Dick Boyer: An Australian Humanist

Dick Byrne

Dick Byrne is Professor of Evolutionary Psychology at the University of St. Andrews, Scotland. He studies the evolution of cognition, and has investigated a wide range of animal capacities — vocal and gestural communication, deception, social comprehension, mental mapping, causal knowledge and the acquisition of novel manual skills. After training in cognitive psychology, he turned to primate f...

Wonderful Life: An Interview with Herb Boyer

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, before restriction enzymes were ordered from a New England Biolabs catalog and vectors arrived in neat packages from Promega, and before molecular biologists added patents or a company to their CV, there was Herb Boyer. One can almost define the revolution in molecular genetics by Herb’s story alone—the discovery of the iconic restriction enzyme EcoR1 and...

Teaching with a Humanist

On Boyer-Moore Preprocessing

Probably the two best-known exact string matching algorithms are the linear-time algorithm of Knuth, Morris and Pratt (KMP), and the fast on average algorithm of Boyer and Moore (BM). The efficiency of these algorithms is based on using a suitable failure function. When a mismatch occurs in the currently inspected text position, the purpose of a failure function is to tell how many positions th...

Chemistry: Richards and Boyer

remains to be done in order that perfect certainty may be attained, nevertheless the outcome must be regarded as promising in pointing toward an adequate and convenient method of separating gallium from other metals. Three fractional samples of the chloride discussed in the previous section were analyzed, using the usual methods employed in Harvard University in order to make a preliminary dete...