A subject of extensive study in evolutionary theory has been the issue of how neutral, redundant copies can be maintained in the genome for long periods of time. Concurrently, examples of adaptive gene duplications to various environmental conditions in different species have been described. At this point, it is too early to tell whether or not a substantial fraction of gene copies have initial...

This paper focuses on a grammar based approach to semantic interpretation which combines the notions of robust and weighted parsing In restricted domains of application in information extraction and natural language speech based information systems this approach may show acceptable performance We present an overview of our research carried out within the recent concluded project ISIS Interactio...

The need for concepts to understand marriage and marital therapy is emphasized by the relative paucity of theory in the marital literature. The title of Coyne's article (this issue) therefore struck us as timely and promising. As indicated in our article, we believe that the cognitive domain may indeed yield useful concepts for understanding marriage and marital therapy. Coyne disagrees strongl...

Jonsen coined the term "Rule of Rescue"(RR) to describe the imperative people feel to rescue identifiable individuals facing avoidable death. In this paper we attempt to draw a more detailed picture of the RR, identifying its conflict with cost-effectiveness analysis, the preference it entails for identifiable over statistical lives, the shock-horror response it elicits, the preference it entai...

Wireless sensor networks is a technology that has been used in a vast number of applications and environments with successful results in the past. Therefore increasing nowadays the number of users of this type of devices and their new applications. In this thesis we worked hand-in-hand with the ISIS B.V. Company to provide a proper WSN design to be deployed inside a spacecraft structure and sat...

Spencer Smith In the mid–second century AD a well-educated, Latin-speaking North African named Lucius Apuleius composed an extended prose narrative that explores some of the foundational themes of the western intellectual tradition: the place of the human in the world, the nature of social order, the quest for spiritual identity—the very nature of being itself, as well as of the divine. Much to...

forward osmosis (fo) has recently drawn attention as a promising membrane based method for seawater and brackish water desalination. in this study, we focus on the use of calciun chloride (cacl2) and potassium bicarbonate (khco3) as inorganic salt draw solution candidates due to their appropriate performance in water flux and reverse salt diffusion as well as reasonable cost. the experiments we...