Avian obligate brood parasites lay their eggs in nests of host species, which provide all parental care. Brood parasites may be host specialists, if they use one or a few host species, or host generalists, if they parasitize many hosts. Within the latter, strains of host-specific females might coexist. Although females preferentially parasitize one host, they may occasionally successfully paras...

We investigate the scalability of distributed virtual environments (DVEs), which are based on a structured peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay. We are interested in the average network load and routing latency and how they depend on the number of hosts in the DVE. To this end, we study a prototypical DVE consisting of a simple game scenario and a P2P architecture based on Pastry and Scribe as proposed b...

BACKGROUND Traps baited with synthetic human odors have been proposed as suitable technologies for controlling malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases. We investigated the potential benefits of such traps for preventing malaria transmission in Africa and the essential characteristics that they should possess so as to be effective. METHODS AND PRINCIPAL FINDINGS An existing mathematical mode...

The existing fault tolerant models focus on the failure of host. If a host fails, the copies of tasks on this host will fail to finish. At one time instant, at most one host may encounter a failure, that is to say, if the primaries of tasks fail, the backups can always finish successfully before another host fails. Failures can be either transient or permanent, and are independent, affecting on...

This paper illustrates a technique to characterize one-way packet delays. In the spirit of [9] such technique does not depend on external clock synchronization facilities: instead, it computes the relative skew of the two clocks, and uses this information to characterize one-way packet delays. We focus on the applicability of such technique to a network monitoring environment, and perform an ex...

The pathogenic chytrid fungus, Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis (denoted Bd), causes large-scale epizootics in naïve amphibian populations. Intervention strategies to rapidly respond to Bd incursions require sensitive and accurate diagnostic methods. Chytridiomycosis usually is assessed by quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) amplification of amphibian skin swabs. Results based on this m...