A Markov chain model has been proposed as a mechanism that generates human sleep stages. A method for estimating the parameters of the model, i.e., the transition probabilities (rates) between sleep stages, has been introduced and applied to 95 hypnograms taken from 23 subjects. The rates characterize interindividual differences and nightly variations of the sleep mechanism, related to sleep-on...

Immature stages of holometabolous insects represent a useful source of information for phylogenetic studies. However, knowledge about immature stages of insects is generally poor. This paper presents a historical overview on the study of immature Cetoniinae and provides an up-to-date list of 194 so far described taxa at the species level. Most immature stages are described for the Cetoniini. La...

With an emphasis on its prominent historical points, this article attempts to take a fresh look at the evolution of political thought in Islam and Iran. This review attempts to identify the milestones of the history of political thought in Iran and in particular, in the Islamic world. By identifying them, the impact of each of the ideas of urban Iran, Sunni Islam, Shiite Islam, the Greek and th...

The article deals with the sacred groves of the Balts in Lithuania and presents the linguistic background, the historical documents from the 12th– 18th century, the key folklore motifs of the topic, as well as selected examples of groves. The article also discusses possible relationships between pre-Christian religious traditions connected with the sacred groves and the ones which have survived...

The Master of Liberal Arts provides the chance to practice the methods of interdisciplinary inquiry that are the hallmark of a rigorous liberal arts education. As a student in the program, one can explore questions of identity through art, literature, and religion; analyze the politics of race in fiction, historical documents, the visual arts, and music; debate ethical choices presented by fict...

Document binarization is an active research area for many years. The choice of the most appropriate binarization algorithm for each case proved to be a very difficult procedure itself. In this paper, we propose a new technique for the validation of document binarization algorithms. Our method is simple in its implementation and can be performed on any binarization algorithm since it doesn’t req...

An enduring problem in electoral systems is that of "disproportionality," i.e., the mismatch between a party's percentage of the popular vote and its percentage of legislative seats. Such disproportionality is quite common and extreme cases are easy to find in the real word. To give just one example, the Liberal Party in Britain polled 13.8% of the national vote in 1979 but was rewarded with on...

Growth and pubertal development are important health markers. We used the data of a longitudinal growth study on a contemporary sample of US youth to examine the relationship between peak height velocity (PHV) and Tanner staging. We observed a substantial variability in the timing of PHV across Tanner stages, which is an important consideration for clinicians when assessing growth.