Research on individual trait variation has gained much attention because of its implication for ecosystem functions and community ecology. The effect of individual variation on population and community abundance (number of individuals) variation remains scarcely tested. Using two established ecological scaling laws (Taylor's law and abundance-size relationship), we derived a new scaling relatio...

A well known problem in automatic speech recognition (ASR) is robustness against the variability of speech between speakers. There are several ways to normalise different speakers; one of them is to deal with the problem of regional variation. In this paper we discuss the problem of whether moderate regional variants of German in uence the automatic speech recognition process and whether there ...

ly large by rule, independent of specific niches and behaviors – we struggled to account for it in terms of ‘developmental constraints’ and ‘spandrels’. Now, we attempt to understand the conserved pattern of allometric scaling as a substrate for ‘evolvability’. That is, we investigate what features such a conserved plan might afford for graceful scaling and facilitated variability (that is, gen...

Size effects at initial yield (prior to stage II) of idealized micron-sized specimens are modeled within a continuum model of plasticity. Two different aspects are considered: specification of a density of dislocation sources that represent the emission of dislocation dipoles, and the presence of an initial, spatially inhomogeneous excess dislocation content. Discreteness of the source distribu...

The European corn borer, Ostrinia nubilalis (Hübner) (Lepidoptera: Crambidae), is a widely distributed and serious economic pest to corn production in the U.S. Genetic variability of O. nubilalis was studied in 18 sub-populations in the upper Midwestern United States using amplified fragment length polymorphism. The relatively low GST values indicate that more variation exists within population...

We investigated how talker variability impacts novel phonological pattern learning in 4and 11-month-olds. Both age groups were better able to discriminate between legal and illegal phonotactic strings after exposure to multiple talkers than a single talker. It is argued that these data may be best accounted for by hybrid models including linguistic representations that abstract from talker iden...