s of the Australasian Viral Hepatitis Elimination Conference: oral presentations

Observing sperm in competition has been limited by our ability to discriminate between males' sperm. Recent work has overcome this obstacle, while another study reports on seminal fluid with very specific spermicidal activity, suggesting discrimination is easy for some.

Abstract presented at the 5th Biennial Conference of the Australasian Academy of Cerebral Palsy & Developmental Medicine, 3-6 March 2010, Christchurch, New Zealand

In a seminal paper, Hammerstein and Parker (1987) described how sex roles in mate searching can be frequency dependent: the need for one sex to perform mate searching is diminished when the opposite sex takes on the greater searching effort. Intriguingly, this predicts that females are just as likely to search as males, despite a higher potential reproductive rate by the latter sex. This predic...

Most heuristics for scheduling address asynchronous communication DAG, but they are not suitable for the synchronous ones. The proposed PRGSC algorithm avoids the deadlock that is caused by the synchronous communication, but also it can alleviate impact of synchronous communicating delay. Simulation shows that the PRGSC algorithm has better performance than the CASC algorithm which deals with t...

Learning, especially in the case of language acquisition, is not an isolated process; there is ever-present competition between words and objects in the world. Such competition is known to play a critical role in learning. Namely, the amount and variability of competing items during word learning have been shown to change learning trajectories in young children learning new words. However, very...

The concept of defining set has been studied in block designs and, under the name critical sets, in Latin squares and Room squares. Here we study defining sets for directed designs. A t-(v, k,'x) directed design (DD) is a pair (V, B), where V is a v-set and B is a collection of ordered blocks (or k-tuples of V), for which each t-tuple of V appears in precisely ,X blocks. A set of blocks which i...

Gamete recognition proteins can evolve at astonishing rates and lie at the heart of reproductive isolation and speciation in diverse taxa. However, the source of selection driving this evolution remains unknown. We report on how the sperm bindin genotype influences reproductive success under natural conditions. An interaction between genotype frequency and spawning density determines how sperm ...

A new algorithm for identifying and locating singular points on a fingerprint image is presented. This algorithm is based on properties of the fingerprint orientation image, including a feature defined as a transition line. The transition line is shown to provide an efficient means of both tracking and classifying singular points without having to search through the entire fingerprint image. Th...