Reply to Chan et al., Tan and Jiang, and St. Clair and Patel

Reply to Chan-Tack et al.

Reply to Rao et al. and Lee et al

In the last issue, I presented a piece that called into question some of the techniques reported in two papers in high-profile journals that purported to provide statistical evidence for the linguistic status of some ancient symbol systems (Sproat 2010a). Not surprisingly the authors of those two papers took issue with a number of my claims, and have requested the opportunity to respond. The tw...

Reply to Tan et al.: Differences between real and simulated proteins in multiple sequence alignments.

Tan et al. (1) comment on our earlier paper regarding the accuracy of multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) using different guide tree topologies (2). We stress that the scope of our result was confined to alignments of very large numbers of protein sequences with known structures, where accuracy was measured against structure-based alignments. We point out that this result could not be translate...

Reply to Gelfand et al and Solla.

TO THE EDITOR—We appreciate the interest Gelfand et al [1] have shown regarding our observational, nonrandomized, comparative multicenter study [2]. Infec-tive endocarditis (IE) is an uncommon, severe disease [3], and it is inevitable that randomized trials on this condition are lacking. In our observational study, the combination of ampicillin and ceftriax-one (AC) was compared with the standa...

Reply to Halstead and Sayce et al

TO THE EDITOR—We agree with Dr Halstead that the findings of our trial of early corticosteroid therapy in Vietnamese children and young adults with dengue add an interesting perspective to the longrunning debate on the mechanisms underlying disease pathogenesis [1, 2]. The absence of any adverse effects of prednisolone therapy on the virological safety parameters assessed, together with the lac...