420 research outputs found
Cost and Access Challenges: A Comparison of Experiences Between Uninsured and Privately Insured Adults Aged 55 to 64 With Seniors on Medicare
Examines trends in the prevalence of unmet medical needs or delayed care due to cost and problems paying medical bills or buying prescription drugs among uninsured and privately insured 55- to 64-year-olds compared with among Medicare beneficiaries
A Scientometric Prediction of the Discovery of the First Potentially Habitable Planet with a Mass Similar to Earth
The search for a habitable extrasolar planet has long interested scientists,
but only recently have the tools become available to search for such planets.
In the past decades, the number of known extrasolar planets has ballooned into
the hundreds, and with it the expectation that the discovery of the first
Earth-like extrasolar planet is not far off. Here we develop a novel metric of
habitability for discovered planets, and use this to arrive at a prediction for
when the first habitable planet will be discovered. Using a bootstrap analysis
of currently discovered exoplanets, we predict the discovery of the first
Earth-like planet to be announced in the first half of 2011, with the likeliest
date being early May 2011. Our predictions, using only the properties of
previously discovered exoplanets, accord well with external estimates for the
discovery of the first potentially habitable extrasolar planet, and highlights
the the usefulness of predictive scientometric techniques to understand the
pace of scientific discovery in many fields.Comment: 7 pages, 4 figures; accepted for publication in PLoS ON
The Rise of Fractional Scholarship
Highlights trends in fractional scholarship -- a distributed approach to part-time research and scholarship, for example, in the form of "citizen science" and crowdsourcing. Proposes an institution to harness the potential of unused expertise
Comparative Analysis of Networks of Phonologically Similar Words in English and Spanish
This is the publisher's version, also available electronically from http://www.mdpi.com/1099-4300/12/3/327.Previous network analyses of several languages revealed a unique set of structural characteristics. One of these characteristics—the presence of many smaller components (referred to as islands)—was further examined with a comparative analysis of the island constituents. The results showed that Spanish words in the islands tended to be phonologically and semantically similar to each other, but English words in the islands tended only to be phonologically similar to each other. The results of this analysis yielded hypotheses about language processing that can be tested with psycholinguistic experiments, and offer insight into cross-language differences in processing that have been previously observed
Superlinear Scaling for Innovation in Cities
Superlinear scaling in cities, which appears in sociological quantities such
as economic productivity and creative output relative to urban population size,
has been observed but not been given a satisfactory theoretical explanation.
Here we provide a network model for the superlinear relationship between
population size and innovation found in cities, with a reasonable range for the
exponent.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figures, 1 table, submitted to Phys. Rev. E; references
corrected; figures corrected, references and brief discussion adde
Contagion of Cooperation in Static and Fluid Social Networks
Cooperation is essential for successful human societies. Thus, understanding how cooperative and selfish behaviors spread from person to person is a topic of theoretical and practical importance. Previous laboratory experiments provide clear evidence of social contagion in the domain of cooperation, both in fixed networks and in randomly shuffled networks, but leave open the possibility of asymmetries in the spread of cooperative and selfish behaviors. Additionally, many real human interaction structures are dynamic: we often have control over whom we interact with. Dynamic networks may differ importantly in the goals and strategic considerations they promote, and thus the question of how cooperative and selfish behaviors spread in dynamic networks remains open. Here, we address these questions with data from a social dilemma laboratory experiment. We measure the contagion of both cooperative and selfish behavior over time across three different network structures that vary in the extent to which they afford individuals control over their network ties. We find that in relatively fixed networks, both cooperative and selfish behaviors are contagious. In contrast, in more dynamic networks, selfish behavior is contagious, but cooperative behavior is not: subjects are fairly likely to switch to cooperation regardless of the behavior of their neighbors. We hypothesize that this insensitivity to the behavior of neighbors in dynamic networks is the result of subjects’ desire to attract new cooperative partners: even if many of one’s current neighbors are defectors, it may still make sense to switch to cooperation. We further hypothesize that selfishness remains contagious in dynamic networks because of the well-documented willingness of cooperators to retaliate against selfishness, even when doing so is costly. These results shed light on the contagion of cooperative behavior in fixed and fluid networks, and have implications for influence-based interventions aiming at increasing cooperative behavior
The Structure of Phonological Networks Across Multiple Languages
The network characteristics based on the phonological similarities in the
lexicons of several languages were examined. These languages differed widely in
their history and linguistic structure, but commonalities in the network
characteristics were observed. These networks were also found to be different
from other networks studied in the literature. The properties of these networks
suggest explanations for various aspects of linguistic processing and hint at
deeper organization within human language.Comment: 5 pages, 3 figures, 2 tables, submitted to Phys. Rev.
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