Scientists reject blame for German genome shortfall

Plant scientists celebrate new woody plant genome.

Our friends often remind us that scientists are strange beasts. As such, it is fitting that we should rejoice at the release of a major new genome by further scholarship and analysis – using the genome to unravel new elements of plant physiology and evolution. In this Feature Issue we celebrate the completion of the genome of Eucalyptus grandis (Myburg et al., 2014), the first representative of...

Gene Frequency Distributions Reject a Neutral Model of Genome Evolution

Evolution of prokaryotes involves extensive loss and gain of genes, which lead to substantial differences in the gene repertoires even among closely related organisms. Through a wide range of phylogenetic depths, gene frequency distributions in prokaryotic pangenomes bear a characteristic, asymmetrical U-shape, with a core of (nearly) universal genes, a "shell" of moderately common genes, and a...

Minimizing Shortfall

Shortfall Aversion ∗

Shortfall aversion reflects the higher utility loss of a spending cut from a reference point than the utility gain from a similar spending increase, in the spirit of Prospect Theory’s loss aversion. This paper posits a model of utility of spending scaled by a function of past peak spending, called target spending. The discontinuity of the marginal utility at the target spending corresponds to s...

Minimizing the Lifetime Shortfall or Shortfall at Death

We find the optimal investment strategy for an individual who seeks to minimize one of four objectives: (1) the probability that his wealth reaches a specified ruin level before death, (2) the probability that his wealth reaches that level at death, (3) the expectation of how low his wealth drops below a specified level before death, and (4) the expectation of how low his wealth drops below a s...