Recent years have seen the emergence of several “third-generation” sequencing platforms, each of which aims to address shortcomings of standard next-generation short-read sequencing by producing data that capture long-range information, thereby allowing us to access regions of the genome that are inaccessible with short-reads alone. These technologies either produce physically longer reads typically with higher error rates or instead capture long-range information at low error rates by virtue of read “barcodes” as in 10x Genomics’ Chromium platform. As with virtually all sequencing data, sequence alignment for third-generation sequencing data is the foundation on which all downstream analyses are based. Here we introduce a latent variable model for improving barcoded read alignment, thereby enabling improved downstream genotyping and phasing. We demonstrate the feasibility of this approach through developing EMerAld— or EMA for short— and testing it on the barcoded short-reads produced by 10x’s sequencing technologies. EMA not only produces more accurate alignments, but unlike other methods also assigns interpretable probabilities to the alignments it generates. We show that genotypes called from EMA’s alignments contain over 30% fewer false positives than those called from Lariat’s (the current 10x alignment tool), with a fewer number of false negatives, on datasets of NA12878 and NA24385 as compared to NIST GIAB gold standard variant calls. Moreover, we demonstrate that EMA is able to effectively resolve alignments in regions containing nearby homologous elements— a particularly challenging problem in read mapping— through the introduction of a novel statistical binning optimization framework, which allows us to find variants in the pharmacogenomically important CYP2D region that go undetected when using Lariat or BWA. Lastly, we show that EMA’s alignments improve phasing performance compared to Lariat’s in both NA12878 and NA24385, producing fewer switch/mismatch errors and larger phase blocks on average. EMA software and datasets used are available at http://ema.csail.mit.edu.

The purpose of this paper is to clarify the meaning of the concept of lifelong learning with the reference to its origin and development. First, the contemporary meaning of the lifelong learning is stated after which we discuss as to when, why and how the term was created. In that regard the difference is made between the term of lifelong learning as an idea and the term of lifelong learning as an educational policy concept. By using the content analysis method we identified the meaning of the concept of lifelong learning in a sample of eight key documents of the UNESCO, the OECD, the Council of Europe and the European Union within the two developmental phases, respectively. We then give the explanation of the terms similar to that of the lifelong learning so as to differentiate between them and the term of lifelong learning. We also examine the different orientations, i.e. positions of the concept of lifelong learning. Finally, we discuss the reasons as to why the older concept of lifelong education was replaced with the newer one - lifelong learning.

This paper shows how facade greening effects the heat resistance value on an old building. The facades of the building are made out of bricks. Two greened facades with different living wall systems have been researched and measured for one heating season. At the same time two not greened parts of the facade were measured. So far there does not exist any general method, how to calculate the U-value or particular heat resistance values of the greened facades. The method which is developed within this research-paper makes the comparison between the greened part of the facade and the not greened part possible. It turned out that there is a difference of the thermal resistance between greened and not greened parts of the facades in winter. The improvement by the greening will be discussed within this paper.

This paper presents an extension of research scope of the relationship between quality of service (QoS) and quality of experience (QoE), which is based on contribution of lower open system interconnection layers, such as physical and media access control, in overall QoS/QoE paradigm. Degradations that inevitably occur in transmission channel are an important reason for appearance of QoS distortion and therefore low values of video quality. Various channel quality indicators (CQIs) relating to domain of communication channel can be used for notification of different interferences in the channel. In order to extend the relationship between QoS and QoE to the transmission channel, the paper proposed the mathematical model that used CQI to estimate values of QoS indicators by using statistical analysis. The model was also expanded by objective video quality metrics in order to evaluate QoE. Verification of the model was checked by experimental method with consideration of Internet protocol television (IPTV) service delivery in Digital Subscriber Line network.