Are there nonverbal cues to commitment? An exploratory study using the zero-acquaintance video presentation paradigm

Altruism is difficult to explain evolutionarily if subtle cheaters exist in a population (Trivers, 1971). A pathway to the evolutionary maintenance of cooperation is nonverbal altruist-detection. One adaptive advantage of nonverbal altruist-detection is the formation of trustworthy division of labour partnerships (Frank, 1988). Three studies were designed to test a fundamental assumption behind altruistic partner preference models. In the first experiment perceivers (blind with respect to target altruism level) made assessments of video-clips depicting self-reported altruists and self-reported non-altruists. Video-clips were designed with attempts to control for attractiveness, expressiveness, role-playing ability, and verbal content. Overall perceivers rated altruists as more “helpful” than non-altruists. In a second experiment manipulating the payoffs for cooperation, perceivers (blind with respect to payoff condition and altruism level) assessed altruists who were helping others as more “concerned” and “attentive” than non-altruists. However perceivers assessed the same altruists as less “concerned” and “attentive” than non-altruists when the payoffs were for self. This finding suggests that perceivers are sensitive to nonverbal indicators of selfishness. Indeed the self-reported non-altruists were more likely than self-reported altruists to retain resources for themselves in an objective measure of cooperative tendencies (i.e. a dictator game). In a third study altruists and non-altruists’ facial expressions were analyzed. The smile emerged as a consistent cue to altruism. In addition, altruists exhibited more expressions that are under involuntary control (e.g., orbicularis oculi) compared to non-altruists. Findings Are there nonverbal cues to commitment? suggest that likelihood to cooperate is signaled nonverbally and the putative cues may be under involuntary control as predicted by Frank (1988)

Smile asymmetries and reputation as reliable indicators of likelihood to cooperate: An evolutionary analysis

Cooperating with individuals whose altruism is not motivated by genuine prosocial emotions could have been costly in ancestral division of labour partnerships. How do humans ‘know’ whether or not an individual has the prosocial emotions committing future cooperation? Frank (1988) has hypothesized two pathways for altruist-detection: (a) facial expressions of emotions signalling character; and (b) gossip regarding the target individual’s reputation. Detecting non-verbal cues signalling commitment to cooperate may be one way to avoid the costs of exploitation. Spontaneous smiles while cooperating may be reliable index cues because of the physiological constraints controlling the neural pathways mediating involuntary emotional expressions. Specifically, it is hypothesized that individuals whose help is mediated by a genuine sympathy will express involuntary smiles (which are observably different from posed smiles). To investigate this idea, 38 participants played dictator games (i.e. a unilateral resource allocation task) against cartoon faces with a benevolent emotional expression (i.e. concern furrows and smile). The faces were presented with information regarding reputation (e.g. descriptions of an altruistic character vs. a non-altruistic character). Half of the sample played against icons with symmetrical smiles (representing a spontaneous smile) while the other half played against asymmetrically smiling icons (representing a posed smile). Icons described as having altruistic motives received more resources than icons described as self-interested helpers. Faces with symmetrical smiles received more resources than faces with asymmetrical smiles. These results suggest that reputation and smile asymmetry influence the likelihood of cooperation and thus may be reliable cues to altruism. These cues may allow for altruists to garner more resources in division of labour situations

The integrative framework for the behavioural sciences has already been discovered, and it is the adaptationist approach

The adaptationist framework is necessary and sufficient for unifying the social and natural sciences. Gintis’s “beliefs, preferences, and constraints” (BPC) model compares unfavorably to this framework because it lacks criteria for determining special design, incorrectly assumes that standard evolutionary theory predicts individual rationality maximisation, does not adequately recognize the impact of psychological mechanisms on culture, and is mute on the behavioural implications of intragenomic conflict

Facial symmetry is positively associated with self-reported extraversion

Fink et al. (2005) reported significant associations between facial symmetry and scores on some of the “big five” personality dimensions derived from self-report data. In particular, they identified a positive association between facial symmetry and extraversion, but negative associations between facial symmetry and both agreeableness and openness. Fink et al. (2005) used a measure of facial symmetry based on analysis of the central region of each face. In the present study we attempted to replicate these findings with a much larger sample (N = 294) and using a landmark-based measure of facial symmetry that includes peripheral regions of the face. In both sexes, we found a significant positive association between self-reported extraversion and facial symmetry but were unable to replicate any of the other previously reported associations. Nevertheless, the positive association between symmetry and extraversion provides further support for the idea that facial appearance could predict personality and therefore makes it possible for some personality attributions to be “data driven”, i.e. driven by properties of the target

Primary aldosteronism: molecular medicine meets public health.

