Over the past year, published research has drawn increased attention to issues of hospital nurse staffing and adverse patient outcomes. Among the published articles that have appeared are those by Aiken et al. [1], Kovner et al. [2], and Needleman et al. [3]. The article by Aiken et al. focused on post-surgical mortality, and received substantial attention because of its conclusion that, contro...

Assessment of the similarities between texts has been studied for decades from different perspectives and for several purposes. One interesting perspective is the morphology. This article reports the results on a study on the assessment of the morphological relatedness between natural language words. The main idea is to adapt a formal string alignment algorithm namely Needleman-Wunsch’s to acco...

Gary P. Richards, a# Michael A. Watson, a David S. Needleman, b Karlee M. Church, c and 4 Claudia C. Häse d 5 6 U.S. Department of Agriculture, Agricultural Research Service, Dover, Delaware USA a ; and 7 Wyndmoor, Pennsylvania USA b ; Rutgers University, New Jersey Aquaculture Innovation 8 Center, North Cape May, New Jersey USA c ; and Oregon State University, Department of 9 Biomedical Scienc...

We introduce an algorithm for the alignment of proteincoding sequences accounting for frameshifts. The main specificity of this algorithm as compared to previously published protein-coding sequence alignment methods is the introduction of a penalty cost for frameshift extensions. Previous algorithms have only used constant frameshift penalties. This is similar to the use of scoring schemes with...

MOTIVATION The advent of next-generation sequencing technologies has increased the accuracy and quantity of sequence data, opening the door to greater opportunities in genomic research. RESULTS In this article, we present GNUMAP (Genomic Next-generation Universal MAPper), a program capable of overcoming two major obstacles in the mapping of reads from next-generation sequencing runs. First, w...

This paper presents an approach to organizing folktales based on a data structure called a plot graph, which captures the narrative flow of events in a folktale. The similarity between two folktales can be computed as the structural similarity between their corresponding plot graphs. This is performed using the well-known Needleman-Wunsch algorithm. To test the efficacy of this approach, experi...

We are working on behavioral marketing in the Internet. On one hand we observe the behavior of visitors, and on the other hand we trigger (in real-time) stimulations intended to alter this behavior. Real-time and mass-customization are the two challenges that we have to address. In this paper, we present a hybrid approach for clustering visitor sessions, based on a combination of global and loc...

The paper reports several studies about quantifying language similarity via phonetic alignment of core vocabulary items (taken from Wichman’s Automated Similarity Judgement Program data base). It turns out that weighted alignment according to the Needleman-Wunsch algorithm yields best results. For visualization and data exploration purposes, we used an implementation of the Fruchterman-Reingold...

Probabilistic DNA sequence models have been intensively applied to genome research. Within the evolutionary biology framework, this article investigates the feasibility for rigorously estimating the probability of a set of orthologous DNA sequences which evolve from a common progenitor. We propose Monte Carlo integration algorithms to sample the unknown ancestral and/or root sequences a posteri...