scholarly journals The effect of male-male competition and ornament size on mean and variance of courtship intensity towards heterospecific and conspecific females

2015 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 113-131
Author(s):  
Inka Keränen ◽  
Aapo Kahilainen ◽  
Janne S. Kotiaho ◽  
Katja Kuitunen
Keyword(s):  
Reproductive Investment ◽  
Search Costs ◽  
Competitive Environment ◽  
Species Discrimination ◽  
Sexual Ornaments ◽  
Courtship Intensity ◽  
In The Wild ◽  
Mean And Variance ◽  
Calopteryx Splendens

Discrimination between hetero- and conspecifics is the elementary choice an individual performs when searching for potential mates. The level of selectivity and strength of species discrimination is modified by variance in the quality of females, level of the male’s reproductive investment, mate search costs, and the competitive environment. The effect of the competitive environment on both species discrimination and conspecific mate choice has seldom been studied simultaneously. We experimentally manipulated territorial competition ofCalopteryx splendensdamselfly males in the wild, and asked two questions. First, does increased competition influence the territorial males’ responses towards introduced heterospecificC. virgofemales. The effect of the size of the territorial males’ sexual ornaments (wing spot) on their responses towards females was also investigated. Second, does increased competition influence the territorial males’ response towards conspecific females? The effect of the size of the territorial males ornament was again investigated. The mean level of response towards heterospecific females did not change between the control (i.e., no competitors presented) and the competition (i.e., two competitors presented) treatments, but the variance of responses towards heterospecifics was greater in the competition treatment. The territorial males’ responses towards conspecific females did not change between control and competition treatments. These results indicate individual differences in the behavior of males towards heterospecifics when territorial competition was experienced. The observed pattern of discrimination might be adaptive when overall reproductive success is considered.

Using International Trade Data for Evaluating the Product Specific Competitiveness and Supplied Product Quality of Countries: A Successful Example of Applied Theory

2006 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 229 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Cleff
Keyword(s):  
Product Quality ◽  
Longitudinal Section ◽  
Search Costs ◽  
Applied Theory ◽  
Present Level ◽  
Combined System ◽  
Trade Data ◽  
Simple Regression ◽  
Selection Of

This paper proposes a simple regression-based method for reducing the complexity of decisions in the international procurement process. Based on foreign trade data, the method uses indicators, which allow a product specific cross-section and longitudinal-section valuation of the international competitiveness and the supplied product quality of all potential supplier countries. The method thus provides a variety of information for procurement departments, including the present level and the dynamic of competitiveness and product quality for the potential supplier countries within every product group of the international product nomenclature (Combined System and the Harmonised System). Potential supplier countries --the companies of which have proven to be particularly competitive in the different product quality stages-- are identified. This pre-selection of countries enables the companies to limit their search for potential suppliers to the selected supplier countries. High search costs are subsequently reduced and trend prognoses can be constructed.

Statistical analysis of nematode counts from interlaboratory proficiency tests

Nematology ◽  
2014 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-243 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wim Van Den Berg ◽  
Olaf Hartsema ◽  
Loes J.M.F. Den Nijs
Keyword(s):  
Statistical Analysis ◽  
Proficiency Test ◽  
Meta Analysis ◽  
Proficiency Tests ◽  
Free Living ◽  
Accuracy And Precision ◽  
Mean And Variance ◽  
The Mean ◽  
Interaction Variance

