Mating partners often have conflicting interests when copulating. One of the major agents affecting female mating partners is seminal fluid, transferred along with sperm. The role of seminal fluid proteins (SFPs) in reproductive success is well studied in separate-sexed animals but is much less so in simultaneous hermaphrodites. The latter potentially have a unique target to exploit for the spe...

Extrapair fertilizations are an important factor in reproduction of many bird species. It has been suggested that pursuit of extrapair fertilizations provides a selective pressure capable of affecting the "ecological" attributes of some bird species. It is known that in some cases the pursuit of extrapair copulations is motivated by fertility assurance. That is, there are populations in which (...

In the present study, the aphrodisiac properties of the purple corn ( Zea mays) in male rats were analyzed. The aqueous crude extract of purple corn (at 25, 50, and 75 mg/kg) was administered to ( a) copulating male rats and ( b) anesthetized and spinal cord transected male rats. Behavioral parameters of copulatory behavior and parameters of the genital motor pattern of ejaculation previous to ...

Sexual conflict theory predicts an antagonistic coevolution, with each sex evolving adaptations and counter-adaptations to overcome a temporary dominance of the other sex over the control of paternity. Polyandry allows sexual selection to operate after mating has commenced, with male and female interests competing for control of fertilization. There are numerous examples of male control of pate...

The muscarinic receptor antagonist scopolamine was microinjected into either the preoptic area or the lateral ventricle, preceding sexual behavior tests. In Experiment 1 unilateral ventricular injections of scopolamine delayed the initiation of copulation, while unilateral preoptic injections had no effect. In Experiment 2 bilateral injections into the preoptic area produced dose-related decrea...

‎‎The equivalence relation isoclinism partitions the class of all pairs of groups‎ ‎into families‎. ‎In this paper‎, ‎a complete classification of the set of all pairs $(G,G')$ is established‏‎,‎ whenever‎ $G$ is a $p$-group of order at most $p^5‎‏$‎ and ‎$p$ is a prime number greater than 3. Moreover‎, ‎the classification of pairs $(H,H')$ for extra special $p$-groups $H$ is also given.

The Optimized Temporal Decomposition (OTD) technique for Line Spectral Frequencies (LSF) speech envelope representation, under a MMSE criterion, has been shown to be promising for very low bit rate speech coding for storage and broadcast applications. In order to improve perceptual speech quality, a dynamically weighted OTD (DW-OTD) technique is introduced in this work. It extends the OTD by al...

In this paper, we have developed a new general distance measure that not only can be used in a vector quantization (VQ) of the line spectrum frequency (LSF) parameters but perforines well in the LSF traiisfornied domain. The new distance is based on the spectral sensitivity of LSF and their transformed coefficients. In addition, the fix scaling factor is used to decrease the sensitivity of spec...

This paper describes a statistical spectral parameter emphasis technique for HMM-based speech synthesis using mel-scaled line spectral pair (mel-LSP). Spectral parameter emphasis is effective for compensating over-smoothed spectra in HMM-based speech synthesis. However, there is no conventional technique that satisfies such requirements as automatic tuning for different speakers and realtime sy...

A new algorithm for finding line spectral frequencies, LSF, is introduced, based on Laguerre method of root approximation. The method allows to assuredly find all roots one by one without recourse to polynomial deflation, which allows approximation to a high precision. Error bounds can be estimated by approximating from two sides with added margin. An improved variant of Laguerre recursion sche...