The multicoloured Asian ladybird Harmonia axyridis is an invasive insect that can negatively influence biodiversity and human economy in invaded areas. According to the enemy release hypothesis, invasive alien species are often little affected by parasites and other enemies. We studied the prevalence of common parasites of insects infesting and infecting H. axyridis in NW Poland. A large sample of 2351 individuals was collected and divided into two groups: 1180 beetles were dissected and examined for the presence of eugregarines, nematodes and Laboulbeniales fungi, and 751 were checked for phoretic mites. Our results show that H. axyridis is indeed parasitized infrequently. The prevalence of eugregarines and nematodes was very low (1.5% and 0.4%, respectively). No specimens of Laboulbeniales or phoretic mites were found. Our study indicates that in NW Poland H. axyridis is rarely infested or infected by parasites. This paper reports for the first time the infection of H. axyridis by the eugregarine Gregarina barbarara., Kryzstof Dudek, Paweł Sienkiewicz, Dariusz J. Gwiazdowicz, Piotr Tryjanowski., and Obsahuje bibliografii
Decomposable (probabilistic) models are log-linear models generated by acyclic hypergraphs, and a number of nice properties enjoyed by them are known. In many applications the following selection problem naturally arises: given a probability distribution p over a finite set V of n discrete variables and a positive integer k, find a decomposable model with tree-width k that best fits p. If H is the generating hypergraph of a decomposable model and pH is the estimate of p under the model, we can measure the closeness of pH to p by the information divergence D(p:pH), so that the problem above reads: given p and k, find an acyclic, connected hypergraph H of tree-width k such that D(p:pH) is minimum. It is well-known that this problem is NP-hard. However, for k=1 it was solved by Chow and Liu in a very efficient way; thus, starting from an optimal Chow-Liu solution, a few forward-selection procedures have been proposed with the aim at finding a `good' solution for an arbitrary k. We propose a backward-selection procedure which starts from the (trivial) optimal solution for k=n−1, and we show that, in a study case taken from literature, our procedure succeeds in finding an optimal solution for every k.
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A probabilistic communication structure considers the setting with communication restrictions in which each pair of players has a probability to communicate directly. In this paper, we consider a more general framework, called a probabilistic communication structure with fuzzy coalition, that allows any player to have a participation degree to cooperate within a coalition. A maximal product spanning tree, indicating a way of the greatest possibility to communicate among the players, is introduced where the unique path from one player to another is optimal. We present a feasible procedure to find the maximal product spanning trees. Furthermore, for games under this model, a new solution concept in terms of the average tree solution is proposed and axiomatized by defining a restricted game in Choquet integral form.
In this paper, we study and characterize some properties of a given binary operation on a lattice. More specifically, we show necessary and sufficient conditions under which a binary operation on a lattice coincides with its meet (resp. its join) operation. Importantly, we construct two new posets based on a given binary operation on a lattice and investigate some cases that these two posets have a lattice structure. Moreover, we provide some representations of a given lattice based on these new constructed lattices.
One crucial step in the construction of the human representation of the world is found at the boundary between two basic stimuli: visual experience and the sounds of language. In the developmental stage when the ability of recognizing objects consolidates, and that of segmenting streams of sounds into familiar chunks emerges, the mind gradually grasps the idea that utterances are related to the visible entities of the world. The model presented here is an attempt to reproduce this process, in its basic form, simulating the visual and auditory pathways, and a portion of the prefrontal cortex putatively responsible for more abstract representations of object classes. Simulations have been performed with the model, using a set of images of 100 real world objects seen from many different viewpoints and waveforms of labels of various classes of objects. Subsequently, categorization processes with and without language are also compared.