Ecological intensification in croplands aims to enhance biodiversity-based ecosystem services, helping increase yield while reducing agricultural environmental impacts. Identifying ecological tools of wide applicability and easily implemented by farmers is, therefore, an imperative. Here, we verify the efficiency provisioning artificial nest boxes for insectivorous birds reinforce pest biologic...

The performance of a food-storing species, the marsh tit tParue palustris), was compared with that of a nonstorer, the blue tit (P. caeruleusi, in a spatial memory task in which birds had to return to a site where they had previously been allowed to eat part of a piece ofpeanut. No differences were found between species' overall performance, but increasing retention interval from 1 min to 24 h ...

Peer-to-peer systems, in which participants pool their resources to accomplish their goals, have become ubiquitous. Since rational peers engage in strategic behavior, much past work has examined the design of mechanisms that incentivize peers to provide resources. The predominant design paradigm to date has been tit-for-tat, in which each peer benefits from every interaction. In this paper, we ...

We characterize the class of symmetric two-player games in which tit-for-tat cannot be beaten even by very sophisticated opponents in a repeated game. It turns out to be the class of exact potential games. More generally, there is a class of simple imitation rules that includes tit-for-tat but also imitate-the-best and imitate-if-better. Every decision rule in this class is essentially unbeatab...

The paper comparatively analyzes the modification of laudatory prayer “Rejoice, Mary!” in poems by V. Vovk and P. Tychyna. comparison helps to reveal peculiarities authors’ styles modifications makes it possible see deep unity emigrational continental literature. Vira has its sources akathist Mother God. In poem “Rejoice!”, poetess retains general structure akathist, modifying some details: she...

The impact of climatic changes on life cycles by re-scheduling the timing of reproduction is an important topic in studies of biodiversity. Global warming causes and will probably cause in the future not only raising temperatures but also an increasing frequency of extreme weather events. In 2013, the winter in central and north Europe ended late, with low temperatures and long-retained snow co...