JCB • VOLUME 188 • NUMBER 1 • 2010 4 P ier Paolo Di Fiore likes to describe his scientifi c successes as bits of happenstance—that as he and his colleagues pursued the next logical step in a sequence of experimental inquiry, luck often handed them something even more interesting to run with. Others would surely describe it as the payoff for perseverance that has led Di Fiore from studying cance...

The learning complexity of niche based learning classifier systems depends both on the complexity of the problem state space and on the number of available actions. In this paper, we introduce a version of XCS with computed actions, briefly XCSCA, that can be applied to problems involving a large number of actions. We report experimental results showing that XCSCA can evolve accurate and compac...

Following the results obtained in Preord and in Cat, we characterize the effective étale-descent morphisms inM -Ord, the category ofM -ordered sets for a given monoid M . Furthermore we show that in M -Ord every effective descent morphism is effective for étale-descent (while the converse is false), and we generalize it to a more general context of relational algebras.

We read with interest the paper of Beshay and colleagues [1]. It is an interesting report about an unusual presentation of synchronous bilateral typical carcinoid (TC) of the lung, treated with resection. The authors report that the patient was referred with diagnosis of bilateral lung metastases of unknown origin. Past history was unremarkable for surgical procedures and smoking history. Presu...

PURPOSE To investigate if anatomical characteristics of eyes undergoing ranibizumab therapy were predictive of best-corrected visual acuity (BCVA) outcomes over 2 years. METHODS Post hoc analyses of patients with age-related macular degeneration from PIER studies, defined by fundus fluorescein angiography, quantitative optical coherence tomography (OCT), and qualitative OCT, were performed to...

The Pacific Fishery Management Council (Pacific Council) has expressed the desire for the development and design of alternative swordfish gears that reduce the potential for interactions with bycatch species of concern (i.e., turtles and marine mammals) along the U.S. west coast. Among the gears recently tested off California is deep-set buoy gear (DSBG), a configuration that was patterned afte...

MOTIVATION In order to accelerate the finishing phase of genome assembly, especially for the whole genome shotgun approach of prokaryotic species, we have developed a software package designated prokaryotic genome assembly assistant system (PGAAS). The approach upon which PGAAS is based is to confirm the order of contigs and fill gaps between contigs through peptide links obtained by searching ...

This paper investigates a seismic retrofit technique that allows bridge steel truss piers to uplift and rock on their foundation. Displacement-based passive energy dissipation devices buckling-restrained braces, or BRBs are implemented at the uplifting location to control the rocking response while providing additional energy dissipation. The hysteretic behavior of the controlled rocking system...