The discovery of a new sensory modality in animals is of great significance in the history of biology – akin to the description of a new species of bird or primate or the unearthing of a missing link in the fossil record. In this issue we celebrate one of the key papers in the discovery of electroreception in fishes (Kalmijn, 1971), which established a biological function for the ampullae of Lo...

Multiple Instance Learning (MIL) proposes a new paradigm when instance labeling, in the learning step, is not possible or infeasible, by assigning a single label (positive or negative) to a set of instances called bag. In this paper, an operator based on homogeneity of positive bags for MIL is introduced. Our method consists in removing instances from the positives bags according to their simil...

The first two papers on optimal foraging theory, one by Robert MacArthur and Eric Pianka and the other by John Merritt Emlen, were published back-to-back in the November-December 1966 issue of the American Naturalist. Both papers are among the most frequently cited papers on foraging theory (having been cited 1079 and 504 times, respectively as of 8-5-05). The circumstances of authorship were d...

Domain knowledge expressed in structured citation formats can be exploited in data mining. We propose four structural properties of canonically cited texts, then look at to two classic problems in the study of the scholia, or ancient scholarly commentary, found in the manuscripts of the Iliad. We cluster citations of scholia to analyze their distribution in different manuscripts; this leads to ...