Human endogenous retroviruses (HERVs) are a potential source of genetic diversity in the human genome. Although many of these elements have been inactivated over time by the accumulation of deleterious mutations or internal recombination leading to solo-LTR formation, several members of the HERV-K family have been identified that remain nearly intact and probably represent recent integration ev...

Data dissemination overlays are central in scalable multicast protocols and are used in many other kinds of distributed systems. Such overlays must selfassemble, and in situations where there are multiple protocol options, a suitable choice of protocol may be key to achieving desired levels of performance, reliability, or other QoS objectives. Here, we describe SOLO, a new platform we’re constr...

J ust as little Susie moves to center stage for her dance solo, a cell phone chirps.As this distraction becomes annoying, you realize it’s your phone. Quickly, you grab the device; it’s your boss, so you run out of the auditorium to take the call. Upon returning, you have missed Susie and are the target of the “look”from your significant other. Sound familiar? You are probably suffering from an...

The wide range of vocal styles, musical textures and recording techniques found in ethnomusicological field recordings leads us to consider the problem of automatically labeling the content to know whether a recording is a song or instrumental work. Furthermore, if it is a song, we are interested in labeling aspects of the vocal texture: e.g. solo, choral, acapella or singing with instruments. ...

A system capable of describing the musical content of any kind of sound file or sound stream, as it is supposed to be done in MPEG7-compliant applications, should provide an account of the different moments where a certain instrument can be listened to. In this paper we concentrate on reviewing the different techniques that have been so far proposed for automatic classification of musical instr...

Physician group practices in the U.S. have grown and changed significantly in terms of health professional team composition, employment contract types, ownership type, size, and management in the last 20 years. In the past, physicians were largely selfemployed or part of small practices, however today's physicians are employed by large healthcare organizations, as well as integrated delivery sy...

Does variety increase happiness? Eight studies examine how the variety among the activities that fill people’s day-to-day lives affects subsequent happiness. The studies demonstrate that whether variety increases or decreases happiness depends on the perceived duration of the time within which the activities occur. For longer time periods (like a day), variety does increase happiness. However, ...

This study examines the effects of competition and competitiveness on hemodynamics. Cardiovascular activity was measured in 27 men at resting baseline and during a car racing game, which comprised a solo race against time and three races against an experimenter. To assess hematocrit, blood was collected at rest and after the final race. Trait competitiveness was assessed by questionnaire. Compe...

VL30 genetic elements constitute a murine multicopy gene family that is retrovirus-like, despite the lack of sequence homology with any known retrovirus. Over one hundred copies of VL30 units are dispersed throughout the mouse genome. We report here that the mouse genome also contains 'solo' VL30 long terminal repeats (LTRs). These are structures which contain the LTR detached from the rest of ...

Test-driven development (TDD) and pair programming (PP) are the key practices of eXtreme Programming methodology that have caught the attention of software engineers and researchers worldwide. One of the aims of the large experiment performed at Wroclaw University of Technology was to investigate the difference between test-driven development and the traditional, test-last development as well a...