A series of proficiency tests on potato cyst nematode (PCN; ) and free-living stages of Meloidogyne and Pratylenchus () were investigated to determine the accuracy and precision of the nematode counts and to gain insights into possible trends and potential improvements. In each test, each participating laboratory received ten samples of soil collected from naturally infested fields and well mixed before distribution. The variance between the counts from the ten samples, estimated per test and laboratory, was constant for PCN cysts and free-living stages of Meloidogyne spp. and Pratylenchus spp. during the period monitored. However, during the initial years, the variance between the samples showed a downward trend for PCN living juveniles. The variance between the laboratories, estimated per test, was constant for PCN cysts over the period 1994-2010. For PCN living juveniles the variance between laboratory means declined from 1994-2000 and from 2000 it was more or less constant, which coincided with the introduction of a well-described new methodology. For Meloidogyne spp. and Pratylenchus spp., from 1998-2005 the variance between laboratory means was more or less constant or increased. From 2006, all participating laboratories incubated the organic matter and the variance between the laboratories was stable and below the levels observed during 2003-2005. After discarding data from initial years with unstable variances of the nematode counts, a meta-analysis was carried out on the remaining data using HGLMs to model the mean and variance of the counts simultaneously. The within-laboratory variance for the ten samples and the interaction variance of test and laboratory were estimated and combined to percentage coefficient of variation (%CV) per laboratory. For PCN cysts, %CV per laboratory ranged from 12.6 to 41.6 and for PCN juveniles in sandy soil from 24.4 to 67.4 and in loamy soil from 37.9 to 102.0. For Meloidogyne spp., %CV ranged from 53.2 to 84.4 and for Pratylenchus spp. from 24.3 to 90.6. The quality of a proficiency test is largely defined by random distribution of the nematodes over the samples allocated, statistical analysis of the data and communication of the results to participating laboratories. This study provides insights into the accuracy and precision at laboratories in recent years and the effect of concerted actions during the period in which the proficiency tests were conducted.

scholarly journals Challenges and opportunities for monitoring wild Nile crocodiles with scute mark-recapture photography

Koedoe ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 60 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Bernard W.T. Coetzee ◽  
Sam M. Ferreira ◽  
Kristine Maciejewski
Keyword(s):  
Conservation Status ◽  
Field Conditions ◽  
High Turnover ◽  
Mark Recapture ◽  
Non Invasive ◽  
Open Population ◽  
Challenges And Opportunities ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
In The Wild

The global conservation status of Nile crocodiles (Crocodylus niloticus) was last assessed in 1996. The species presents particular difficulty in monitoring because it can be cryptic, require expertise to handle, and caudal tail tags and transmitters are often lost. Some studies advocate mark-recapture techniques based on photograph identification of the unique scute markings of crocodile tails as a non-invasive means of monitoring their populations. Researchers developed this method with crocodiles in captivity. In this study, we test the technique under field conditions by monitoring crocodiles from 2015 to 2017 in the Sunset Dam in the Kruger National Park. Using a Cormack-Jolly-Seber open population model, we found that the dam may host 15–30 individuals, but that there is a high turnover of individuals and much uncertainty in model outputs. The dam’s population thus has high rates of immigration and emigration. The method proved challenging under field conditions, as there was bias in identifying scute markings consistently. The efficient use of the method requires an exceptional quality of photographic equipment. Animal crypsis, however, remains an issue. In this study, we discuss how to improve the mark-recapture photography methodology, especially to adapt the technique for citizen science initiatives.Conservation implications: Using scute mark-recapture photography presents challenges under field conditions. These challenges require innovative, practical and analytical solutions to successfully use the technique before monitoring programmes, aimed at ensuring the persistence of crocodiles in the wild, can be implemented.

scholarly journals THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CUSTOMER SATISFACTION AND INTERNAL SERVICE QUALITY FROM AN INTERNAL MARKETING PERSPECTIVE AND AN APPLICATION IN THE BANKING SECTOR

2016 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-178
Author(s):  
Özlen Onurlu ◽  
Suna Karataş
Keyword(s):  
Customer Satisfaction ◽  
Competitive Advantage ◽  
Employee Satisfaction ◽  
Banking Sector ◽  
Internal Marketing ◽  
Competitive Environment ◽  
Long Run ◽  
Marketing Activities ◽  
The Relationship

