[1] In the face of global change, which is characterized by growing water demands and increasingly variable water supplies, the equitable sharing of water and the drought proofing of rural livelihoods will require an increasing physical capacity to store water. This is especially true for the semiarid and dry subhumid regions of sub-Saharan Africa and Asia. This paper addresses the following qu...

Elaine Mardis and Marc Ladanyi discuss how large-scale genomics has driven advances in cancer translational medicine, with a focus on publications in this month's Special Issue.

Cost estimation for large projects can be difficult because of many complex factors and uncertainties involved. It is often the case that only very rough guesses of actual costs may be provided. In this paper, we will examine the various types of uncertainties in the cost estimation problem of the Myrrha project. We will then use a few examples originated from the conceptual phase of the projec...

Like most bioethical discussion, examination of human biobanks has been largely framed in terms of research subjects’ rights, principally informed consent, with some gestures toward public benefits. However, informed consent is for the competent, rights-bearing individual: focussing on the individual, it thus neglects social, economic and even political matters; focussing on the competent right...

Large-scale information technology (IT) projects experience higher failure rates than smaller IT projects. When these projects fail in government agencies, they represent significant costs to both the agencies and society. This paper reports the results of a study on large-scale government IT projects that failed over multiple iterations. Data was gathered on the modernization efforts at the In...

Upon the completion of the SACCHAROMYCES: cerevisiae genomic sequence in 1996 [Goffeau,A. et al. (1997) NATURE:, 387, 5], several creative and ambitious projects have been initiated to explore the functions of gene products or gene expression on a genome-wide scale. To help researchers take advantage of these projects, the SACCHAROMYCES: Genome Database (SGD) has created two new tools, Function...

Software projects require a right mix of the software resources and the expertise to increase the chances of timely completion. The interface for the resource allocation to the software projects is provided by the project factors. The identification of the comprehensive project factors for the diversified nature of projects in itself is an open research area. This paper is based on a quantitati...