This letter is in response to the article by Dr Anirudh Malpani regarding family balancing by preimplantation genetic diagnosis (PGD) (Malpani et al., 2002). We wish to place on record that the technique of sex selection by PGD is proscribed by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR, 2000). Draft guidelines for the practice of assisted reproduction, which have been formulated and which wi...

Guidelines proposed by Pennings in 1996 to allow sex preselection ignore ethical problems, basic aspects of human biology and social behavior, cultural differences in reproductive choice availability, and implementation issues. The proposed guidelines would forbid sex preselection for a first child and in cases where gender balance exists. Sex preselection would only be used if the sex select...

Panayiota Poirazi, David Belin, Johannes Gr€ aff, Ileana L. Hanganu-Opatz and Guillermina L opez-Bendito Institute of Molecular Biology and Biotechnology (IMBB), Foundation for Research and Technology-Hellas (FORTH), N. Plastira 100, Vassilika Vouton, P.O. Box 1385, Crete, Greece Department of Pharmacology, University of Cambridge, Tennis Court Road, Cambridge CB2 1PD, UK EPFL-SV-BMI-UPGRAEFF, ...

In this lecture, we will see our first glimpse of a “killer app” of probability in EECS. Probability helps us understand quantitatively how much of a resource we need when demands are somewhat random. There is a wide range of applications, especially in networking where understanding randomness is the key to the idea of “stochastic multiplexing.” The basic idea behind this (which are explored a...

We propose balancing related numerically reliable methods to compute minimal realizations of linear periodic systems with time-varying dimensions. The first method belongs to the family of square-root methods with guaranteed enhanced computational accuracy and can be used to compute balanced minimal order realizations. An alternative balancing-free square-root method has the advantage of a pote...

We propose a numerically reliable approach for balancing and minimal realization of linear periodic systems with time-varying dimensions. The proposed approach to balancing belongs to the family of square-root methods with guaranteed enhanced computational accuracy and can be also used to compute balanced minimal order realizations from non-minimal ones. An alternative balancing-free square-roo...

Vector wavelet transforms for vector-valued fields can be implemented directly from multiwavelets; however, existing multiwavelets offer surprisingly poor performance for transforms in vector-valued signal-processing applications. In this paper, the reason for this performance failure is identified, and a remedy is proposed. A multiwavelet design criterion, omnidirectional balancing, is introdu...