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

Toward an Operational Theory of Media

Computer science currently lacks a widely applicable definition for the concept of a medium. Most existing definitions are implicit and treat data types, such as video streams, text, and digital audio, as examples of media. This viewpoint does a poor job of discriminating between many pairs of media, such as 2D static graphics and 2D animation, which share the same set of data types. Furthermore, this viewpoint is not suitable as a conceptual basis for software services that can be configured to serve many different media. This paper presents a new, operational model of media. This model asserts that a medium is a triple M = (T; D;O), where T is a set of primitive data types (such as video streams or spline paths), D is a set of dimensions in which layout is performed, and O is a set of formatting operations with typed parameters. The model is sufficiently rich to discriminate between all commonly used media and can also be used to make statements about the extent of differences betwee..

Representing Appearance Information in a World of Interchangeable Documents

Document processing researchers have long been interested in easing the exchange of documents between people using different software. The central results of this research have been interlingua for structured documents which represent logical structure and content while ignoring presentation. Adoption of these interlingua has been slow because of the lack of an acceptable standard for specifying presentation. Proteus is a presentation specification system for structured documents. It provides a uniform specification language for all media and also supports synchronized multiple presentations, allowing the user to view the same document in several styles simultaneously even while the document is being edited. Technology like that provided by Proteus is critical if document interlingua are to be widely adopted. Research on Proteus is also relevant to intelligent software systems. It provides a higher-level model of presentation that may be more appropriate for reasoning about the present..