BACKGROUND AND AIMS Forest tree saplings that grow in the understorey undergo frequent changes in their light environment to which they must adapt to ensure their survival and growth. Crown architecture, which plays a critical role in light capture and mechanical stability, is a major component of sapling adaptation to canopy disturbance. Shade-adapted saplings typically have plagiotropic stems...

A key challenge in ecology is to define species' niches on the basis of functional traits. Size and shape are important determinants of a species' niche but their causal role is often difficult to interpret. For endotherms, size and shape define the thermal niche through their interaction with core temperature, insulation, and environmental conditions, determining the thermoneutral zone (TNZ) w...

Corrective and conditioning exercises accomplish two entirely different purposes, yet they are frequently confused. Corrective exercises are given solely for the purpose of eradicating a postural defect and thereby increasing efficiency, while conditioning exercises aim at the increase of strength and endurance. No correction is necessarily accomplished but any defects present may be either imp...

In hominoids, the broad thorax has been assumed to contribute to their dorsal scapular position. However, the dorsoventral diameter of their cranial thorax was found in one study to be longer in hominoids. There are insufficient data on thoracic shape to explain the relationship between broad thorax and dorsal scapular position. The current study presents data on multilevel cross-sectional shap...

Manifestly covariant formalism for Bargmann-Wigner fields is developed. It is shown that there exists some freedom in the choice of the form of the Bargmann-Wigner scalar product: The general product depends implicitly on a family of world-vectors. The standard choice of the product corresponds to timelike and equal vectors which define a “time” direction. The generalized form shows that formul...

Architecting dependable systems is a daunting task since it requires trade-offs among attributes such as reliability with a precisely computed, ordinal value and attributes such as security whose value is neither precisely computed nor ordinal. Quality attribute driven architecture design [1] techniques rely on models of the attributes that provide values that can be compared and ranked. Qualit...

We discuss two-sample global permutation tests for sets of multivariate ordinal data in possibly high-dimensional setups, motivated by the analysis of data collected by means of the World Health Organisation’s International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health. The tests do not require any modelling of the multivariate dependence structure. Specifically, we consider testing for ...

Synodontis nigriventris is a surface-feeding facultative air-breather that swims inverted with its zoological ventral side towards the water surface. Their near-surface drag is about double the deeply submerged drag (due to wave drag) and roughly twice the sum of frictional and pressure drags. For streamlined technical bodies, values of wave drag augmentation near the surface may be five times ...

We introduce several notions of potentials for mechanism design problems with interdependent values, and relate them to implementation in ex-post equilibrium. Whereas ex-post implementation is closely linked to the ordinal concept of best-alternative potentials, the celebrated Vickrey-Clarke-Groves mechanism corresponds to the stronger notion of a cardinal potential: agents agree not only on th...

Previous observations suggest that females utilize a more erect initial landing posture than males with sex differences in landing posture possibly related to sex-specific energy absorption (EA) strategies. However, sex-specific EA strategies have only been observed when accompanied by sex differences in initial landing posture. This study (a) investigated the potential existence of sex-specifi...