Genomes of the month Four new genomes will be discussed in this month’s Genome Update. The list of organisms given in Table 1 includes an archaeon, two bacteria and an eukaryote. Two genomes will only be mentioned briefly. The protozoan Cryptosporidium hominis causes gastroenteritis and diarrhoea around the world. Like the Cryptosporidium parvum genome (Abrahamsen et al., 2004), that of C. homi...

Robust Inequality Comparisons This paper is concerned with the problem of ranking Lorenz curves in situations where the Lorenz curves intersect and no unambiguous ranking can be attained without introducing weaker ranking criteria than first-degree Lorenz dominance. To deal with such situations Aaberge (2009) introduced two alternative sequences of nested dominance criteria for Lorenz curves wh...

The commentary by Savitz and Olshan (1) and the response by Thompson (2) form a fascinating contrast. Savitz and Olshan speak in the language of epidemiology, complaining about the seeming arbitrary and antiscientific dictates of conventional (frequentist) statistical methodology, particularly as it applies to the study of many associations. Thompson, speaking mainly in the language of statisti...

Adjectives are typically felicitous in within-predicate comparisons—constructions of the form ‘X is more A than y’, as in This is bigger than that, but are often infelicitous in between-predicate comparisons—constructions of the form ‘X is more A than (y is) B’, as in *Tweety is bigger than (it is) heavy. Nouns, by contrast, exhibit the inverse pattern. The challenge is to ac...

In biomedical research, a common question posed by investigators is whether or not an outcome of interest differs significantly between multiple independent groups of subjects in the study sample. For example, in a randomized clinical trial focusing on differences in a parameter of cardiovascular health such as systolic blood pressure or heart rate that is measured on a continuum, one might mak...