Insect Food of the Vesper Sparrow

Vesper

VESPER is a denotational formalism, that is, a collection of expressions each of which denotes some entity. Its logic, when viewed at the topmost level, is given by a single simpliication function. The simpliication is vertically extended in the sense that in a single act of simpliication an expression and (simultaneously) all or most of its subexpressions are recast into a simpler form. All VE...

Vesper: Verilog Signal Profiler

Verification of complex hardware designs remains a very labor-intensive process often involving multiple designer and verification teams. Unfortunately, often the designs under verification are poorly documented and invariants of circuit operations are ill-defined increasing the burden on testers and verification engineers, who must understand internal aspects of the design written by other peo...

Insect Food Habits and Vegetation

Insect symbionts in food webs

Recent research has shown that the bacterial endosymbionts of insects are abundant and diverse, and that they have numerous different effects on their hosts' biology. Here we explore how insect endosymbionts might affect the structure and dynamics of insect communities. Using the obligate and facultative symbionts of aphids as an example, we find that there are multiple ways that symbiont prese...

Not the Nice Sparrow

—We began our studies of House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) biparental care in the mid-1990s by applying the classic Margaret Morse Nice field technique of color-banding individuals. Over the ensuing summers, we slowly accumulated quantitative provisioning records for 100 broods, even as we commenced a series of experimental manipulations. Provisioning data showed parental fitness, as expressed ...