Mass customization has been identified as a competitive strategy by an increasing number of companies. Family-based product design has been recognized as an efficient and effective means to realize sufficient product variety to satisfy a range of customer demands in support for mass customization. This chapter presents a knowledge-supported approach to concept evaluation and selection in design...

Many decision tree (DT) induction algorithms, including the popular C4.5 family, are based on the Conditional Entropy (CE) measure family. An interesting question involves the relative performance of other entropy measure families such as Class-Attribute Mutual Information (CAMI). We therefore conducted a theoretical analysis of the CAMI family that enabled us to expose relationships with CE an...

one of the basic questions in the domain of lexical access and the process of word recognition in mental lexicon is how the native speaker can access the meaning of new complex words in his/her language and what factors affect  its speed? the aim of this study was to investigate empirically effective factors on the speed of lexical access to the derived words in persian mental lexicon. if we kn...

Comparison of whole genomes has revealed that changes in the size of gene families among organisms is quite common. However, there are as yet no models of gene family evolution that make it possible to estimate ancestral states or to infer upon which lineages gene families have contracted or expanded. In addition, large differences in family size have generally been attributed to the effects of...

Homology modeling is a powerful tool for predicting a protein's structure. This approach is successful because proteins whose sequences are only 30% identical still adopt the same structure, while structure similarity rapidly deteriorates beyond the 30% threshold. By studying the divergence of protein structure as sequence evolves in real proteins and in evolutionary simulations, we show that t...

This study was carried out to investigate the direct and indirect responses to selection for four-week body weight (4 week body (wk BW)) and four-week breast weight (4 week breast weight (wk BRW)) and to determine the genetic contribution of reminder founders to the last generation. A total number of 351 birds were equally allocated to three lines, including two selected lines (S1 and S2 for BW...

Comparative genomics and systems biology offer unprecedented opportunities for testing central tenets of evolutionary biology formulated by Darwin in the Origin of Species in 1859 and expanded in the Modern Synthesis 100 years later. Evolutionary-genomic studies show that natural selection is only one of the forces that shape genome evolution and is not quantitatively dominant, whereas non-adap...

Secondary structure elements of many protein families exhibit differential conservation on their opposing faces. Amphipathic helices and -sheets by definition possess this property, and play crucial functional roles. This type of evolutionary trajectory of a protein family is usually critical to the functions of the protein family, as well as in creating functions within subfamilies. That is, d...