Unlike most aspects of life in North Korea, one's ability to shoot up through the company ranks is less contingent on background: even those with poor songbun, a caste system delineated by family background and political loyalty, can be a boss.
Ranging through philosophy, history, belles lettres and biography, one's responses and choices are much more personal, even capricious, and more contingent on education, background, experience and – yes – sheer prejudice.
Furthermore, given the rates of state transitions in traits, it is possible to assess whether changes in one trait are contingent upon the background state of another.
The posterior probability distributions of the eight transition parameters in the dependent evolutionary model were used to estimate whether the change in one state was contingent upon the background state of the other state [ 26, 28].
Further, different mutations in the same gene can have a different spectrum of pleiotropic effects [ 28, 71], and the mutational effects on any one trait can be contingent on genetic background and the environment [ 28, 33, 72].
The temporal dependence indicated that some state changes in NGP elements were contingent upon the background states of other elements, suggesting a temporal order of accumulation of the changes, summarized as a form of network.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06121.002 Context is the contingent sensory or cognitive background for a given situation.
In summary, mtDNA variation had sizeable effects on adult longevity but these effects were contingent upon the nuDNA background and were generally stronger in females compared to males.
Epistasis is the term used to describe such a situation, in which the positive or negative fitness impact of a mutational event is contingent upon the genetic background, and thus the past evolutionary history, of a protein.
Taken together, our results suggest that over-expressing c-FLIPL in T cells leads to the development of systemic lupus-like disease, which was contingent upon the BALB/c background.
