Presents findings from a sociological and psychological study of rumor, gossip, and hearsay, showing that the distribution patterns of these communication forms closely parallel characteristics and rules of economic exchange, and that the consumption of rumor and gossip corresponds to the consumption of goods and services. Recommendations and guidelines for rumor control centers based on World War II clinics are presented.

Euripides, as Rene Girard observes of Shakespeare, "in the portrayal of certain characters seems to oscillate between two opposite, really incompatible poles. On the one hand he makes these characters quite distinctive, especially as 'villains'; on the other hand he shows these same characters behaving and thinking exactly like their antagonists."1 Thus in the Hippolytus, quite different characters come to act like their opponents in the course of the play's action. The young virgin Hippolytus comes to sound and act like the mature, sexually experienced Phaedra; Phaedra like Hippolytus; and Theseus like Hippolytus. Even Artemis resembles her opposite, Aphrodite, at the play's end. Furthermore, all characters seek eventually to revenge themselves reciprocally on one another, and in this reciprocity arises the play's disaster. I shall attempt to show how these two processes unfold in Euripides' Hippolytus.

When Laura Levitt, my friend and colleague at Temple University, asked me to participate in this forum, my first response was a categorical no. Laura and I have talked about our different perspectives about postmodern approaches to Jewish feminism infrequently over the last several years. The conversations always end with us restating our differences, agreeing to disagree. Because my feelings are so strong about this subject, I was reluctant to have this conversation in public. Yet Laura persuaded me to consider participation, in full knowledge that this would be an airing of our differences, and I have taken the risk to do so. My contribution, a letter to Laura, is an effort to bring my love for her into the context of what is, for me, a passionate and acrimonious intellectual debate that has important implicationsfor the future ofJewish feminism.

BACKGROUND: The Master Catalog is a collection of evolutionary families, including multiple sequence alignments, phylogenetic trees and reconstructed ancestral sequences, for all protein-sequence modules encoded by genes in GenBank. It can therefore support large-scale genomic surveys, of which we present here The Adaptive Evolution Database (TAED). In TAED, potential examples of positive adaptation are identified by high values for the normalized ratio of nonsynonymous to synonymous nucleotide substitution rates (KA/KS values) on branches of an evolutionary tree between nodes representing reconstructed ancestral sequences. RESULTS: Evolutionary trees and reconstructed ancestral sequences were extracted from the Master Catalog for every subtree containing proteins from the Chordata only or the Embryophyta only. Branches with high KA/KS values were identified. These represent candidate episodes in the history of the protein family when the protein may have undergone positive selection, where the mutant form conferred more fitness than the ancestral form. Such episodes are frequently associated with change in function. An unexpectedly large number of families (between 10% and 20% of those families examined) were found to have at least one branch with high KA/KS values above arbitrarily chosen cut-offs (1 and 0.6). Most of these survived a robustness test and were collected into TAED. CONCLUSIONS: TAED is a raw resource for bioinformaticists interested in data mining and for experimental evolutionists seeking candidate examples of adaptive evolution for further experimental study. It can be expanded to include other evolutionary information (for example changes in gene regulation or splicing) placed in a phylogenetic perspective.

A report on the 18th Congress of the European Society for Evolutionary Biology (ESEB), Aarhus, Denmark, 20-25 August, 2001.

The proteome is the complete set of proteins in an organism. It is considerably larger and more complex than the genome - the collection of genes that encodes these proteins. Proteomics deals with the qualitative and quantitative study of the proteome under physiological and pathological conditions (e.g., after exposure to alcohol, which causes major changes in numerous proteins of different cell types). To map large proteomes such as the human proteome, proteins from discrete tissues, cells, cell components, or biological fluids are first separated by high-resolution two-dimensional electrophoresis and multidimensional liquid chromatography. Then, individual proteins are identified by mass spectrometry. The huge amount of data acquired using these techniques is analyzed and assembled by fast computers and bioinformatics tools. Using these methods, as well as other technological advances, alcohol researchers can gain a better understanding of how alcohol globally influences protein structure and function, protein-protein interactions, and protein networks. This knowledge ultimately will assist in the early diagnosis and prognosis of alcoholism and the discovery of new drug targets and medications for treatment.