Nestlings of many brood parasites are reared together with those of their hosts, but still manage to monopolize a disproportionate share of the food delivered by adult hosts. We hypothesized that: (1) the low levels of host-specific pathogens of such brood parasite nestlings provide them with an advantage in competition for limited food; (2) a higher provisioning rate and the resulting better b...

The coevolutionary process between avian brood parasites and their hosts predicts that low intraclutch variation in egg colour appearance favours egg discrimination of parasite eggs by hosts. Low intraclutch variation would also result in high interclutch variation, which would increase the difficulty of evolution of mimicry by the cuckoo, because many host colour patterns might coexist in the ...

We describe several advanced functionalities of Magpie – a tool that assists users in the interpretation of web resources. Magpie is an extension to Internet Explorer that automatically creates a semantic layer for browsed web pages from a user-selected ontology. Semantic layers are annotations of web pages, with a set of applicable semantic services attached to the annotated items. We argue th...

Tools to understand complex system behaviour are essential for many performance analysis and debugging tasks, yet there are many open research problems in their development. Magpie is a toolchain for automatically extracting a system’s workload under realistic operating conditions. Using low-overhead instrumentation, we monitor the system to record fine-grained events generated by kernel, middl...

This paper presents two various approaches to decreasing effort of Internet users during searching the Internet. The focus is on a particular mapping of a web sub-graph of the nearest surroundings of an actual web page for better orientation and on interpretation of web pages content through the explanation of the meaning of concepts with the aid of the Magpie system. Particularly, we tried to ...

Parasites can have dramatic effects on life-history decisions of hosts such as timing of reproduction, clutch size, and investment in individual offspring, depending on the timing of parasite effects on host fitness. Moreover, parasites may influence the optimum values of important life-history traits such as clutch size and brood size by having different fitness effects for large and for small...

Although important improvements have been achieved in the comprehension of astrophysical jets, several questions remain open, including jet formation, propagation in an external medium and survival to potentially disruptive instabilities [1]. Jets produced in laboratory are scalable to astrophysical conditions. In particular, jets produced by conical wire arrays are especially suitable to study...

Magpie is a suite of tools supporting a ‘zero-cost’ approach to semantic web browsing: it avoids the need for manual annotation by automatically associating an ontology-based semantic layer to web resources. An important aspect of Magpie, which differentiates it from superficially similar hypermedia systems, is that the association between items on a web page and semantic concepts is not merely...

Reproductive success in many avian populations declines throughout the breeding season. Two hypotheses have gained attention to explain such a decline: the ‘‘timing’’ hypothesis proposes that deteriorating food availability causes the decline in reproductive success (causal effect of breeding time), whereas the ‘‘quality’’ hypothesis proposes that individuals of lower phenotypic quality reprodu...