This book gives a general view of sequence analysis, the statistical study of successions of states or events. It includes innovative contributions on life course studies, transitions into and out of employment, contemporaneous and historical careers, and political trajectories. The approach presented in this book is now central to the life-course perspective and the study of social processes more generally. This volume promotes the dialogue between approaches to sequence analysis that developed separately, within traditions contrasted in space and disciplines. It includes the latest developments in sequential concepts, coding, atypical datasets and time patterns, optimal matching and alternative algorithms, survey optimization, and visualization. Field studies include original sequential material related to parenting in 19th-century Belgium, higher education and work in Finland and Italy, family formation before and after German reunification, French Jews persecuted in occupied France, long-term trends in electoral participation, and regime democratization. Overall the book reassesses the classical uses of sequences and it promotes new ways of collecting, formatting, representing and processing them. The introduction provides basic sequential concepts and tools, as well as a history of the method. Chapters are presented in a way that is both accessible to the beginner and informative to the expert.

The intent of these notes is to provide an appreciation of sequencing theory, and to develop an awareness of the combinatorial aspects of sequencing problems. An under standing of the ideas and concepts presented in these notes will provide the necessary background to enable further study in this rapidly growing subject. These notes have been used as a part of one-semester C0urses in Operations Research for both senior and first-year graduate students. Following the introductory chapter, several classes of scheduling models are discussed in Chapter 2. Chapter 3 is devoted to discussing the characteristics of several types of criteria that have been proposed in the literature. Because of the importance of the combinatorial properties in the analysis of scheduling models, various combinatorial aspects are treated in Chapter 4. The primary objective of such a treatment is to provide the reader with an insight into the nature of the problem. Due to the tremendous number of sequences involved, and the fact that many sequences have the same schedule time, statistical sampling has elicited a great deal of theoretical studies. Two such studies, one of which has evolved from my research, are reported in Chapter 5. Many references to basic sources are cited at the end of each chapter to provide a guide for further readings. I am indebted to Professor Santa Arora of the University of Minnesota who intro duced me to the subject during my graduate career.

Description of the seductions - and snares - of self-managed communist or, in other words, anarchist society. This title, an edited collection of original essays on "Le Guin's The Dispossessed", represents an exploration of the political ramifications of this work by a wide interdisciplinary swath of scholars from around the world.

Biomolecular sequence comparison is the origin of bioinformatics. This book gives a complete in-depth treatment of the study of sequence comparison. A comprehensive introduction is followed by a focus on alignment algorithms and techniques, proceeded by a discussion of the theory. The book examines alignment methods and techniques, features a new issue of sequence comparison - the spaced seed technique, addresses several new flexible strategies for coping with various scoring schemes, and covers the theory on the significance of high-scoring segment pairs between two unalignment sequences. Useful appendices on basic concepts in molecular biology, primer in statistics and software for sequence alignment are included in this reader-friendly text, as well as chapter-ending exercise and research questions A state-of-the-art study of sequence alignment and homology search, this is an ideal reference for advanced students studying bioinformatics and will appeal to biologists who wish to know how to use homology search tools.

Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed is of interest to political theorists partly because of its association with anarchism and partly because it is thought to represent a turning point in the history of utopian/dystopian political thought and literature and of science fiction. Published in 1974, it marked a revival of utopianism after decades of dystopian writing. According to this widely accepted view The Dispossessed represents a new kind of literary utopia, which Tom Moylan calls a 'critical utopia.' The present work challenges this reading of The Dispossessed and its place in the histories of utopian/dystopian literature and science fiction. It explores the difference between traditional literary utopia and novels and suggests that The Dispossessed is not a literary utopia but a novel about utopianism in politics. Le Guin's concerns have more to do with those of the novelists of the 19th century writing in the tradition of European Realism than they do with the science fiction or utopian literature. It also claims that her theory of the novel has an affinity with the ancient Greek tragedy. This implies that there is a conservatism in Le Guin's work as a creative writer, or as a novelist, which fits uneasily with her personal commitment to anarchism.

Sequence - Evolution - Function is an introduction to the computational approaches that play a critical role in the emerging new branch of biology known as functional genomics. The book provides the reader with an understanding of the principles and approaches of functional genomics and of the potential and limitations of computational and experimental approaches to genome analysis. Sequence - Evolution - Function should help bridge the "digital divide" between biologists and computer scientists, allowing biologists to better grasp the peculiarities of the emerging field of Genome Biology and to learn how to benefit from the enormous amount of sequence data available in the public databases. The book is non-technical with respect to the computer methods for genome analysis and discusses these methods from the user's viewpoint, without addressing mathematical and algorithmic details. Prior practical familiarity with the basic methods for sequence analysis is a major advantage, but a reader without such experience will be able to use the book as an introduction to these methods. This book is perfect for introductory level courses in computational methods for comparative and functional genomics.