This paper investigates the problem of fault detection for uncertain switched fuzzy systems with unmeasurable premise variables. A dissipativity-based fault detection observer is designed. The ...observer order can be adjusted within a certain range. By solving a set of linear matrix inequalities, the sufficient condition can be obtained to ensure that under arbitrary switching signal, the residual dynamic is strictly (Q, S, R)-κ-dissipative. Furthermore, the elaborate H ∞ . performance and the elaborate H_ performance are obtained, which can be treated as expansions of the traditional H ∞ . performance and H_ performance. The parameter uncertainties are decoupled from the residual. Simulation results are presented to verify the proposed techniques.
The underlying goal of this study was to assess the effects of metatalk at elaborate and limited levels of engagement on Iranian L2 learners’ grammatical accuracy in writing. Thirty-four male and ...female students were recruited following the administration of the Quick Oxford Placement Test (QOPT) and then randomly divided into an experimental group with elaborate engagement (n=16) and a comparison one with limited engagement (n=18). Ten narrative tasks were used during the treatment sessions and both groups were asked to write the stories. The initial drafts were reformulated by the teacher. They were then asked to compare the two versions. The experimental group was asked to discuss the reasons for the applied changes while the comparison group only noted the differences. The learners’ sheets were scored and their accuracy was measured drawing on Ellis and Yuan's (2004) accuracy scales. The results revealed that both groups’ grammatical accuracy in writing was enhanced. However, the experimental group outperformed the comparison one since their posttest scores were statistically different. The learners’ language-related episodes were also analyzed, and the qualitative scrutiny brought to surface four patterns of interaction including collaborative, expert-novice, dominant-dominant and dominant-passive. Finally, the current study discusses implications for L2 instructional settings and the use of metatalk as a means to enhance noticing the target forms and expedite their grammatical accuracy and learning processes.
Due to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) epidemic, global economies have suffered an exogenous shock never seen before with a strong economic and psychosocial impact on organizations. Italy, in ...the context of the research, has been severely affected. The economic crisis has mainly affected women. In this scenario, entrepreneurial perceived success (objective and subjective) is influenced by increasingly burdensome job demands that entrepreneurs have to face up. Using the job demand-resources model, the study aims to broaden the knowledge of the determinants of entrepreneurial perceived success in the current emergency moment. In particular, as regards of the demands, alongside the specific entrepreneurial demands (time demands, uncertainty and risk, and responsibility), we also decided to include the negative interface family–work in both directions from-family-to-work (NEGWIF) and from-work-to-family (NEGFIW). Regarding the resources, we considered entrepreneurial self-efficacy (researching, planning, marshaling, implementing people, and implementing financial), proactive and elaborate social strategies (SS), and both directions of the positive interface: from-family-to-work (POSWIF) and from-work-to-family (POSFIW). All participants are women entrepreneurs ( N = 137) who have completed a self-report questionnaire. We explored the associations between demands, resources, and the dimensions of success through hierarchical regressions. As for the demands, time demands, uncertainty and risk, NEGWIF, and NEGFIW negatively influenced the perceived entrepreneurial success. Regarding resources, planning, implementing financial, proactive and elaborate SS positively influenced the perceived entrepreneurial success.
Biologists have long been fascinated by the elaborate courtship displays performed by diverse organisms throughout the animal kingdom. The evolution of courtship behaviour often requires ...specializations of neural, sensory and motor systems. In addition, physically impressive displays may also require optimized metabolic, respiratory and cardiovascular systems to sustain the neuromuscular demands. Hormonal signalling can reach all of these tissues simultaneously to prepare them for use in courtship. Studies of male golden-collared manakins, Manacus vitellinus, a small bird of the Neotropics with a physically intense and noisy courtship display, have uncovered numerous androgen-dependent neuromuscular and metabolic specializations that enable not only the performance of elaborate courtship routines, but also their evolutionary exaggeration. However, physiological specializations for one function can create limits on their use for other purposes. Such trade-offs may influence the way courtship develops but may also provide information used by females for mate choice. We review this body of work with an eye towards expanding our appreciation of the evolution of widespread tissue hormone sensitivity and hormone action as the system through which elaborate courtship behaviours evolve.
