Comparative evolutionary studies have greatly aided our understanding of how the heart develops. Two recent articles from Benoit Bruneau’s laboratory reveal the power of the so-called evo-devo approach and provide yet further details of development, both of the heart itself and of the cells that build it. Thanks to our many and varied primitive cousins, developmental biologists are gaining a go...

What does it mean to compare sets of objects along a scale, for example by saying "the men are taller than the women"? We explore comparison of pluralities in two experiments, eliciting comparison judgments while varying the properties of the members of each set. We find that a plurality is judged as "bigger" when the mean size of its members is larger than the mean size of the competing plural...

Reconfigurable computing devices are emerging as a viable alternative to fixed-function components and programmable processors. To expand our knowledge of the role and optimization of these devices, it is increasingly imperative for us to compare implementations of tasks and subroutines across this wide spectrum of implementation options. The fact that most processors, FPGAs, ASICs, and memorie...

Semi-Markov processes (SMPs) are real-time stochastic processes in which the time that is spent in a given state before a transition is fired is determined by an arbitrary probability distribution. I Continuous-time Markov chains are a special case of SMPs where all residence-time distributions are exponential. I SMPs have been used extensively to model systems where the time behaviour is not e...

We study the cube of type assignment systems, as introduced in [10]. This cube is obtained from Barendregt’s typed -cube [1] via a natural type erasing function E, that erases type information from terms. We prove that the systems in the former cube enjoy good computational properties, like subject reduction and strong normalization. We study the relationship between the two cubes, which leads ...