Description: This article discusses RICHEST, a web server for richness estimation in biological data. Richness is defined as the number of distinct species or classes in a sample or population. Although richness estimation is an important practice, it requires mathematical and computational methods that are challenging to understand and implement. The authors have developed a web server, RICHness ESTimator (RICHEST), which implements three non-parametric statistical methods for richness estimation. Its user-friendly web interface allows users to analyze and compare their data conveniently over the web.

Description: Front cover of the fall 2012 issue of The Hexagon, which features an image of the "ring of fire" that occurred during the annular eclipse on May 20, 2012. The photograph was taken in Brownfield, Texas a few minutes before sunset. The inside cover contains a table of contents, a staff list, an editorial, and details about the cover photograph.

Description: This article discusses the role of hypoxia in the evolution and development of the cardiovascular system. How multicellular organisms obtain and use oxygen and other substrates has evolved over hundreds of millions of years in parallel with the evolution of oxygen-delivery systems. A steady supply of oxygen is critical to the existence of organisms that depend on oxygen as a primary source of fuel (i.e., those that live by aerobic metabolism). Not surprisingly, a number of mechanisms have evolved to defend against oxygen deprivation. This review highlights evolutionary and developmental aspects of O(2) delivery to allow understanding of adaptive responses to O(2) deprivation (hypoxia). First, the authors consider how the drive for more efficient oxygen delivery from the heart to the periphery may have shaped the evolution of the cardiovascular system, with particular attention to the routing of oxygenated and deoxygenated blood in the cardiac outlet. Then the authors consider the role of O(2) in the morphogenesis and the cardiovascular system of animals of increasing size and complexity. The authors conclude by suggesting areas for future research regarding the role of oxygen deprivation and oxidative stress in the normal development of the heart and vascular or in the pathogenesis of ...

Description: This article discusses Salman Rushdie and reading the postcolonial texts in the era of empire. Using the first three novels of Salman Rushdie, this essay articulates a different conceptual framework for reading the postcolonial texts. It is a known fact that in most metropolitan readings of the global periphery, the text is made to stand in for an entire culture. Inundation, a technique introduced in this essay, ensures a more complex reading by inserting silenced knowledge and histories in our reading to challenge any reductive representations of the global periphery. An inundated text, the author suggests, becomes a better tool in teaching the complexities of the postcolony to the metropolitan audiences, while also taking the reader beyond the politics of representation. It is hoped that this essay will invite other scholars to expand on this concept (inundation), for a new mode of reading is absolutely necessary in the politically charged world of today's empire.

Description: This article discusses scaling detection in time series. The methods currently used to determine the scaling exponent of a complex dynamic process described by a time series are based on the numerical evaluation of variance. This means that all of them can be safely applied only to the case where ordinary statistical properties hold true even if strange kinetics are involved. The authors illustrate a method of statistical analysis based on the Shannon entropy of the diffusion process generated by the time series, called diffusion entropy analysis (DEA). The authors adopt artificial Gauss and Lévy time series, as prototypes of ordinary and anomalous statistics, respectively, and the authors analyze them with the DEA and four ordinary methods of analysis, some of which are very popular. The authors show that the DEA determines the correct scaling exponent even when the statistical properties, as well as the dynamic properties, are anomalous. The other four methods produce correct results in the Gauss case but fail to detect the correct scaling in the case of Lévy statistics.