The dairy industry in North America has changed dramatically with a trend in direction of larger herds and higher production per cow, which seems to be associated with a decrease in fertility, especially a decrease in conception rates and extension of calving intervals (Butler, 2000; Lucy, 2001; Stevenson, 2001) This decline in fertility of lactating dairy cows is observed not only in North Ame...

Two nonsymmetric search directions for semideenite programming, the XZ and ZX search directions, are proposed. They are derived from a nonsymmetric formulation of the semideenite programming problem. The XZ direction corresponds to the direct linearization of the central path equation XZ = I; while the ZX direction corresponds to ZX = I. The XZ and ZX directions are well deened if both X and Z ...

That intravitam staining with basic dyes occurs more readily in alkaline than in acid solutions has long been known. Among the explanations which have been offered to account for this fact two deserve especial mention. The first is that originally proposed byOverton (1), accepted by Harvey (2), and supported in certain respects by the experiments of Robertson (3) (who, however, on other grounds...

The International Society for Computational Biology (ISCB) presents ISMB/ECCB 2007, the Fifteenth International Conference on Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology (ISMB 2007), held jointly with the Sixth European Conference on Computational Biology (ECCB 2007) in Vienna, Austria, July 21–25, 2007 (http://www.iscb.org/ ismbeccb2007). Now in the final phases of selecting papers, presentation...

Message from the ISCB: The Bioinformatics Open Source Conference (BOSC) is a yearly meeting organized by the Open Bioinformatics Foundation (OBF), a non-profit group dedicated to promoting the practice and philosophy of Open Source software development and Open Science within the biological research community. BOSC has been run since 2000 as a two-day Special Interest Group (SIG) before the ann...

The ISCB held its 13th annual Intelligent Systems for Molecular Biology Conference (ISMB) in Detroit, Michigan, June 25– 29, 2005. Considering this conference has moved to many points on the globe in its 13 years, this location was not so far away geographically from the first ISMB held in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1993, but the increase in numbers in all categories—attendance, presentations, and ...

The spectral bundle method was introduced by Helmberg and Rendl [13] to solve a class of eigenvalue optimization problems that is equivalent to the class of semidefinite programs with the constant trace property. We investigate the feasibility and effectiveness of including full or partial second-order information in the spectral bundle method, building on work of Overton and Womersley [20, 23]...

That intravitam staining with basic dyes occurs more readily in alkaline than in acid solutions has long been known. Among the explanations which have been offered to account for this fact two deserve especial mention. The first is that originally proposed byOverton (1), accepted by Harvey (2), and supported in certain respects by the experiments of Robertson (3) (who, however, on other grounds...

In this paper, we first note that Method III in Friedland, Nocedal, and Overton [SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 24 (1987), pp. 634–667] may not converge quadratically in the quotient sense. Then, we show that the method is convergent quadratically under a weaker notion of convergence — the root convergence. We also extend our results to the algorithm given in Chu [SIAM J. Numer. Anal., 29 (1992), pp. 88...