Molecular phylogeny: My sister is a sea squirt?

My Oldest Sister Is a Sea Walnut? GENETICS

W ith common names such as “sea walnut,” “sea gooseberry,” and “Venus’ girdle” that refl ect their morphological diversity, the jelly-like creatures belonging to the phylum Ctenophora that bear distinctive “combs” of cilia are not only breathtakingly beautiful ( 1) but are also key to understanding early animal evolution. On page 1336 of this issue, Ryan et al. ( 2) decode the genome of the sea...

Sea Squirt Sex

I f you spend a minute observing behaviour at your next party, it is easy to grasp the basics of sexual selection theory females are choosy and males compete. But how do you choose or compete for the best partner when you are permanently stuck to a rock? Most marine organisms reproduce by releasing their eggs and sperm into the ocean. This mode of reproduction is called broadcast spawning. You'...

To my parents and sister

DEDICATION To God , My Parents , and My Sister iii

Distributed coding is a new paradigm for video transmission, based on the Wyner-Ziv theorem. In this thesis, a new Wyner-Ziv codec was proposed using non-binary Low-Density Parity-Check (LDPC) codes. Non-binary LDPC codes, developed for use in channel coding, have been extended for source coding to compress correlated non-binary sources, such as video. The approach is based on considering the c...

ii DEDICATION To my parents and my sister .

RAMACHANDRAN, SHANKAR. Stack Space Analysis for ARM Executables. (Under the direction of Dr. Alexander Dean). Bounding maximum stack depth for embedded system applications is essential in order to avoid conditions such as stack overflow. Stack usage information is useful for allocating the stack into a memory hierarchy. Prior work in stack space analysis addresses specific issues such as handli...