Army ants are well known for their destructive raids of other ant colonies. Some known defensive strategies include nest evacuation, modification of nest architecture, blockade of nest entrances using rocks or debris, and direct combat outside the nest. Since army ants highly prefer Pheidole ants as prey in desert habitats, there may be strong selective pressure on Pheidole to evolve defensive ...

With the increased attention and legislation for data-privacy, collaborative machine learning (ML) algorithms are being developed to ensure protection of private data used processing. Federated (FL) is most popular these methods, which provides privacy preservation by facilitating training a shared model without need exchange any with centralized server. Rather, an abstraction in form update se...

The study of stochastic processes can take many forms. Theoretical properties are important to ensure consistent model definition. Statistical inference on unknown parameters is equally important but can be difficult. This is principally because many of the standard assumptions for proving consistency and asymptotic normality of estimators involve independence and homogeneity. In the case where...

Plant life-history strategies associated with resource acquisition and economics (e.g. leaf habit) are thought to be fundamental determinants of the traits and mechanisms that drive herbivore pressure, resource allocation to plant defensive traits, and the simultaneous expression (positive correlations) or trade-offs (negative correlations) between these defensive traits. In particular, it is e...

In this study we present a simple optimization model for the evolution of defensive strategies (tolerance and resistance) of plants against their natural enemies. The model specifically evaluates the consequences of introducing variable costs and benefits of tolerance and resistance and nonlinear cost-and-benefit functions for tolerance and resistance. Incorporating these assumptions, the prese...

Much debate surrounds how prosurvival members of the BCL-2 family repress opening of the BAX/BAK channel to block apoptosis; in this issue Llambi et al. (2011) identify two modes of apoptosis inhibition that exhibit surprisingly different behavior upon repeat proapoptotic challenges by BH3-only proteins.

Security Games employ game theoretical tools to derive resource allocation strategies in security domains. Recent works considered the presence of alarm systems, even suffering various forms of uncertainty, and showed that disregarding alarm signals may lead to arbitrarily bad strategies. The central problem with an alarm system, unexplored in other Security Games, is finding the best strategy ...

This paper examines the short-term battle being conducted by streetlevel drug suppression units in two cities, Minneapolis (MN) and Kansas City (MO). It details features of point-of-sale drug markets that have not been widely explored in the research literature to date, and illuminates an aspect of the crack trade not yet widely discussed: the resilience and adaptability of drug dealers to stre...