This paper introduces two new demographic parameters, the entropy and the reproductive potential of a population. The entropy of a population measures the variability of the contribution of the different age classes to the stationary age distribution. The reproductive potential measures the mean of the contribution of the different age classes to the growth rate. Using a relation between these ...

Additive genetic variance in natural populations is commonly estimated using mixed models, in which the covariance of the genetic effects is modeled by a genetic similarity matrix derived from a dense set of markers. An important but usually implicit assumption is that the presence of any nonadditive genetic effect increases only the residual variance and does not affect estimates of additive g...

Uncultured microorganisms comprise the majority of the planet's biological diversity. Microorganisms represent two of the three domains of life and contain vast diversity that is the product of an estimated 3.8 billion years of evolution. In many environments, as many as 99% of the microorganisms cannot be cultured by standard techniques, and the uncultured fraction includes diverse organisms t...

We examined how dietary, social, and genetic factors affect individual size and caste in the Florida harvester ant Pogonomyrmex badius, which has three discrete female castes. The diet that a larva consumed, as indicated by delta(13)C, delta(15)N, and C:N, varied with caste. Both N content and estimated trophic position of dietary input was higher for major than for minor workers and was highes...

Secular variation in the heritability of educational attainment are proposed to be due to the implementation of more egalitarian educational policies leading to increased equality in educational opportunities in the second part of the 20th century. The action of effect is hypothesized to be a decrease of shared environmental (e.g., family socioeconomic status or parents' education) influences o...

We prove that the family of functionals (Iδ) defined by Iδ(g) = ∫∫ RN×RN |g(x)−g(y)|>δ δ |x− y|N+p dx dy, ∀ g ∈ L(R ), for p ≥ 1 and δ > 0, Γ-converges in L(R ), as δ goes to 0, when p ≥ 1. Hereafter | | denotes the Euclidean norm of R . We also introduce a characterization for BV functions which has some advantages in comparison with the classic one based on the notion of essential variation o...

For the nite volume method applied to scalar hyperbolic conservation law in two space dimensions, the uniform BV estimate for an approximate solution is not available on unstructured grids. Therefore the convergence proofs are based on methods which needs less regularity, e.g. on the Young measure theory. In this contribution we discuss the so-called ((t)-condition which serves as a suitable re...

When the random intersection graph G(n,m, p) proposed by Karoński, Scheinerman, and Singer-Cohen in [8] is compared with the independent-edge G(n, p), the evolutions are different under some values of m and equivalent under others. In particular, when m = nα and α > 6, the total variation distance between the graph random variables has limit 0.