ETHNOHISTORY AND PALEOPATHOLOGY OF A LATE WOODLAND DOG

In this paper, the author approaches a dog burial in the same aspect humans treat their burials. With this, the author was able to uncover what the pathological life history of the dog was. The author was able to support their hypothesis that dogs in the Late-Woodland culture served the role of high relative importance and also as symbols of religious meaning

Event-Related Theta Power during Lexical-Semantic Retrieval and Decision Conflict is Modulated by Alcohol Intoxication: Anatomically Constrained MEG

Language processing is commonly characterized by an event-related increase in theta power (4–7 Hz) in scalp EEG. Oscillatory brain dynamics underlying alcohol’s effects on language are poorly understood despite impairments on verbal tasks. To investigate how moderate alcohol intoxication modulates event-related theta activity during visual word processing, healthy social drinkers (N = 22, 11 females) participated in both alcohol (0.6 g/kg ethanol for men, 0.55 g/kg for women) and placebo conditions in a counterbalanced design. They performed a double-duty lexical decision task as they detected real words among non-words. An additional requirement to respond to all real words that also referred to animals induced response conflict. High density whole-head MEG signals and midline scalp EEG data were decomposed for each trial with Morlet wavelets. Each person’s reconstructed cortical surface was used to constrain noise-normalized distributed minimum norm inverse solutions for theta frequencies. Alcohol intoxication increased reaction time and marginally affected accuracy. The overall spatio-temporal pattern is consistent with the left-lateralized fronto-temporal activation observed in language studies applying time-domain analysis. Event-related theta power was sensitive to the two functions manipulated by the task. First, theta estimated to the left-lateralized fronto-temporal areas reflected lexical-semantic retrieval, indicating that this measure is well suited for investigating the neural basis of language functions. While alcohol attenuated theta power overall, it was particularly deleterious to semantic retrieval since it reduced theta to real words but not pseudowords. Second, a highly overlapping prefrontal network comprising lateral prefrontal and anterior cingulate cortex was sensitive to decision conflict and was also affected by intoxication, in agreement with previous studies indicating that executive functions are especially vulnerable to alcohol intoxication

Live for Now: Teens, Soda Marketing, and the Law

The alarming rate of overweight and obesity in U.S. children, adolescents, and adults has focused attention on the marketing of unhealthy foods and beverages.\u27 Adolescents are heavily targeted in marketing for beverages, including sugary drinks like soda. They have higher rates of overweight and obesity than children less than five years of age, and are on a path to have a shorter life expectancy than their parents. This article analyzes soda marketing through the lens of teen biological and psychological development, marketing tactics commonly used with teen audiences, and consumer protection law principles

Exploring the potential of grass feedstock from marginal land in Ireland: Does marginal mean lower yield?

peer-reviewedThe production of biomass feedstock from marginal land has attracted much attention as a means of avoiding conflict between the production of food and fuel. Yield potentials from marginal lands have generally not been quantified although it is generally assumed that lower biomass yields can be expected from marginal lands. A three year study was conducted in Ireland in order to determine if grass yields of perennial rhizomatous grasses (cocksfoot, tall fescue, reed canary grass, festulolium) for anaerobic digestion from three marginal land sites (very wet site, very dry site, site prone to flooding) could match yields from better soils. Randomised complete block designs were established on each site in 2012 with two varieties of each grass species as treatments. Three grass harvests were taken from each site in 2013 and in 2014. There was no significant difference between yields from the control site and those from the very dry site and the site prone to flooding. Biomass yields from the very wet site were 85% of those from the control site. Highest yields were obtained from festulolium which were significantly higher than yields from perennial ryegrass. An energy analysis showed that maximising the production of grass from low lying mineral marginal grassland in Ireland could provide enough energy to meet the energy requirements of both the private car fleet and the heavy goods vehicle fleet while avoiding conflict with food production which could be concentrated on conventional land

Attention and Social Cognition in Virtual Reality:The effect of engagement mode and character eye-gaze

Technical developments in virtual humans are manifest in modern character design. Specifically, eye gaze offers a significant aspect of such design. There is need to consider the contribution of participant control of engagement. In the current study, we manipulated participants’ engagement with an interactive virtual reality narrative called Coffee without Words. Participants sat over coffee opposite a character in a virtual café, where they waited for their bus to be repaired. We manipulated character eye-contact with the participant. For half the participants in each condition, the character made no eye-contact for the duration of the story. For the other half, the character responded to participant eye-gaze by making and holding eye contact in return. To explore how participant engagement interacted with this manipulation, half the participants in each condition were instructed to appraise their experience as an artefact (i.e., drawing attention to technical features), while the other half were introduced to the fictional character, the narrative, and the setting as though they were real. This study allowed us to explore the contributions of character features (interactivity through eye-gaze) and cognition (attention/engagement) to the participants’ perception of realism, feelings of presence, time duration, and the extent to which they engaged with the character and represented their mental states (Theory of Mind). Importantly it does so using a highly controlled yet ecologically valid virtual experience

Price Discovery and the Accuracy of Consolidated Data Feeds in the U.S. Equity Markets

Both the scientific community and the popular press have paid much attention to the speed of the Securities Information Processor, the data feed consolidating all trades and quotes across the US stock market. Rather than the speed of the Securities Information Processor, or SIP, we focus here on its accuracy. Relying on Trade and Quote data, we provide various measures of SIP latency relative to high-speed data feeds between exchanges, known as direct feeds. We use first differences to highlight not only the divergence between the direct feeds and the SIP, but also the fundamental inaccuracy of the SIP. We find that as many as 60 percent or more of trades are reported out of sequence for stocks with high trade volume, therefore skewing simple measures such as returns. While not yet definitive, this analysis supports our preliminary conclusion that the underlying infrastructure of the SIP is currently unable to keep pace with the trading activity in today's stock market.Comment: 18 pages, 20 figures, 2 table