecological communities, and understanding how such a variability influences the biodiversity of an ecosystem is a major question in ecology. In this paper, we analyze the case of two species competing for the resources within the framework of the neutral theory in the presence of environmental noise, devoting special ...

Software development projects are about change, yet change is problematic in any situation. Individuals resist change and software developers are no different than other organizational actors in this regard. This paper describes a case study which examines the changes to the IS development environment wrought by the introduction of a new software development methodology. One aspect of the new m...

A heavily used competitive tactic in the grocery business is the weekly advertising of price reductions in newspaper inserts and store fliers. Store managers commonly believe that advertisements of price reductions and loss leaders help to build store traffic by diverting customers from competing stores, thereby increasing store volume and profitability. It is therefore not surprising that groc...

Attention filters behaviorally relevant stimuli from the constant stream of sensory information comprising our environment. Research into underlying neural mechanisms in humans suggests that visual attention biases mutual suppression between stimuli resulting from competition for limited processing resources. As a consequence, processing of an attended stimulus is facilitated. This account make...

This paper offers a short commentary on the editorial by Mannion and Exworthy. The paper highlights the positive insights offered by their analysis into the tensions between the competing institutional logics of standardization and customization in healthcare, in part manifested in the conflict between managers and professionals, and endorses the plea of the authors for further research in this...

We propose a model, inspired by recent artificial life theory, applied to the problem of retrieving information from a large, distributed collection of documents such as the World Wide Web. A population of agents is evolved under density dependent selection for the task of locating information for the user. The energy necessary for survival is obtained from both environment and user in exchange...

A. Rajabifard A. Binns I. Williamson Centre for Spatial Data Infrastructures and Land Administration Department of Geomatics The University of Melbourne Victoria AUSTRALIA 3010 [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] Administering the spatial dimension of the marine environment is very important as decision-makers in both land and marine related areas of the coastal z...

The study described here tested a model of how characteristics of the feedback environment influence the allocation of resources (time and effort) among competing tasks. Results demonstrated that performers invest more resources on tasks for which higher quality (more timely and more specific) feedback is available; this effect was partially mediated by task salience and task expectancies. Feed...

This paper describes a method for designing robots to learn self-motivated behaviors rather than externally specified behaviors. Self-motivation is viewed as an emergent property arising from two competing pressures: the need to accurately predict the environment while simultaneously wanting to seek out novelty in the environment. The robot’s internal prediction error is used to generate a rein...