•Physiology influences how courtship behaviour evolves.•Innovations in steroid signalling mechanisms can enhance courtship evolution.•Similarly, innovations in muscle physiology can affect courtship evolution.•Intrinsic trade-offs in muscle performance are relevant to this process.
Courtship displays are typically conspicuous, elaborate and composed of concomitant signals occurring in different sensory modalities. Although multimodal signals have received increasing attention ...over the past years, technical issues, in particular the lack of appropriate recording and analytical methods, have long restricted large-scale systematic study of their function. Here, we investigated in detail in 100 male–female dyads whether the multimodal, audiovisual courtship signals of the male ring dove, Streptopelia risoria, are associated with different immediate behavioural responses by the female, and whether such responses depend on the courting individual. We used synchronized high-speed video and audio recordings followed by semiautomatic image- and audio-processing techniques to precisely quantify variation in male courtship and female response. In particular, we investigated the structure of acoustic and visual courtship components, as well as aspects related to multimodal synchronization. We found that the fundamental frequency of male calls, as well as the total courtship duration and the duration of courtship bouts, influenced female tail-quivering behaviour, confirming that this behaviour is a sign of sexual interest in doves. On the other hand, some courtship variables frequently investigated in the literature, such as courtship rate, did not affect any aspect of female response. Additionally, we demonstrated an effect of repeated encounters with an individual of the opposite sex both on male courtship variables and on female sexual response to courtship. Females also responded differently to different males, that is, we found variation in female behavioural response to courtship variables related to identity and courtship effort. Further empirical studies are needed to assess how different male courtship elements influence female behaviour and ultimate mating decisions.
•Courtship is often multimodal and elaborate, yet most studies focus on single traits.•We studied the synchronized vocal-visual courtship of the ring dove.•Spectral auditory features and courtship duration influence female sexual response.•Repeated encounters affect female response and temporal structure of male display.
For the CNN-based density estimation approaches in the field of crowd counting, how to generate a high-quality density map with accurate counting performance and detailed spatial description is still ...an open question. In this paper, to tackle the aforementioned contradiction, we propose an end-to-end trainable architecture called Elaborate Density Estimation Network for Crowd Counting (EDENet), which can gradually generate high-quality density estimation maps based on distributed supervision. Specifically, EDENet is composed of Feature Extraction Network (FEN), Feature Fusion Network (FFN), Double-Head Network (DHN) and Adaptive Density Fusion Network (ADFN). The FEN adopts VGG as the backbone network and employs Spatial Adaptive Pooling (SAP) to extract coarse-grained features. The FFN can effectively fuse contextual information and localization information for enhancing the spatial description ability of fine-grained features. In the DHN, the Density Attention Module (DAM) can provide attention masks of foreground-background, thereby urging the Density Regression Module (DRM) to focus on the pixels around the head annotations to regress density maps with different resolutions. The ADFN constructed on the basis of the adaptive weighting mechanism can directly introduce coarse-grained density representation into high-resolution density maps to strengthen the commonality and dependency among density maps. Extensive experiments on four benchmark crowd datasets (the ShanghaiTech, the UCF-QNRF, the JHU-CRWORD++ and the NWPU-Crowd) indicate that EDENet can achieve state-of-the-art recognition performance and high robustness. Not only that, the density map with the highest Peak Signal to Noise Ratio (PSNR) can be considered to be of high quality.
Developing electrode materials with hierarchically porous structure and high electrochemical stability is crucial for improving the energy density of supercapacitors (SCs). Herein, the NiCoAl layered ...trimetallic hydroxides supported on hollow carbon shells (NCA@HCs LTHs) with various Al doping amounts is synthesized by a simple hydrothermal method. The electrode material with the optimal NCA doping ratio (mass ratio 3:2:0.3) displays a stable layered hydroxides structure and low crystallinity. Additionally, the unique 3D hollow structure not only increases the specific surface area (SSA) but also effectively prevents the agglomeration of LTHs. The synergistic interaction of these two aspects is responsible for the exceptional specific capacity and cycling performance. The optimal N3C2A0.3 @HCs LTHs exhibits a high specific capacitance of 792 C g−1 at 1 A g−1. Moreover, the constructed asymmetric supercapacitor (ASC) achieves a coulombic efficiency of 98% and retains 80% of its capacitance after 12,000 cycles at 5 A g−1. The above results show that the synergistic strategy of Al doping and hollow structure design provides new insights into improving the electrochemical performance of SCs.