In a highly competitive environment, the meeting of customer demands and expectations in an effective way is highly crucial for companies that want to have a competitive advantage and to keep on existing in the long run. The main objective of companies is making profit in a sustainable way and this is possible by assuring customer satisfaction. The quality of the services that companies offer their customers is closely related with the performance of the employees. This has made it necessary that marketing activities for employee satisfaction be developed prior to customer satisfaction. Feeling more motivated, workers start working more eagerly as a result of these marketing activities which are called internal marketing. So, companies make their profitability sustainable by means of keeping their customers satisfied and loyal. The aim of this paper is to investigate the relationship between internal marketing activities applied to employees and employee motivations.

scholarly journals Automating The Improvement Of Service Quality: The TELCO Case

2011 ◽  
Vol 7 (6) ◽  
pp. 81-90
Author(s):  
Elad Harison ◽  
Ofer Barkai
Keyword(s):  
Service Providers ◽  
Service Systems ◽  
Competitive Environment ◽  
Preventive Service ◽  
Automated Systems ◽  
Customer Complaints ◽  
Service Failures ◽  
Broad Variety

The case under discussion presents a new and innovative framework for implementing preventive service systems that detect potential service malfunctions, attempt to automatically prevent them and notify customers about the results of these operations. Such automated systems may proactively avert service malfunctions and reduce the volume of customer complaints due to service outages. The presented framework is based on four major stages: continuous detection of service delivery infrastructure and equipment, prevention of identified service failures, notification of customers about service failures and follow-up activities. Telco is a major Israeli telecommunications operator that implemented the preventive service methodology and systems to improve the quality of its services to the satisfaction of its largest customers. The model presented in this paper can be utilized by a broad variety of firms and service providers as means for improving the quality of their services, the satisfaction and the loyalty of customers and the ability to retain them for longer periods in an increasingly competitive environment.

Service Quality and Perceived Value of Cloud Computing-Based Service Encounters

2019 ◽  
pp. 234-247
Author(s):  
Eges Egedigwe
Keyword(s):  
Cloud Computing ◽  
Community Colleges ◽  
Service Quality ◽  
Competitive Environment ◽  
Service Encounters ◽  
Institutional Level ◽  
Computing Services ◽  
Key Stakeholders ◽  
Cloud Computing Services

Cloud computing-based technology is becoming increasingly popular as a way to deliver quality education to community colleges, universities, and other organizations. At the same time, compared with other industries, colleges have been slow on implementing and sustaining cloud computing services on an institutional level because of budget constraints facing many large community colleges, in addition to other obstacles. Faced with this challenge, key stakeholders are increasingly realizing the need to focus on service quality as a measure to improve their competitive position in today's highly competitive environment. Considering the amount of study done with cloud computing in education, very little has been done in examining the needs and the satisfactions of the instructor customer. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the expectations and perceptions of instructors' usage of cloud computing based technology on overall quality of service (QoS) in their respective institutions of higher education.

Churn Prediction in Internet Service Provider Companies

2016 ◽  
pp. 265-281
Author(s):  
İlayda Ülkü ◽  
Mehmet Yahya Durak ◽  
Fadime Üney-Yüksektepe
Keyword(s):  
Service Providers ◽  
Real Data ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Competitive Environment ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Internet Service ◽  
Important Place ◽  
Churn Management ◽  
Basic Standard

As a basic standard of life, internet connects millions of computers in a global network. People use, participate, or access the internet with the help of internet service providers (ISPs). To have better quality of connection, customers are prone to change their ISPs. In the competitive environment, ISPs endeavor to prevent losing their customers which are referred as churn. Thus, churn management takes an important place for ISPs. To investigate customer loyalty status, behavior, and information of the churn possibility in Turkey, a questionnaire is implemented. By using a real data obtained from a survey, promising and applicable results are obtained to predict the churn behavior of ISP customers in Turkey. As an extension of the study, the questionnaire will be applied for a larger population to find accurate results about churn situations. This study will help ISP companies to determine the required advertising campaigns for the customers.

scholarly journals Sensor Fusion-Based Cooperative Trail Following for Autonomous Multi-Robot System

Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 823 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mingyang Geng ◽  
Shuqi Liu ◽  
Zhaoxia Wu
Keyword(s):  
Sensor Fusion ◽  
Sensor Data ◽  
Great Success ◽  
Trail Following ◽  
Robust Performance ◽  
Robot System ◽  
Threshold Mechanism ◽  
Local View ◽  
In The Wild

Autonomously following a man-made trail in the wild is a challenging problem for robotic systems. Recently, deep learning-based approaches have cast the trail following problem as an image classification task and have achieved great success in the vision-based trail-following problem. However, the existing research only focuses on the trail-following task with a single-robot system. In contrast, many robotic tasks in reality, such as search and rescue, are conducted by a group of robots. While these robots are grouped to move in the wild, they can cooperate to lead to a more robust performance and perform the trail-following task in a better manner. Concretely, each robot can periodically exchange the vision data with other robots and make decisions based both on its local view and the information from others. This paper proposes a sensor fusion-based cooperative trail-following method, which enables a group of robots to implement the trail-following task by fusing the sensor data of each robot. Our method allows each robot to face the same direction from different altitudes to fuse the vision data feature on the collective level and then take action respectively. Besides, considering the quality of service requirement of the robotic software, our method limits the condition to implementing the sensor data fusion process by using the “threshold” mechanism. Qualitative and quantitative experiments on the real-world dataset have shown that our method can significantly promote the recognition accuracy and lead to a more robust performance compared with the single-robot system.

Hitting-Time Densities of a Two-Dimensional Markov Process

1992 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 561-580
Author(s):  
C. H. Hesse
Keyword(s):  
Global Analysis ◽  
First Passage Time ◽  
Type Equation ◽  
Passage Time ◽  
Two Dimensional ◽  
First Passage ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Laplace Transform ◽  
Mean And Variance

This paper deals with the two-dimensional stochastic process (X(t), V(t)) where dX(t) = V(t)dt, V(t) = W(t) + ν for some constant ν and W(t) is a one-dimensional Wiener process with zero mean and variance parameter σ2= 1. We are interested in the first-passage time of (X(t), V(t)) to the plane X = 0 for a process starting from (X(0) = −x, V(0) = ν) with x > 0. The partial differential equation for the Laplace transform of the first-passage time density is transformed into a Schrödinger-type equation and, using methods of global analysis, such as the method of dominant balance, an approximation to the first-passage density is obtained. In a series of simulations, the quality of this approximation is checked. Over a wide range of x and ν it is found to perform well, globally in t. Some applications are mentioned.

scholarly journals Shy birds play it safe: personality in captivity predicts risk responsiveness during reproduction in the wild

2014 ◽  
Vol 10 (5) ◽  
pp. 20140178 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ella F. Cole ◽  
John L. Quinn
Keyword(s):  
Life History ◽  
Reproductive Investment ◽  
Parus Major ◽  
Great Tit ◽  
Personality Types ◽  
Risk Averse ◽  
Trial Period ◽  
Life History Variation ◽  
In Captivity ◽  
In The Wild

Despite a growing body of evidence linking personality to life-history variation and fitness, the behavioural mechanisms underlying these relationships remain poorly understood. One mechanism thought to play a key role is how individuals respond to risk. Relatively reactive and proactive (or shy and bold) personality types are expected to differ in how they manage the inherent trade-off between productivity and survival, with bold individuals being more risk-prone with lower survival probability, and shy individuals adopting a more risk-averse strategy. In the great tit ( Parus major ), the shy–bold personality axis has been well characterized in captivity and linked to fitness. Here, we tested whether ‘exploration behaviour’, a captive assay of the shy–bold axis, can predict risk responsiveness during reproduction in wild great tits. Relatively slow-exploring (shy) females took longer than fast-exploring (bold) birds to resume incubation after a novel object, representing an unknown threat, was attached to their nest-box, with some shy individuals not returning within the 40 min trial period. Risk responsiveness was consistent within individuals over days. These findings provide rare, field-based experimental evidence that shy individuals prioritize survival over reproductive investment, supporting the hypothesis that personality reflects life-history variation through links with risk responsiveness.

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