Biophysics: Many guises in Bristol

Evaluation Comes in Many Guises

As the information visualisation (infovis) community matures, the evaluation of information visualisation techniques is becoming more of a requirement and less of an optional extra. Unfortunately, the term evaluation means different things to different people. Simply encouraging “evaluation” is too general and imprecise. There is a need for clarification as to what kind of evaluation is expecte...

Pattern Inference under many Guises

Expression profiling: DNA arrays in many guises.

DNA arrays have become the preferred method for large-scale expression measurement. Such data are needed in view of the large amounts of sequence data available: expression levels in a number of different tissues or situations provide a first step toward functional characterisation of new entities revealed by DNA sequencing. Although the basic principle of measurement is in all cases based on h...

Randomness Extractors and their Many Guises

Since its introduction by Nisan and Zuckerman (STOC ‘93) nearly a decade ago, the notion of a randomness extractor has proven to be a fundamental and powerful one. Extractors and their variants have found widespread application in a variety of areas, including pseudorandomness and derandomization, combinatorics, cryptography, data structures, and computational complexity. Equally striking has b...

Confirmation Bias: A Ubiquitous Phenomenon in Many Guises

Confirmation bias, as the term is typically used in the psychological literature, connotes the seeking or interpreting of evidence in ways that are partial to existing beliefs, expectations, or a hypothesis in hand. The author reviews evidence of such a bias in a variety of guises and gives examples of its operation in several practical contexts. Possible explanations are considered, and the qu...