Spatial decision support system for the selection of an overhead electrical transmission line corridor.

This dissertation presents research into the possibility of using GIS Spatial Analysis and Multi-Criteria Decision Making to determine a corridor for electric overhead transmission power line routing. The research described in this dissertation examines the feasibility of developing a spatial decision support system to select an overhead transmission line corridor. This support system could also be used to perform scenario analysis. The selection model evaluates multiple environmental, ecological, electrical, aesthetic, engineering and socio-economic criteria spatially. Each criterion is weighted using a pair-wise comparison and is presented as a GIS layer. A suitability map is derived from the weighted layers using a weighted linear combination. A least cost path that represents the corridor most likely to contain the optimum route for an overhead electrical transmission line is derived from the suitability map

Finishing the euchromatic sequence of the human genome

The sequence of the human genome encodes the genetic instructions for human physiology, as well as rich information about human evolution. In 2001, the International Human Genome Sequencing Consortium reported a draft sequence of the euchromatic portion of the human genome. Since then, the international collaboration has worked to convert this draft into a genome sequence with high accuracy and nearly complete coverage. Here, we report the result of this finishing process. The current genome sequence (Build 35) contains 2.85 billion nucleotides interrupted by only 341 gaps. It covers ∼99% of the euchromatic genome and is accurate to an error rate of ∼1 event per 100,000 bases. Many of the remaining euchromatic gaps are associated with segmental duplications and will require focused work with new methods. The near-complete sequence, the first for a vertebrate, greatly improves the precision of biological analyses of the human genome including studies of gene number, birth and death. Notably, the human enome seems to encode only 20,000-25,000 protein-coding genes. The genome sequence reported here should serve as a firm foundation for biomedical research in the decades ahead