Edinburgh Napier University

About: Edinburgh Napier University is a education organization based out in Edinburgh, United Kingdom. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Context (language use). The organization has 2665 authors who have published 6859 publications receiving 175272 citations.

Who cares? Individual contributions to pup care by breeders vs non-breeders in the cooperatively breeding banded mongoose (Mungos mungo)

Abstract: Knowledge of the investment rules adopted by breeders and non-breeders, and the factors that affect them, is essential to understanding cooperative breeding as part of a life-history tactic. Although the factors that affect relative contributions to care of young have been studied in some cooperative bird species, there is little data on mammals, making coherent generalisations within mammals and across taxa difficult. In this study, we investigate individual contributions to pup escorting, a strong predictor of offspring provisioning, in the banded mongoose (Mungos mungo), a cooperatively breeding mammal in which reproductive skew is low. Contributions by those under a year old (which virtually never breed) increased with age and body weight but were generally low. Among older age classes (yearlings and adults), individuals that had not bred in the current litter generally contributed less to escorting than those that had bred (with the exception of yearling males). In addition, females that did not breed reduced their investment if they were heavy presumably because such females are more likely to breed in the following event and benefit from saving resources for this. The generally greater contributions by breeders in banded mongooses contrast with the recent findings in meerkats (Suricata suricatta), another obligatorily cooperative mongoose with similar group size but wherein reproductive skew is high. Our results suggest that relative contributions by breeders vs non-breeders are not dependent on group size but on the ratio of breeders to carers and the probability that non-breeders will breed in the near future.

Hybrid Population-Based Algorithms for the Bi-Objective Quadratic Assignment Problem

Abstract: We present variants of an ant colony optimization (MO-ACO) algorithm and of an evolutionary algorithm (SPEA2) for tackling multi-objective combinatorial optimization problems, hybridized with an iterative improvement algorithm and the robust tabu search algorithm. The performance of the resulting hybrid stochastic local search (SLS) algorithms is experimentally investigated for the bi-objective quadratic assignment problem (bQAP) and compared against repeated applications of the underlying local search algorithms for several scalarizations. The experiments consider structured and unstructured bQAP instances with various degrees of correlation between the flow matrices. We do a systematic experimental analysis of the algorithms using outperformance relations and the attainment functions methodology to asses differences in the performance of the algorithms. The experimental results show the usefulness of the hybrid algorithms if the available computation time is not too limited and identify SPEA2 hybridized with very short tabu search runs as the most promising variant.

Telemonitoring-based service redesign for the management of uncontrolled hypertension (HITS): cost and cost-effectiveness analysis of a randomised controlled trial

Abstract: Objectives: To compare the costs and costeffectiveness of managing patients with uncontrolled blood pressure (BP) using telemonitoring versus usual care from the perspective of the National Health Service (NHS). Design: Within trial post hoc economic evaluation of data from a pragmatic randomised controlled trial using an intention-to-treat approach.