Dropped genetics paper lacked scientific merit

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How to make experimental economics research more reproducible: lessons from other disciplines and a new proposal

Efforts in the spirit of this special issue aim at improving the reproducibility of experimental economics, in response to the recent discussions regarding the “research reproducibility crisis.” We put this endeavour in perspective by summarizing the main ways (to our knowledge) that have been proposed – by researchers from several disciplines – to alleviate the problem. We discuss the scope for economic theory to contribute to evaluating the proposals. We argue that a potential key impediment to replication is the expectation of negative reactions by the authors of the individual study, and suggest that incentives for having one’s work replicated should increase

Measurement of Dielectric Suppression of Bremsstrahlung

In 1953, Ter-Mikaelian predicted that the bremsstrahlung of low energy photons in a medium is suppressed because of interactions between the produced photon and the electrons in the medium. This suppression occurs because the emission takes place over on a long distance scale, allowing for destructive interference between different instantaneous photon emission amplitudes. We present here measurements of bremsstrahlung cross sections of 200 keV to 20 MeV photons produced by 8 and 25 GeV electrons in carbon and gold targets. Our data shows that dielectric suppression occurs at the predicted level, reducing the cross section up to 75 percent in our data.Comment: 11 pages, format is postscript file, gzip-ed, uuencode-e

Signaling about norms: socialization under strategic uncertainty

We consider a signaling model where adults possess information about the dominant social norm. Children want to conform to whatever norm is dominant but, lacking accurate information, take the observed behavior of their parent as representative. We show that this causes a signaling distortion in adult behavior, even in the absence of conflicts of interest. Parents adopt attitudes that encourage their children to behave in a socially safe way, i.e. the way that would be optimal under maximum uncertainty about the prevailing social norm. We discuss applications to sexual attitudes, collective reputation, and trust

In-depth analysis of the Naming Game dynamics: the homogeneous mixing case

Language emergence and evolution has recently gained growing attention through multi-agent models and mathematical frameworks to study their behavior. Here we investigate further the Naming Game, a model able to account for the emergence of a shared vocabulary of form-meaning associations through social/cultural learning. Due to the simplicity of both the structure of the agents and their interaction rules, the dynamics of this model can be analyzed in great detail using numerical simulations and analytical arguments. This paper first reviews some existing results and then presents a new overall understanding.Comment: 30 pages, 19 figures (few in reduced definition). In press in IJMP

Large Deviations of the Maximum Eigenvalue for Wishart and Gaussian Random Matrices

We present a simple Coulomb gas method to calculate analytically the probability of rare events where the maximum eigenvalue of a random matrix is much larger than its typical value. The large deviation function that characterizes this probability is computed explicitly for Wishart and Gaussian ensembles. The method is quite general and applies to other related problems, e.g. the joint large deviation function for large fluctuations of top eigenvalues. Our results are relevant to widely employed data compression techniques, namely the principal components analysis. Analytical predictions are verified by extensive numerical simulations.Comment: 4 pages, 3 .eps figures include

Statistical properties of genealogical trees

We analyse the statistical properties of genealogical trees in a neutral model of a closed population with sexual reproduction and non-overlapping generations. By reconstructing the genealogy of an individual from the population evolution, we measure the distribution of ancestors appearing more than once in a given tree. After a transient time, the probability of repetition follows, up to a rescaling, a stationary distribution which we calculate both numerically and analytically. This distribution exhibits a universal shape with a non-trivial power law which can be understood by an exact, though simple, renormalization calculation. Some real data on human genealogy illustrate the problem, which is relevant to the study of the real degree of diversity in closed interbreeding communities.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Rev. Let