A ll three teams honored in this year’s Gordon Bell Prize competition benefited from new or scaled-up hardware introduced since work for last year’s competition was completed. While the gap in raw performance between the price/performance and performance winners narrowed, the ratio was still more than 300. All 1996 finalists in the annual competition, which recognizes significant achievements i...

Belation of the American Association to the National Academy: DR. BURTON E. LIVINGSTON ............ 493 The Activity of Nerve: DR. R.,W. GERARD ......-................ 495 Hawaii's Tribute to Dr. Newcombe: E. D. W. BROWN 499 Scientific Events: The Australan National Research Council; Lectures by Indutrial Fellows at the Mellon Institute; Standards far Scientific and Engineering Symbols and Abbr...

Using the notions of Q-heaps and fusion trees developed by Fredman and Willard, we develop a faster version of the fractional cascading technique while maintaining the linear space structure. The new version enables sublogarithmic iterative search in the case when we have a search tree and the degree of each node is bounded by O(log n), for some constant > 0, where n is the total size of all th...

The bacteriology of acute tonsillitis and the normal flora of the throat in children is interesting and somewhat puzzling. Several studies (Box, Cleveland and Willard, 1961; Reilly et al, 1981; Toner et al, 1986) have shown that the culture of throat swabs taken from children with a history of acute tonsillitis does not differ, in terms of organisms cultured, from those taken from normal childr...

This article reviews evolutionary biological studies of sex-biased post-natal parental investment that may be relevant to the issue of preconception gender selection. The focus is on tests of the Trivers-Willard hypothesis, which predicts that natural selection has favoured parents that bias investment in favour of the sex with the best reproductive prospects. Because resource abundance and sca...