Serbia orders integrated ID system

The Republic of Serbia has ordered a US$21 million integrated identification system that will be used for both criminal and civil identification purposes. The system will include an automated fingerprint identification system (AFIS), facial and photo imaging and livescan fingerprint and palmprint scanning technologies.This is a short news story only. Visit www.compseconline.com for the latest computer security news.     

On some generative orders of behaviour

The sociobiological fashion has for a long time discouraged the development of theories of the immediate causation of behaviour. It is only recently that new approaches are being developed to improve on the classical ethological theory originated by Lorenz and Tinbergen. One new departure is behavioural field theory (BFT) which brings back the concept of energy in behaviour, without being susceptible to the drawbacks of the energy or fuel concept of classical theory. In this paper the new theory is explained in some detail and it is shown to be illuminating, predictive and testable in examples of play-like and territorial behaviour.     

Chronobiologic serial sections of several orders

The chronobiologic serial section is described. Its applicability to the analysis of nonequidistant data is emphasized. Its ability to detect and quantify multiple components is discussed and exemplified on simulated series with various amounts of additive Gaussian noise. This least-squares method is discussed in the context of a number of complementary procedures such as complex demodulation and linear-nonlinear least-squares rhythmometry.     

Determination of the autocorrelation orders of proteins

A statistical analysis of the autocorrelation characteristics of active polypeptides has been carried out by means of the correlogram method. It is shown that the amino acid sequences of the analysed proteins, considered as a whole, are autocorrelated and that the correlograms characterize each protein reflecting its three-dimensional structure.     

Evolution of mitochondrial gene orders in echinoderms

A comprehensive analysis of the mitochondrial gene orders of all previously published and two novel Antedon mediterranea (Crinoidea) and Ophiura albida (Ophiuroidea) complete echinoderm mitochondrial genomes shows that all major types of rearrangement operations are necessary to explain the evolution of mitochondrial genomes. In addition to protein coding genes we include all tRNA genes as well as the control region in our analysis. Surprisingly, 7 of the 16 genomes published in the GenBank database contain misannotations, mostly unannotated tRNAs and/or mistakes in the orientation of tRNAs, which we have corrected here. Although the gene orders of mt genomes appear very different, only 8 events are necessary to explain the evolutionary history of echinoderms with the exception of the ophiuroids. Only two of these rearrangements are inversions, while we identify three tandem-duplication-random-loss events and three transpositions.