Quartet of Unlikely Discoveries

Quartet Compatibility and the Quartet Graph

A collection P of phylogenetic trees is compatible if there exists a single phylogenetic tree that displays each of the trees in P. Despite its computational difficulty, determining the compatibility of P is a fundamental task in evolutionary biology. Characterizations in terms of chordal graphs have been previously given for this problem as well as for the closely-related problems of (i) deter...

AIDS Quartet

Not long ago, I e-mailed Donald McNeil, Jr. I wanted to know how many HIV/AIDS articles the New York Times reporter had written over the years. “Fiddling with the Times’ website and internal library . . . produces 201 to 495,” McNeil replied. “I think it’s safe to say I’ve written 400 stories about AIDS.” At the end of this piece I’ll share McNeil’s favorite, but for now I’ll state the obvious....

A quartet of interactions.

When people practice specific tasks –such as playing video games or speaking a second language– does this boost their general cognitive abilities? To what extent are our basic cognitive processes malleable? Are we to accept the hand that nature has dealt us –a short attention span, a fallible memory, a limited perceptual system– or is there hope that, with the right training and dogged persiste...

From the Workshop of Discoveries From the Workshop of Discoveries

Short Quartet Puzzling: A New Quartet-Based Phylogeny Reconstruction Algorithm

Quartet-based phylogeny reconstruction methods, such as Quartet Puzzling, were introduced in the hope that they might be competitive with maximum likelihood methods, without being as computationally intensive. However, despite the numerous quartet-based methods that have been developed, their performance in simulation has been disappointing. In particular, Ranwez and Gascuel, the developers of ...