Parent-offspring conflict (POC) theory is an interesting conceptual framework for understanding the dynamics of parental care. However, this theory is not easy to test empirically, as exact measures of parental investment in an experimental set-up are difficult to obtain. We have used free-ranging dogs Canis familiaris in India, to study POC in the context of extended parental care. We observed...

BACKGROUND It remains unclear whether the association between low birth weight and insulin resistance in adulthood has its origin in utero or whether it develops later in life depending on predisposition and exogenous factors. METHODS AND RESULTS Total glycosylated hemoglobin (TGH) was quantified at delivery in 1295 mother/child pairs serving as a surrogate of maternal and fetal glycemia. Mul...

Introduction. Asthma is the commonest chronic condition of children. Diagnosis of this condition remains difficult. Many surrogate markers are used, such as documenting evidence of atopy. Method. A random sample of asthmatic children and their mothers attending the Children's Chest and Allergy Clinic at Steve Biko Academic Hospital were enrolled. Children were classified as having atopic or non...

This paper presents a discriminating approach to detecting the existence of underlying determinism in speech phonemes using the surrogate data method. The discrimination is made using a statistical measurement of neighboring trajectory directions. This approach is experimentally verified with both deterministic and stochastic time series and then applied to speech phonemes from the TIMIT databa...

Ethnographic studies in West Africa show that the practice of sending children away to be raised by relatives and nonrelatives is widespread among many ethnic groups. This paper is an attempt to explore the demographic relevance of the practice. The fostering information is obtained from two sources: the responses given by women to the question on children away from home, and by linking all chi...

We introduce a new correlation-based measure of spike timing reliability. Unlike other measures, it does not require the definition of a posteriori "events". It relies on only one parameter, which relates to the timescale of spike timing precision. We test the measure on surrogate data sets with varying amounts of spike time jitter, and missing or additional spikes, and compare it with a widely...

Directives given in advance of need and substituted consent cases include: the New York trial court that denied the request of a patient's son for an order revoking the health care proxy his mother had given to his sister, the tape-recorded telephone conversation between the son and his mother was ruled to be insufficient evidence of the mother's desire to revoke the proxy, the mother was not ...

The natural and surrogate key architectures are two competing approaches to specifying keys in relational databases. We analyze the performance of these approaches with respect to the update complexity and the query data and expression complexity. Our results provide new insights into the advantages and disadvantages of both approaches.