We wish to comment on two issues relating to a prediction raised in the article by Randolph1 about our work2. Randolph argues that because ‘low acorn production and moderate mouse densities are the norm [our] data do not explain the cause of the severe acorn failures and contingent crash in mouse populations that might initiate [gypsy] moth outbreaks’. We made no attempt to explain masting peri...

Larval stages can be astonishingly different from their adult forms. A new study in acorn worms shows that the whole larval body is patterned only with a subset of anterior genes, revealing the intricate developmental bases that underlie the evolution of larval forms.

This paper describes Acorn, a sentence planner and surface realizer for dialogue systems. Improvements to previous stochastic word-forest based approaches are described, countering recent criticism of this class of algorithms for their slow speed. An evaluation of the approach with semantic input shows runtimes of a fraction of a second and presents results that suggest it is also portable acro...

BACKGROUND Much scholarly and practitioner attention to the impact of Hurricane Katrina on the city of New Orleans, Louisiana has focused on the failures of government disaster prevention and management at all levels, often overlooking the human strength and resourcefulness observed in individuals and groups among the worst-affected communities. OBJECTIVES This preliminary study sought to inv...

The aCoRn collaboration plans to measure the electron-antineutrino correlation coefficient (“little a”) in neutron decay. “a” is the least well known of the neutron decay coefficients. It’s value, when combined with other neutron decay parameters, can be used to determine the weak vector and axial vector coupling constants and to test the validity and self-consistency of the Electroweak Standar...

1. INTRODUCTION. Physics often provides mathematics not only with a problem, but also with the idea of a solution. Physical reasoning has traditionally been a fruitful source of mathematical invention, having played a key role in some of the main discoveries of Archimedes, Bernoulli, and Riemann, among many others. In this article we give a much more modest example of a mathematical result that...

This paper describes ARCHIMEDES-STUDENT, a computer program that constructs and modifies its own representations of diagrams from instructions supplied by a human who is demonstrating a theorem of geometry. The program’s representation permits it to make inferences from its constructions and to find a justification for the conclusion of the theorem. It is argued that the sort of perceptual reas...