Search

Designed specifically to accompany Introduction to Mythology, Fourth Edition, Now Playing: Learning Mythology Through Film uses a mass medium that is interactive, familiar, and easily accessible to illustrate how mythological concepts play out in a variety of situations. Integrating clips and descriptions from thirty-eight films and television episodes, this vibrant resource includes both classics and recently released material. With Now Playing, your students will learn about the mythological concepts presented in such films as The Wizard of Oz (1939), Oedipus Rex (1967), The Matrix (1999), Serenity (2005), and Clash of the Titans (2010). This edition features two new feature films, Stargate (1994) and The King of Masks (1996), and three new TV episodes, from Daniel Boone (1970), Once Upon a Time (2012), and Marvel's Agents of Shield (2014). Each entry includes details about the mythological concepts featured within the film or TV episode, a brief synopsis and questions for discussion or written homework assignments.

Recent advances in next-generation sequencing have enabled high-throughput determination of biological sequences in microbial communities, also known as microbiomes. The large volume of data now presents the challenge of how to extract knowledge—recognize patterns, find similarities, and find relationships—from complex mixtures of nucleic acid sequences currently being examined. In this chapter we review basic concepts as well as state-of-the-art techniques to analyze hundreds of samples which each contain millions of DNA and RNA sequences. We describe the general character of sequence data and describe some of the processing steps that prepare raw sequence data for inference. We then describe the process of extracting features from the data, assigning taxonomic and gene labels to the sequences. Then we review methods for cross-sample comparisons: (1) using similarity measures and ordination techniques to visualize and measure differences between samples and (2) feature selection and classification to select the most relevant features for discriminating between samples. Finally, in conclusion, we outline some open research problems and challenges left for future research.