Iconic Reconciliations in a Secular Setting: Recent Bohemian Examples

Craniofacial Secular Change in Recent Mexican Migrants.

Research by economists suggests that recent Mexican migrants are better educated and have higher socioeconomic status (SES) than previous migrants. Because factors associated with higher SES and improved education can lead to positive secular changes in overall body form, secular changes in the craniofacial complex were analyzed within a recent migrant group from Mexico. The Mexican group repre...

Fast Reconciliations in Fluid Replication

Mobile users can increasingly depend on high speed connectivity. Despite this, using distributed file services across the wide area is painful. Past approaches sacrifice one or more of safety, visibility, and consistency in the name of performance. Instead, we propose Fluid Replication, the ability to create replicas where and when needed. These replicas, called WayStations, maintain consistenc...

Robot Learning: Some Recent Examples

This paper provides a brief overview of three recent contributions to robot learning developed by researchers at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. The first is the use of policy search algorithms that exploit new techniques in nonparameteric heteroscedastic regression to directly model policy-dependent distribution of cost [12]. Experiments demonstrate dynamic stabilization of a mobile m...

Visualizing Co-phylogenetic Reconciliations

We introduce a hybrid metaphor for the visualization of the reconciliations of co-phylogenetic trees, that are mappings among the nodes of two trees. The typical application is the visualization of the co-evolution of hosts and parasites in biology. Our strategy combines a space-filling and a node-link approach. Differently from traditional methods, it guarantees an unambiguous and ‘downward’ r...

Should Priority Setting Also Be Concerned About Profound Socio-Economic Transformations? A Response to Recent Commentary