The impact of economic growth on the competitiveness of national elite sport systems

India is the extreme under - achiever in international sport competitions. This has only marginally changed with the recent promotion of the Indian economy into the league of BRIC nations. Whereas in China high growth rates have been accompanied by a huge im provement of its performance in international sport events a similar impact of extraordinary growth rates has been almost totally absent in the case of India. Is India an exception? Several econometric studies have shown that income per capita is a signifi cant variable explaining elite sport results such as results in the Olympic Games. From this stylized fact follows the hypothesis that 'above/below average' growth rates lead to relative improvements/deterioration of elite sport results (with a time lag)‟. This paper tests the hypothesis by means of a study of the correlation between growth in GNP per capita and growth in medal points in the sports of the Olympic Summer Games. The findings show no correlation. However, a detailed analysis of country evidenc e shows interesting trends and details. The paper concludes with tentative explanations for the findings including the contradictory country evidence

Error-prone polymerase activity causes multinucleotide mutations in humans

About 2% of human genetic polymorphisms have been hypothesized to arise via multinucleotide mutations (MNMs), complex events that generate SNPs at multiple sites in a single generation. MNMs have the potential to accelerate the pace at which single genes evolve and to confound studies of demography and selection that assume all SNPs arise independently. In this paper, we examine clustered mutations that are segregating in a set of 1,092 human genomes, demonstrating that MNMs become enriched as large numbers of individuals are sampled. We leverage the size of the dataset to deduce new information about the allelic spectrum of MNMs, estimating the percentage of linked SNP pairs that were generated by simultaneous mutation as a function of the distance between the affected sites and showing that MNMs exhibit a high percentage of transversions relative to transitions. These findings are reproducible in data from multiple sequencing platforms. Among tandem mutations that occur simultaneously at adjacent sites, we find an especially skewed distribution of ancestral and derived dinucleotides, with $\textrm{GC}\to \textrm{AA}$, $\textrm{GA}\to \textrm{TT}$ and their reverse complements making up 36% of the total. These same mutations dominate the spectrum of tandem mutations produced by the upregulation of low-fidelity Polymerase $\zeta$ in mutator strains of S. cerevisiae that have impaired DNA excision repair machinery. This suggests that low-fidelity DNA replication by Pol $\zeta$ is at least partly responsible for the MNMs that are segregating in the human population, and that useful information about the biochemistry of MNM can be extracted from ordinary population genomic data. We incorporate our findings into a mathematical model of the multinucleotide mutation process that can be used to correct phylogenetic and population genetic methods for the presence of MNMs

The maximum theoretical performance of unconcentrated solar photovoltaic and thermoelectric generator systems

The maximum efficiency for photovoltaic (PV) and thermoelectric generator (TEG) systems without concentration is investigated. Both a combined system where the TEG is mounted directly on the back of the PV and a tandem system where the incoming sunlight is split, and the short wavelength radiation is sent to the PV and the long wavelength to the TEG, are considered. An analytical model based on the Shockley-Queisser efficiency limit for PVs and the TEG figure of merit parameter $zT$ is presented. It is shown that for non-concentrated sunlight, even if the TEG operates at the Carnot efficiency and the PV performance is assumed independent of temperature, the maximum increase in efficiency is 4.5 percentage points (pp.) for the combined case and 1.8 pp. for the tandem case compared to a stand alone PV. For a more realistic case with a temperature dependent PV and a realistic TEG, the gain in performance is much lower. For the combined PV and TEG system it is shown that a minimum $zT$ value is needed in order for the system to be more efficient than a stand alone PV system.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figure

REPdenovo: Inferring De Novo Repeat Motifs from Short Sequence Reads.

Repeat elements are important components of eukaryotic genomes. One limitation in our understanding of repeat elements is that most analyses rely on reference genomes that are incomplete and often contain missing data in highly repetitive regions that are difficult to assemble. To overcome this problem we develop a new method, REPdenovo, which assembles repeat sequences directly from raw shotgun sequencing data. REPdenovo can construct various types of repeats that are highly repetitive and have low sequence divergence within copies. We show that REPdenovo is substantially better than existing methods both in terms of the number and the completeness of the repeat sequences that it recovers. The key advantage of REPdenovo is that it can reconstruct long repeats from sequence reads. We apply the method to human data and discover a number of potentially new repeats sequences that have been missed by previous repeat annotations. Many of these sequences are incorporated into various parasite genomes, possibly because the filtering process for host DNA involved in the sequencing of the parasite genomes failed to exclude the host derived repeat sequences. REPdenovo is a new powerful computational tool for annotating genomes and for addressing questions regarding the evolution of repeat families. The software tool, REPdenovo, is available for download at https://github.com/Reedwarbler/REPdenovo

“I ain’t Never Been Charged with Nothing!”: The Use of Falsetto Speech as a Linguistic Strategy of Indignation

This article examines falsetto speech in African American English (AAE). Although AAE is arguably the most studied dialect of American English, intonation in general and falsetto in particular are still poorly understood. The present study investigates falsetto phonation in a linguistic case study of “Michael,” a fourteen year old African American male from Washington, D.C. I focus on the quantitative patterning of falsetto in addition to inferring the multifaceted social meanings of falsetto from the interview discourse. For this purpose, the falsetto is measured in terms of maximum F0 (Hz), falsetto range (Hz), and duration of falsetto (ms) in various discursive positionings. The analysis reveals that the sociological interview, in which the focus is on eliciting specific information on a set list of topics rather than making the interviewee feel comfortable, causes misalignment between “Michael” and the interviewer. Falsetto occurs in 45 out of a total of 1680 intonational phrases, and while the generic meaning of falsetto is expressiveness, the analysis reveals also that the most extreme falsetto phonation occurs in forced self-positioning + repositioning with severe cases of oppositional alignment between “Michael” and the interviewer. In these cases, “Michael” conveys indignation towards the interview questions, while using falsetto as a proactive, agentive tool to reposition his status and thus change his discursively constructed place in the social world