Primary aldosteronism is the most common single cause of hypertension and is potentially curable when only one adrenal gland is the culprit. The importance of primary aldosteronism to public health derives from its high prevalence but huge under-diagnosis (estimated to be <1% of all affected individuals), despite the consequences of poor blood pressure control by conventional therapy and enhanced cardiovascular risk. This state of affairs is attributable to the fact that the tools used for diagnosis or treatment are still those that originated in the 1970-1990s. Conversely, molecular discoveries have transformed our understanding of adrenal physiology and pathology. Many molecules and processes associated with constant adrenocortical renewal and interzonal metamorphosis also feature in aldosterone-producing adenomas and aldosterone-producing micronodules. The adrenal gland has one of the most significant rates of non-silent somatic mutations, with frequent selection of those driving autonomous aldosterone production, and distinct clinical presentations and outcomes for most genotypes. The disappearance of aldosterone synthesis and cells from most of the adult human zona glomerulosa is the likely driver of the mutational success that causes aldosterone-producing adenomas, but insights into the pathways that lead to constitutive aldosterone production and cell survival may open up opportunities for novel therapies

Tuning remote GPU virtualization for InfiniBand networks

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/ 10.1007/s11227-016-1754-3In the past few years, a tendency towards using InfiniBand networks to interconnect high performance computing clusters can be observed. Thus, most of the supercomputers appearing in the TOP500 list either use Ethernet or InfiniBand interconnects. Regarding the latter, the complexity of the InfiniBand programming API (i.e., InfiniBand Verbs) makes it difficult for applications to get the maximum performance of these networks. In this paper we expose how we have tuned a remote GPU virtualization framework whose communications module is implemented using InfiniBand Verbs. The net result is a noticeable increase in the performance of this framework, significantly reducing the gap between remote and local GPUs.This work was funded by the Spanish MINECO and FEDER funds under Grant TIN2012-38341-C04-01. Authors are also grateful for the generous support provided by Mellanox Technologies.Reaño González, C.; Silla Jiménez, F. (2016). Tuning remote GPU virtualization for InfiniBand networks. Journal of Supercomputing. 72(12):4520-4545. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11227-016-1754-3S452045457212InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) (2015) [Online]. http://www.infinibandta.orgDAmbrosia J (2014) Ethernet in the TOP500 [Online]. http://www.scientificcomputing.com/blogs/2014/07/ethernet-top500TOP500 Supercomputer Sites (2014) [Online]. http://www.top500.org/InfiniBand Trade Association (IBTA) (2007) The InfiniBand Trade Association SpecificationKerr G (2011) Dissecting a small infiniband application using the verbs API. CoRR abs/1105.1827 [Online]. arxiv:1105.1827Woodruff B, Hefty S, Dreier R, Rosenstock H (2005) Introduction to the infiniband core software. In: Linux symposium, vol 2Bedeir T (2010) Building an RDMA-capable application with ib verbs, Technical report, HPC Advisory Council, Tech. Rep., 2010. http://www.hpcadvisorycouncil.com/pdf/building-an-rdma-capable-application-with-ib-verbs.pdfLiu Q, Russell RD (2014) A performance study of infiniband fourteen data rate (fdr). In: Proceedings of the High performance computing symposium, ser. HPC ’14. San Diego, CA, USA: Society for Computer Simulation International, 2014, pp 16:1–16:10 [Online]. http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=2663510.2663526Hjelm N (2014) Optimizing one-sided operations in open mpi. In: Proceedings of the 21st European MPI Users’ Group Meeting, ser. EuroMPI/ASIA ’14. New York, NY, USA: ACM, 2014, pp 123:123–123:124 [Online]. http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2642769.2642792Subramoni H, Hamidouche K, Venkatesh A, Chakraborty S, Panda D (2014) Designing mpi library with dynamic connected transport (dct) of infiniband: Early experiences. In: Kunkel J , Ludwig T, Meuer H (eds) Supercomputing, ser. lecture notes in computer science. Springer International Publishing, 2014, vol 8488, pp 278–295 [Online]. doi: 10.1007/978-3-319-07518-1_18Unified Communication X (UCX), 2015 [Online]. http://www.openucx.orgNVIDIA (2014) CUDA C Programming Guide 6.5Peña AJ, Reaño C, Silla F, Mayo R, Quintana-Ortí ES, Duato J (2014) A complete and efficient cuda-sharing solution for hpc clusters. Parallel Comput 40(10):574– 588 [Online]. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0167819114001227Reaño C, Silla F, Gimeno AC, Peña AJ, Mayo R, Quintana-Ortí ES, Duato J (2015) Improving the user experience of the rcuda remote GPU virtualization framework. Concurr Comput Pract Exp 27(14)3746–3770 [Online]. doi: 10.1002/cpe.3409Prades J, Reaño C, Silla F (2016) Flexible access to CUDA accelerators from Xen virtual machines in InfiniBand clusters using rCUDA. In: 21st ACM SIGPLAN symposium on principles and practice of parallel programming, PPoPP 2016Iserte S, Gimeno AC, Mayo R, Quintana-Ortí ES, Silla F, Duato J, Reaño C, Prades J (2014) SLURM support for remote GPU virtualization: implementation and performance study. In: 26th IEEE international symposium on computer architecture and high performance computing, SBAC-PAD, 2014, pp 318–325 [Online]. doi: 10.1109/SBAC-PAD.2014.49NVIDIA (2014) NVIDIA CUDA Samples 6.5Che S, Boyer M, Meng J, Tarjan D, Sheaffer J, Lee S-H, Skadron K (2009) Rodinia: a benchmark suite for heterogeneous computing. In: Workload Characterization, 2009. IISWC 2009. IEEE international symposium on, 2009, pp 44–54University of Tennessee, MAGMA: matrix algebra on GPU and multicore architectures [Online]. http://icl.cs.utk.edu/magmaBosma W, Cannon J, Playoust C (1997) The Magma algebra system. I. The user language. Computational algebra and number theory (London, 1993). 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A retrospective cohort study examining STI testing and perinatal records demonstrates reproductive health burden of chlamydia and gonorrhea.

