While XP principles are independent of the languages in which software is developed, we can distinguish properties of programming languages that affect the agility of development. Some languages are inherently more agile than others, and the experience of developing software in these languages reflects this. A family of languages descended from the mathematics notation developed at Harvard in t...

A b s t r a c t . Predicting the evolution of individuals is a rather new mining task with applications in medicine. Medical researchers are interested in the progress of a disease and in the evolution of individuals subjected to treatment. We investigate the evolution of patients on the basis of medical tests before and during treatment after brain trauma: we want to understand how similar pat...

A study of some of the members of the genus Telemiades, including amphion Geyer and several others having a somewhat similar superficial appearance, has resulted in establishing the identity of two or three rather obscure names applied to these insects by authors and in the discovery of two species not previously described. Ohie name has been removed from the usual synonymy of amphihn Geyer and...

The book Why Are Some People Healthy and Others Not? The Determinants of Health of Populations represented a milestone in our evolving understanding of the determinants of population health. Building on Marc Lalonde's earlier A New Perspective on the Health of Canadians, it created a theoretical framework that could incorporate emerging evidence from a wide range of disciplines. Central to its ...

Previous explanations of why bacterial genes for certain "optional" traits tend to occur on plasmids rather than chromosomes are based on an outdated misunderstanding of natural selection. They also fail to explain why certain characters that are ubiquitous in some bacterial species tend to occur on plasmids. This paper shows that all major classes of traits usually associated with plasmids rat...

Norms—that is, specifications of what we ought to do—play a critical role in the study of informal argumentation, as they do in studies of judgment, decisionmaking and reasoning more generally. Specifically, they guide a recurring theme: are people rational? Though rules and standards have been central to the study of reasoning, and behavior more generally, there has been little discussion with...

Positive self-statements are widely believed to boost mood and self-esteem, yet their effectiveness has not been demonstrated. We examined the contrary prediction that positive self-statements can be ineffective or even harmful. A survey study confirmed that people often use positive self-statements and believe them to be effective. Two experiments showed that among participants with low self-e...

A recent article reports that human perception of heartbeat timing is mediated by right (non-dominant) anterior insular cortex, and that the activity and the size of this region is directly correlated with individuals' subjective awareness of inner body feelings and emotionality. These results support the somatic-marker hypothesis of consciousness (a modern successor to the James-Lange theory o...

The list of completely sequenced microbial genomes, released in August and September of 2007 (Table 1), is relatively short. Still, it includes some remarkable environmental microorganisms, such as the sulfur-reducing crenarchaeon Ignicoccus hospitalis, host of the smallest archaeon Nanoarchaeum equitans, the soil bacterium Bacillus pumilus isolated from a supposedly sterile environment of the ...

How does brain size and design influence the survival chances of a species? A large brain may contribute to an individual’s success irrespective of its detailed composition. I have studied the size and shape of cerebella in birds and looked for links between the bird’s cerebellar design, brain size and behavior. My results indicate that the cerebellum in large-brained birds does not scale unifo...