In a least squares adjustment when more than one variable in an equation of condition has error, the results will be affected by unnecessary asymptotic bias unless the algorithm is properly formulated. Similar difficulties can be expected with robust estimation techniques that are based on extending least squares to a noneuclidean metric. This paper presents an algorithm for robust estimation i...

The positive replies to our original paper (West et al., 1999) leave us in the pleasurable position of being able to keep our ®nal comments short. Kondrashov (1999) demonstrates what Seger (1999) called `physics envy'. The idea that the Mutational Deterministic hypothesis can be easily validated or rejected, once the minimum rate of deleterious mutations per genome per generation (U) is known, ...

Monoclonal antibodies against pneumococcal surface protein A (PspA) have been shown to protect mice from fatal pneumococcal infection. PspA is highly variable serologically, raising the possibility that PspA from one strain might not be able to elicit protective responses against strains which possess serologically different PspA. We have prepared a Agtll library of pneumococcal genomic DNA and...

A natural way to deal with multiple, partially conflicting objectives is turning all the objectives but one into budget constraints. Some classical polynomial-time optimization problems, such as spanning tree and forest, shortest path, (perfect) matching, independent set (basis) in a matroid or in the intersection of two matroids, become NP-hard even with one budget constraint. Still, for most ...

This paper presents a new approach for resolving lexical ambiguities in one language using statistical data on lexical relations in another language. This approach exploits the differences between mappings of words to senses in different languages. We concentrate on the problem of target word selection in machine translation, for which the approach is directly applicable, and employ a statistic...

ow cells connect to each other and to the extracellular matrix (ECM) was a sticky issue in the early 1980s. Integrins, molecules that hook the cy-toskeleton to ECM proteins such as collagen and fibronectin, hadn't been discovered, but evidence for a link between external and internal fibers was mounting. For example, Irwin Singer (1979) observed that extra-cellular fibronectin molecules closely...

Protein export from the ER is mediated by COPII vesicles. Glycosylphosphatidylinositol-linked proteins seem to be segregated from other cargo proteins during ER export, suggesting that ER membranes produce more than one type of vesicle.