Adverse reproductive health outcomes, such as pelvic inflammatory disease, ectopic pregnancy, and tubal factor infertility, have been associated with Chlamydia trachomatis and Neisseria gonorrhoea infections. These reproductive health outcomes could be complemented by measuring subsequent pregnancies to assess impact on fertility. The study design was a cohort study of women in Queensland (QLD), Australia, using data linkage methods to link chlamydia and/or gonorrhea testing records (including an unexposed group undergoing full blood count tests) (2000 and 2005) with the QLD Perinatal Registry (2000 to 2013). The cohort included 132 962 women, with 69 533 records of pregnancies. Women in the exposed group, with no prior pregnancy, had a reduced odds of a pregnancy during the follow up of the study (20 year old (at 2005) aOR 0.91 95% CI 0.87-0.95, and 25 year old aOR 0.71 95% CI 0.68-0.75). Women in the exposed group with a prior pregnancy had increased odds of pregnancy during the follow up of the study (20 year old (at 2005) aOR 1.72 95% CI 1.59-1.86, and 25 year old aOR 1.35 95% CI 1.26-1.45). Our data provides further evidence at a population level of the significant impact on reproductive outcomes associated with chlamydia and gonorrhea

The Economic Archaeology of Roman Economic Performance

Recent years have witnessed a paradigm shift in the study of the Roman economy. Methodologically modern economic analysis is now far more acceptable than it once was, and archaeology has become the major source of empirical data for many questions. On the substantive side there is now a far clearer appreciation of the major changes that the Roman economy underwent, with substantial growth of population and aggregate production and even some improvements in standard of living, but followed by equally dramatic decline. This economic success was not limited to the imperial core, but also extended to the provinces

The spirit of sport: the case for criminalisation of doping in the UK

This article examines public perceptions of doping in sport, critically evaluates the effectiveness of current anti-doping sanctions and proposes the criminalisation of doping in sport in the UK as part of a growing global movement towards such criminalisation at national level. Criminalising doping is advanced on two main grounds: as a stigmatic deterrent and as a form of retributive punishment enforced through the criminal justice system. The ‘spirit of sport’ defined by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) as being based on the values of ethics, health and fair-play is identified as being undermined by the ineffectiveness of existing anti-doping policy in the current climate of doping revelations, and is assessed as relevant to public perceptions and the future of sport as a whole. The harm-reductionist approach permitting the use of certain performance enhancing drugs (PEDs) is considered as an alternative to anti-doping, taking into account athlete psychology, the problems encountered in containing doping in sport through anti-doping measures and the effect of these difficulties on the ‘spirit of sport’. This approach is dismissed in favour of criminalising doping in sport based on the offence of fraud. It will be argued that the criminalisation of doping could act as a greater deterrent than existing sanctions imposed by International Federations, and, when used in conjunction with those sanctions, will raise the overall ‘price’ of doping. The revelations of corruption within the existing system of self-governance within sport have contributed to a disbelieving public and it will be argued that the criminalisation of doping in sport could assist in satisfying the public that justice is being done and in turn achieve greater belief in the truth of athletic performances

Cellular structure of qq-Brauer algebras

In this paper we consider the $q$-Brauer algebra over $R$ a commutative noetherian domain. We first construct a new basis for $q$-Brauer algebras, and we then prove that it is a cell basis, and thus these algebras are cellular in the sense of Graham and Lehrer. In particular, they are shown to be an iterated inflation of Hecke algebras of type $A_{n-1}.$ Moreover, when $R$ is a field of arbitrary characteristic, we determine for which parameters the $q$-Brauer algebras are quasi-heredity. So the general theory of cellular algebras and quasi-hereditary algebras applies to $q$-Brauer algebras. As a consequence, we can determine all irreducible representations of $q$-Brauer algebras by linear algebra methods