Juvenile neuronal ceroid lipofuscinosis (JNCL) is an autosomal recessive disorder of childhood caused by mutations in CLN3. Although visual deterioration is typically the first clinical sign to manifest in affected children, loss of Cln3 in a mouse model of JNCL does not recapitulate this retinal deterioration. This suggests that either the loss of CLN3 does not directly affect retinal cell sur...

The biggest mass extinction of the past 600 million years (My), the end-Permian event (251 My ago), witnessed the loss of as much as 95% of all species on Earth. Key questions for biologists concern what combination of environmental changes could possibly have had such a devastating effect, the scale and pattern of species loss, and the nature of the recovery. New studies on dating the event, c...

This paper concerns the empirical basis of causation, and addresses the following issues: 1. the clues that might prompt people to perceive causal relationships in uncontrolled observations. 2. the task of inferring causal models from these clues, and 3. whether the models inferred tell us anything useful about the causal mechanisms that underly the observations. We propose a minimal-model sema...

We present a probabilistic theory of causal explanations, which integrates probabilistic and causal knowledge. Unlike most other approaches where a causal explanation is a hypothesis that one or more causative events occurred , we deene an explanation of a set of observations to be the occurrence of a chain of causation events. These causation events constitute a scenario where all the observat...

We address the issue of causation in demography, focusing. particularly onchange through time in aggregate demographic phenomena. We regard the interventionframework associated with the Neyman-Rubin-Holland model of causal estimation as toorarely applicable to be useful as a general solution to causal inference in demography.Discussion centres on a series of examples of demograp...

the performance of different yield loss models from an exponential family was evaluated in safflower-redroot pigweed systems in two field experiments conducted during 2007 and 2008 growing seasons at the research field of agricultural college of shiraz university, iran. the yield loss of safflower was recorded as relative yield loss in experimental plots laid out in split plot design with three...