7,279 research outputs found
An economic impact study and analysis of the economies of Gibraltar and the Campo de Gibraltar
Circular 87
High rates of female breeding success and offspring survival are
the two major factors in productivity of any commercial livestock
industry. To im prove breeding success and offspring survival, the
herd m anager will establish selection criteria and choose which
males and females will breed. The genetics or characteristics of future
animals will reflect their parentage.
Selection pressure is evident in both wild and captive populations
of herbivores. Predators, environment, and human harvest
strategies are a few forces which influence the characteristics of freeranging
populations of reindeer, caribou, moose, wapiti, etc. In
livestock production systems, herd managers often breed for specific
characteristics such as larger body size, high birth and growth rates,
leanness, etc. A single color or combination of colors has been
another characteristic often selected by purebred cattle producers as
well as reindeer herders
Relative Entropy in Biological Systems
In this paper we review various information-theoretic characterizations of
the approach to equilibrium in biological systems. The replicator equation,
evolutionary game theory, Markov processes and chemical reaction networks all
describe the dynamics of a population or probability distribution. Under
suitable assumptions, the distribution will approach an equilibrium with the
passage of time. Relative entropy - that is, the Kullback--Leibler divergence,
or various generalizations of this - provides a quantitative measure of how far
from equilibrium the system is. We explain various theorems that give
conditions under which relative entropy is nonincreasing. In biochemical
applications these results can be seen as versions of the Second Law of
Thermodynamics, stating that free energy can never increase with the passage of
time. In ecological applications, they make precise the notion that a
population gains information from its environment as it approaches equilibrium.Comment: 20 page
Network Models
Networks can be combined in various ways, such as overlaying one on top of
another or setting two side by side. We introduce "network models" to encode
these ways of combining networks. Different network models describe different
kinds of networks. We show that each network model gives rise to an operad,
whose operations are ways of assembling a network of the given kind from
smaller parts. Such operads, and their algebras, can serve as tools for
designing networks. Technically, a network model is a lax symmetric monoidal
functor from the free symmetric monoidal category on some set to
, and the construction of the corresponding operad proceeds via a
symmetric monoidal version of the Grothendieck construction.Comment: 46 page
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