An important clue to the evolutionary history of an allele is the structure of the neighboring region of the genome, which we term the genomic background of the allele. Consider two copies of the allele. How similar we expect their genomic background to be is strongly influenced by the age of their most recent common ancestor (MRCA). We apply diffusion theory, first used by Motoo Kimura as a to...

The mutation process is introduced into the colored coalescent theory. The mutation process can be viewed as an independent Poisson process running on the colored genealogical random tree generated by the colored coalescent process, with the edge lengths of the random tree serving as the time scale for the mutation process. Moving backward along the colored genealogical tree, the color of verti...

The genealogies of samples of orthologous regions from multiple species can be classified by their shapes. Using a neutral coalescent model of two species, I give exact probabilities of each of four possible genealogical shapes: reciprocal monophyly, two types of paraphyly, and polyphyly. After the divergence that forms two species, each of which has population size N, polyphyly is the most lik...

 Continued rise in annual average temperature. Warming is projected to continue throughout the 21 century (Figure 5-1). For the 2050s relative to 1950-1999, temperature is projected to rise +5.8°F (range: +3.1 to +8.5°F) for a high greenhouse gas scenario (RCP8.5). Much higher warming is possible after mid-century (Figure 5-1, Table 5-1). Lower emissions of greenhouse gases will result in less...

Dance Confidence, Age and Gender 2 ABSTRACT Dance Confidence is a measure of domain-specific self-esteem as applied to how a person feels about their social and recreational dance ability. This study is concerned with how dance confidence varies as a function of gender and age group. 13,715 people watched a video and then completed an on-line survey. The results show that dance confidence varie...

Linguistic studies of the intonation of Yes-No questions in French show that, in questions containing more than two stress groups, interrogative intonation is characterized by a sequence of lowered pitches or downstepped tones which precede the final rise. The gating paradigm was used here to determine whether subjects listening to French NP utterances containing three stress groups could indic...

The natural unemployment rate seems to have taken a wild ride. As late as 1970 the natural rate is thought to have been still low, perhaps 5.5 percent. Then unemployment rose in the mid-1970's, dipped, and rose again in the early 1980's. The impression formed that beneath this movement was a major rise of the natural rate--to about 6.5 percent at mid-decade in some estimates. Now the American u...

Categorical perception occurs when a physical continuum is perceived discontinuously. In speech, a vast body of research has shown that consonants are perceived categorically whereas vowels are perceived continuously. The other major phonetic unit of speech, lexical tone, has been relatively neglected in categorical perception studies. Here tonal language (Thai), and non-tonal language (Austral...