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•The construction of NiCoAl-LTHs@mesoporous carbon core-shell hollow nanospheres.•The synergistic strategy of atomic doping and structure design facilitates performance.•The electrode exhibits a high specific capacitance of 792 C g−1 at 1 A g−1.
Courtship displays are behaviours aimed to facilitate attraction and mating with the opposite sex and are very common across the animal kingdom. Most courtship displays are multimodal, meaning that ...they are composed of concomitant signals occurring in different sensory modalities. Although courtship often strongly influences reproductive success, the question of why and how males use multimodal courtship to increase their fitness has not yet received much attention. Very little is known about the role of different components of male courtship and their relative importance for females. Indeed, most of the work on courtship displays have focused on effects on female choice, often neglecting other possible roles. Additionally, a number of scientists have recently stressed the importance of considering the complexity of a display and the interactions between its different components in order to grasp all the information contained in those multimodal signals. Unfortunately, these methods have not yet been extensively adapted in courtship studies. The aim of this study was to review what is currently known about the functional significance of courtship displays, particularly about the role of multimodality in the courtship communication context. Emphasis is placed on those cases where a complete picture of the communication system can only be assessed by taking complexity and interaction between different modalities into account.
•Relationship between GCs and the quality of male sexual traits is mixed.•Mate choice tests consistently show that females favor males with low GCs.•High GC levels can dampen female sexual ...receptivity and the strength of preferences.•Sexual selection may promote diversity in GC regulation.
We review work relating glucocorticoids (GCs), male sexual signals, and mate choice by females to understand the potential for GCs to modulate the expression of sexually selected traits and how sexual selection potentially feeds back on GC regulation. Our review reveals that the relationship between GC concentrations and the quality of male sexual traits is mixed, regardless of whether studies focused on structural traits (e.g., coloration) or behavioral traits (e.g., vocalizations) or were examined in developmental or activational frameworks. In contrast, the few mate choice experiments that have been done consistently show that females prefer males with low GCs, suggesting that mate choice by females favors males that maintain low levels of GCs. We point out, however, that just as sexual selection can drive the evolution of diverse reproductive strategies, it may also promote diversity in GC regulation. We then shift the focus to females where we highlight evidence indicating that stressors or high GCs can dampen female sexual proceptivity and the strength of preferences for male courtship signals. Hence, even in cases where GCs are tightly coupled with male sexual signals, the strength of sexual selection on aspects of GC physiology can vary depending on the endocrine status of females. Studies examining how GCs relate to sexual selection may shed light on how variation in stress physiology, sexual signals, and mate choice are maintained in natural populations and may be important in understanding context-dependent relationships between GC regulation and fitness.
Abstract
The question of the origin of petals has long been debated in the botanical literature. Ranunculales are characterized by a spectacular floral diversity, particularly at the perianth level. ...Recent progress in understanding the genetic bases of floral organ identity suggests a single origin for petals in Ranunculaceae, contrasting with the traditional morphological hypothesis of repeated evolution. However, perianth evolution at the ordinal level remains incompletely understood. Recent advances in the elucidation of phylogenetic relationships in the order now provide a new opportunity to study character evolution with model-based methods. We used ancestral state reconstruction methods that take into account various sources of uncertainty to reconstruct the evolution of floral traits at the scale of Ranunculales using a consensus phylogenetic framework of 144 terminal species representing all families in the order. Ancestrally, Ranunculales probably had three trimerous whorls of perianth organs differentiated into two categories of petaloid organs differing in their shape. Each whorl was further lost or duplicated. Moreover, our results support the hypothesis of a single origin of highly specialized (elaborate) nectariferous petals in Ranunculaceae.
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