Differences in Emergence Date and Size Between the Sexes of \u3ci\u3eMalacosoma Americanum\u3c/i\u3e the Eastern Tent Caterpillar (Lepidoptera: Lasiocampidae)

Malacosoma americanum males were smaller and began to pupate earlier than females. Since the sexes spent the same amount of time as pupae, males also emerged earlier. The adaptive significance of these results is discussed. Emergence data revealed an interesting sidelight; no moths emerged from cocoons inside tents

Design-level Cohesion Measures: Derivation, Comparison, and Applications

Cohesion was first introduced as a software attribute that could be used to predict properties of implementations that would be created from a given design. Unfortunately, cohesion, as originally defined, could not be objectively assessed, while more recently developed objective cohesion measures depend on code-level information. We show that association-based and slice-based approaches can be used to measure cohesion using only design-level information. Our design-level cohesion measures are formally defined, can be readily implemented, and can support software design, maintenance, and restructuring. Index terms --- cohesion, software measurement and metrics, software design, software maintenance, software restructuring and re-engineering, software visualization, software reuse. 1 Introduction Module cohesion was defined by Yourdan and Constantine as "how tightly bound or related its internal elements are to one another"[10, p. 106]. They describe cohesion as an attribute of design..

A framework for the simulation of structural software evolution

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2008 ACM.As functionality is added to an aging piece of software, its original design and structure will tend to erode. This can lead to high coupling, low cohesion and other undesirable effects associated with spaghetti architectures. The underlying forces that cause such degradation have been the subject of much research. However, progress in this field is slow, as its complexity makes it difficult to isolate the causal flows leading to these effects. This is further complicated by the difficulty of generating enough empirical data, in sufficient quantity, and attributing such data to specific points in the causal chain. This article describes a framework for simulating the structural evolution of software. A complete simulation model is built by incrementally adding modules to the framework, each of which contributes an individual evolutionary effect. These effects are then combined to form a multifaceted simulation that evolves a fictitious code base in a manner approximating real-world behavior. We describe the underlying principles and structures of our framework from a theoretical and user perspective; a validation of a simple set of evolutionary parameters is then provided and three empirical software studies generated from open-source software (OSS) are used to support claims and generated results. The research illustrates how simulation can be used to investigate a complex and under-researched area of the development cycle. It also shows the value of incorporating certain human traits into a simulation—factors that, in real-world system development, can significantly influence evolutionary structures

New Foods For Thought: Maine Food Producers Add Value through Innovation

This short article discusses how the Maine Technology Institute (MTI) is contributing to the state’s value-added food cluster

Differences in Emergence Date and Size Between the Sexes of \u3ci\u3eMalacosoma Americanum\u3c/i\u3e the Eastern Tent Caterpillar (Lepidoptera: Lasiocampidae)

Malacosoma americanum males were smaller and began to pupate earlier than females. Since the sexes spent the same amount of time as pupae, males also emerged earlier. The adaptive significance of these results is discussed. Emergence data revealed an interesting sidelight; no moths emerged from cocoons inside tents

Effects of thermal fluctuation and the receptor-receptor interaction in bacterial chemotactic signalling and adaptation

Bacterial chemotaxis is controlled by the conformational changes of the receptors, in response to the change of the ambient chemical concentration. In a statistical mechanical approach, the signalling due to the conformational changes is a thermodynamic average quantity, dependent on the temperature and the total energy of the system, including both ligand-receptor interaction and receptor-receptor interaction. This physical theory suggests to biology a new understanding of cooperation in ligand binding and receptor signalling problems. How much experimental support of this approach can be obtained from the currently available data? What are the parameter values? What is the practical information for experiments? Here we make comparisons between the theory and recent experimental results. Although currently comparisons can only be semi-quantitative or qualitative, consistency is clearly shown. The theory also helps to sort a variety of data.Comment: 26 pages, revtex. Journal version. Analysis on another set of data on adaptation time is adde

Validation of an efficient two-layer non-hydrostatic wave model on a sloping foreshore

In the physical modelling of coastal engineering problems, use is often made of foreshores and transition slopes to obtain the desired wave conditions - both spectral parameters and wave height distribution - at a given location. Numerical wave models can be used to predict whether the target wave conditions are met for a given physical model layout and wave forcing. The XBeach non-hydrostatic two-layer model is a computationally efficient numerical model that has been validated for spectral wave parameters, but lacks validation of the simulated wave height distributions. In this work, wave flume data with high spatial density over a sloping foreshore is used to validate the ability of this numerical model to reproduce both spectral wave parameters and wave height distributions. As part of this effort, optimal settings have been derived for the wave breaking formulation used in the numerical model, resulting in recommended values for the maxbrsteep and reformsteep parameters of 0.40 and 0.20 respectively.   From the results of the validation it is concluded that the numerical model is unsuccessful in reproducing the validation tests with 5.0% wave steepness, potentially due to the higher kph numbers on the generating model boundary. Hence, using the numerical model with values of kph ≥ 2 on the model boundary is not recommended.   The XBeach non-hydrostatic two-layer model performs much better for the 1.0% and 2.5% wave steepness tests, where the spectral wave parameters are represented well. The corresponding wave height distributions are represented reasonably well up to the point that the relative water depth gets very shallow. For shallower water, the model is expected to underestimate the higher waves in the wave height distribution. Additionally, the numerical model is shown to reproduce the wave height distribution better than a commonly used analytical formulation for wave height distributions on slopes

Hemiptera records from Lake Spechtensee and from Southern Styria (Austria)

Hemiptera records gained in July 2015 in course of the 7th European Hemiptera Congress in Styria are presented. In total, 144 Auchenorrhyncha, 143 Heteroptera, 13 Psylloidea and 2 Aphididae species were collected. Ribautodelphax imitans (Delphacidae), Eurhadina saageri (Cicadellidae), Notonecta maculata (Notonectidae), Notonecta meridionalis (Notonectidae) and Polymerus cognatus (Miridae) are new records for Styria