In hot pursuit : fluctuating mating system and sexual selection in sand lizards

A changing climate is expected to have profound effects on many aspects of ectotherm biology. We report on a decade-long study of free-ranging sand lizards (Lacerta agilis), exposed to an increasing mean mating season temperature and with known operational sex ratios. We assessed year-to-year variation in sexual selection on body size and postcopulatory sperm competition and cryptic female choice. Higher temperature was not linked to strength of sexual selection on body mass, but operational sex ratio (more males) did increase the strength of sexual selection on body size. Elevated temperature increased mating rate and number of sires per clutch with positive effects on offspring fitness. In years when the “quality” of a female's partners was more variable (in standard errors of a male sexual ornament), clutches showed less multiple paternity. This agrees with prior laboratory trials in which females exercised stronger cryptic female choice when male quality varied more. An increased number of sires contributing to within-clutch paternity decreased the risk of having malformed offspring. Ultimately, such variation may contribute to highly dynamic and shifting selection mosaics in the wild, with potential implications for the evolutionary ecology of mating systems and population responses to rapidly changing environmental conditions.

Do cyclic changes in women's face preferences target cues to long-term health?

A shift to prefer more masculine male faces when conception risk is high may be an adaptation for finding mates with good disease resistance. We investigated whether preferences for other facial cues to long-term health also increase when conception is likely. We examined preferences for the faces of men with good health histories and for facial averageness and symmetry, two putative indicators of health during development. Preferences were tested at two points in the menstrual cycle that differed maximally in conception risk. No cyclic changes in preferences were found. We consider implications for the sexual selection of variation in preferences across the menstrual cycle.

A protocol for a discrete choice experiment: understanding preferences of patients with cancer towards their cancer care across metropolitan and rural regions in Australia.

Medical decision-making in oncology is a complicated process and to date there are few studies examining how patients with cancer make choices with respect to different features of their care. It is also unknown whether patient choices vary by geographical location and how location could account for observed rural and metropolitan cancer differences. This paper describes an ongoing study that aims to (1) examine patient and healthcare-related factors that influence choices of patients with cancer; (2) measure and quantify preferences of patients with cancer towards cancer care using a discrete choice experiment (DCE) and (3) explore preference heterogeneity between metropolitan and rural locations.

Averaging aggregation functions for preferences expressed as Pythagorean membership grades and fuzzy orthopairs

Rather than denoting fuzzy membership with a single value, orthopairs such as Atanassov's intuitionistic membership and non-membership pairs allow the incorporation of uncertainty, as well as positive and negative aspects when providing evaluations in fuzzy decision making problems. Such representations, along with interval-valued fuzzy values and the recently introduced Pythagorean membership grades, present particular challenges when it comes to defining orders and constructing aggregation functions that behave consistently when summarizing evaluations over multiple criteria or experts. In this paper we consider the aggregation of pairwise preferences denoted by membership and non-membership pairs. We look at how mappings from the space of Atanassov orthopairs to more general classes of fuzzy orthopairs can be used to help define averaging aggregation functions in these new settings. In particular, we focus on how the notion of 'averaging' should be treated in the case of Yager's Pythagorean membership grades and how to ensure that such functions produce outputs consistent with the case of ordinary fuzzy membership degrees.

Mating success depends on rearing substrate in cactophilic Drosophila

Drosophila buzzatii and D. koepferae coexist in the arid lands of southern South America and exploit different types of cactus as breeding hosts. The former prefers to lay eggs on the rotting pads of prickly pears (genus Opuntia) whereas D. koepferae exhibits greater acceptance for columnar cacti (e. g., Echinopsis terschekii). Here, we demonstrate that the rearing cacti affect male mating success, flies reared in each species' preferred host exhibited enhanced mating success than those raised in secondary hosts. Opuntia sulphurea medium endows D. buzzatii males with greater mating ability while D. koepferae males perform better when flies develop in Echinopsis terschekii. These effects are not mediated through body size, even in D. buzzatii whose body size happens to be affected by the rearing cacti. This scenario, which is consistent with the evolution of host specialization and speciation through sensory drive, emphasizes the importance of habitat isolation in the coexistence of these cactophilic Drosophila. © 2011 Springer Science+Business Media B.V.

Discovering implicit criteria preferences reflected in tourism journal ranking lists using the Choquet Integral

Variations between journal rankings may cause confusion. As such, prior attempts were made to compare and evaluate journal ranking criteria for obtaining insightful knowledge on how different research communities have ranked journals. However, existing approaches are unable to model the journal ranking process closely enough as they are incapable of considering the relationship between multiple criteria simultaneously. In this paper, we address the challenges by introducing the Choquet Integral (CI) for evaluating journal ranking criteria. The new approach is able to account for interactions between criteria in relation to overall ranking score, using a fuzzy measure in its computation. Its properties, the Shapley value and the Interaction index, allow for good representations of importance and interactions between criteria. We demonstrate the efficiency of the CI through a case study of journal ranking lists in tourism and service journals.

Modeling dual role preferences for trust-aware recommendation

Unlike in general recommendation scenarios where a user has only a single role, users in trust rating network, e.g. Epinions, are associated with two different roles simultaneously: as a truster and as a trustee. With different roles, users can show distinct preferences for rating items, which the previous approaches do not involve. Moreover, based on explicit single links between two users, existing methods can not capture the implicit correlation between two users who are similar but not socially connected. In this paper, we propose to learn dual role preferences (truster/trustee-specific preferences) for trust-aware recommendation by modeling explicit interactions (e.g., rating and trust) and implicit interactions. In particular, local links structure of trust network are exploited as two regularization terms to capture the implicit user correlation, in terms of truster/trustee-specific preferences. Using a real-world and open dataset, we conduct a comprehensive experimental study to investigate the performance of the proposed model, RoRec. The results show that RoRec outperforms other trust-aware recommendation approaches, in terms of prediction accuracy. Copyright 2014 ACM.

Parents' food choice motives and their associations with children's food preferences.

The objective was to investigate parents' motives for selecting foods for their children and the associations between these motives and children's food preferences.