In January 1975, Jacques Tits gave a lecture during which he wrote down the order, 246 · 320 · 59 ·76 ·112 ·133 ·17·19·23·29·31·41·47·59·71, or about 8 · 1053, of a sporadic simple group M that Bernd Fischer and, independently, Robert Griess had predicted in 1973. Andrew Ogg, an expert in modular functions who happened to be in the audience, was uniquely qualified to recognize something peculia...

a r t i c l e i n f o Because dominant competitors can monopolize resources, any positive effects they have on other species can have large community impacts. The solitary tunicate Ascidia ceratodes is a dominant competitor in the fouling community in Bodega Harbor, CA. This tunicate preempts primary substratum from competitors, but its thick tunic also allows other species to grow on its surfa...

Many natural patterns, such as the distributions of blood particles in a blood sample, proteins on cell surfaces, biological populations in their habitat, galaxies in the universe, the sequence of human genes, and the fitness in evolutionary computing, have been found to follow power law (e.g., Kendal 2004, Illian et al. 2008, Venter 2001, Ma 2012). Taylor’s power law (Taylor 1961: Nature, vol....

The idea of using natural patterns as guides for policy and practices continues to gain favour in forestland management. Towards this, research activities in the boreal have been focusing on the patterns and processes of wildfires over the last 15-20 years. This project is the fourth phase of a long-term research study looking at natural wildfire patterns across the forested areas of Alberta an...

Colonization of abandoned lands by woody vegetation may be a great opportunity for ecosystem recovery given the current and future trend of land abandonment. This may help to reverse the generalized condition of ecosystem degradation of developed countries which is an urgent need. However, ecosystem recovery in abandoned lands can be seriously limited by biotic and abiotic factors. Indentify su...

Quantitative electroencephalography is a primary measurement by which dysfunctional conditions can be inferred and characterized within the human cerebrum. There is an implicit assumption that anomalous spatial-temporal configurations over the surface of a patient’s scalp are strongly correlated with altered cognitive behaviors or that both share a common source of variance. In this experiment ...

Conjugate, or bimodal, fault patterns dominate the geological literature on shear failure. Based on Anderson's (1905) application of the Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion, these patterns have been interpreted from all tectonic regimes, including normal, strike-slip and thrust (reverse) faulting. However, a fundamental limitation of the Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion e and others that assume faults...

the world’s most durable mysteries. Some patterns—clouds, snowflakes— form in space. Others—the ebb and flow of tides, seasonal wet and dry spells—are patterns that form in time. Natural patterns are mysterious because they are complex, organized and interconnected, even though the laws of physics on which they rest—Newton’s classical laws of motion—are simple. The living world presents the ult...

19 1. How much should an individual invest in reproduction as it grows older? Answering 20 this question involves determining whether individuals measure their age as the time 21 left for future reproduction or as the rate of deterioration in their state. Theory 22 suggests that in the former case individuals should increase their allocation of 23 resources to reproduction as opportunities for ...

A novel, multistage approach to passive islanding detection is presented which uses a decision-tree-like classification algorithm. The novelty of the proposed method is centered on the way in which features are passed to subsequent stages of the decision tree (DT). A traditional DT uses a single feature set while in the modified algorithm, feature sets extracted using different sized time windo...