WE ALL INHERIT AND ACQUIRE different characteristics. When we experience a treatment aimed at changing our physiology, these characteristics may modify the effect of the treatment, making it more or less beneficial, harmful, or ineffective in different individuals. The issue of individual responses to treatments is therefore one of the most important in experimental research, yet few researcher...

In the 1960s-1980s, determination of bacterial growth rates was an important tool in microbial genetics, biochemistry, molecular biology, and microbial physiology. The exciting technical developments of the 1990s and the 2000s eclipsed that tool; as a result, many investigators today lack experience with growth rate measurements. Recently, investigators in a number of areas have started to use ...

We put forward a simple high-level framework for describing a population protocol, which includes the capacity for sequential execution of instructions and a (limited) capacity for loops and branching instructions. The process of translation of the protocol into its standard form, i.e., into a collection of asynchronously executed state-transition rules, is performed by exploiting nested synchr...

Evolutionary programming (EP) has been applied with success to many numerical and combinatorial optimization problems in recent years. EP has rather slow convergence rates, however, on some function optimization problems. In this paper, a “fast EP” (FEP) is proposed which uses a Cauchy instead of Gaussian mutation as the primary search operator. The relationship between FEP and classical EP (CE...

Paxos [3] is a simple protocol that a group of machines in a distributed system can use to agree on a value proposed by a member of the group. If it terminates, the protocol reaches consensus even if the network was unreliable and multiple machines simultaneously tried to propose different values. The basic idea is that each proposal has a unique number. Higher numbered proposals override lower...

practice, the detection Ii mit of scanning electron microscopy is about 0.1 j.m (Middleton, 1982). Transmission electron microscopy may be required to detect very thin fibres (Rood & Streeter, 1985). The elemental composition of individual fibres can be determined with an energy-dispersive X-ray ana1ysis attachment combined with an electron microscope (Middleton, 1982). Fibres are counted and s...

Designing routing schemes is a multidimensional and complex task that depends on the objective function, the computational model (centralized vs. distributed), and the amount of uncertainty (online vs. offline). Nevertheless, there are quite a few well-studied general techniques, for a large variety of network problems. In contrast, in our view, practical techniques for designing robust routing...

1 The Biodesign Institute, Arizona State University, 1001 S. McAllister Avenue, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA 2 School of Life Sciences, Arizona State University, 1001 S. McAllister Avenue, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA 3Department of Science and Technology for Agriculture, Forestry, Nature and Energy (DAFNE), University of Tuscia, Via San Camillo de Lellis snc, 01100 Viterbo, Italy 4Department of Biological Sys...