Prey organisms evolved a multitude of plastic responses to avoid being eaten by predators. Besides the evolution of plastic morphological responses to escape predation, prey also evolved a set of physiological stress responses to avoid dying because of chronic predator stress per se due to disruption of cellular homeostasis. As physiological stress theory predicts increased energy consumption a...

A novel approach based on hidden Markov models (HMMs) is proposed for damage classification in composite structures. Time-frequency damage features are first extracted from the measured signals using the matching pursuit decomposition algorithm. The features are then incorporated as observation sequences to be modeled statistically by the HMMs. Once built, the HMMs are integrated very efficient...

In the 24 months to December 2005 recorded incidents of malicious damage to property increased by eight per cent in NSW. This bulletin provides information about the nature of malicious damage to property incidents through a detailed analysis of police database records and narratives of incidents occurring in 2005. These data reveal that the most frequent targets of malicious damage are private...

Natural disasters can severely impact transportation networks. In the hours and days following a major flooding event, knowing the location and extent of the damage is crucial for incident managers for a number of reasons: it allows for emergency vehicle access to affected areas; it facilitates the efficient rerouting of traffic; it raises the quality and reduces the cost of repairs; and it all...

Drawing upon climate change damage functions previously proposed in the literature that we have calibrated to a common level of damages at 2.5 C, we examine the effect upon the social cost of carbon (SCC) of varying the specification of damages in a DICE-like integrated assessment model. In the absence of risk aversion, all of the SCC estimates but one agree within a factor of two. The effect o...

Extravagant ornaments evolved to advertise their bearers' quality, the honesty of the signal being ensured by the cost paid to produce or maintain it. The oxidation handicap hypothesis (OHH) proposes that a main cost of testosterone-dependent ornamentation is oxidative stress, a condition whereby the production of reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (ROS/RNS) overwhelms the capacity of antioxi...

This paper describes a composed error model for estimating the conditional distribution of yield loss to serve as an insect damage function. The two-part error separates yield variability due to pest damage from other non-pest factors such as soil heterogeneity, non-uniform application of agronomic practices, and measurement errors. Various common functional forms (linear, quadratic, Cobb-Dougl...

Fruit loss to birds is a long-standing and costly problem for many producers. We conducted a survey of Honeycrisp apple, blueberry, cherry, and wine grape growers in California, Michigan, New York, Oregon, and Washington to estimate costs of bird damage and benefits of bird damage management. We also assessed grower perceptions of impacts on profits and effectiveness of bird management techniqu...

We consider the problem of characterizing user equilibria and optimal solutions for selfish routing in a given network. We extend the known models by considering malicious behaviour. While selfish users follow a strategy that minimizes their individual cost, a malicious user will use his flow through the network in an effort to cause the maximum possible damage to this cost. We define a general...

There is a widespread sentiment that a sufficiently stringent climate policy, i.e. considerable reduction of greenhouse gas emissions to avoid extreme climate change, will go along with tremendous economic costs for society. Various climate cost-benefit analyses and climate policy cost assessments have calculated these costs, but all of them are characterized by debatable assumptions. Moreover,...