It has long been noted that conversational partners tend to exhibit increasingly similar pitch, intensity, and timing behavior over the course of a conversation. However, the metrics developed to measure this similarity to date have generally failed to capture the dynamic temporal aspects of this process. In this paper, we propose new approaches to measuring interlocutor similarity in spoken di...

One of the last steps in a genome assembly project is filling the gaps between consecutive contigs in the scaffolds. This problem can be naturally stated as finding an s-t path in a directed graph whose sum of arc costs belongs to a given range (the estimate on the gap length). Here s and t are any two contigs flanking a gap. This problem is known to be NP-hard in general. Here we derive a simp...

the possibility of in vivo carcass trait prediction using the ultrasound measurements obtained between 12th and 13th ribs was studied. attention was paid to several carcass traits such as carcass backfat thickness (cbft), carcass longissimus dorsi muscle (clma) and carcass weight (hcw). also, the effects of the flock, as the fixed effects, and body weight (bw), as covariate, on these traits wer...

Executive Summary Adapting to climate change will not only require responding to the physical effects of global warming, but will also require adapting the way we conceptualize, measure, and manage risks. Climate change is creating new risks, altering the risks we already face, and also, importantly, impacting the interdependencies between these risks. In this paper we focus on three particular...

Pigs may display biting behavior directed at pen mates, resulting in body damage such as tail wounds. We assessed the suitability of jute sacks (hung vertically at wall) to reduce biting behaviors and tail wounds in rearing gilts. Additionally, we assessed several characteristics of different types of tail biters. Tail docked rearing gilts originated from 72 litters, which were kept in partly s...

To study the role of the poly(A) tail length during the replication of poly(A)-containing plus-strand RNA virus, we have developed a simple reverse transcription polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR)-based method that substantially improves the previously reported PAT [poly(A) test] assay. In contrast to the PAT assay, the new method is based on the enzymatic 3' elongation of mRNA with guanosine r...