A Model of a Rule of Law and a Rule of Man: Implications for the Design of Institutions

rule of law, rule of man, collectivism, discretion, enforcement, individualism, institutions, rules

Group-Oriented Values, Rules and Cooperation

collectivism, cooperation, economic development, game theory, individualism, institutions, conflicts

Collective Values, Behavioural Norms, and Rules: Building Institutions for Economic Growth and Poverty Reduction

Growth, Poverty, Rules, Institutions, Human behaviour

Emergence of Blind Areas in Information Spreading

Recently, contagion-based (disease, information, etc.) spreading on social networks has been extensively studied. In this paper, other than traditional full interaction, we propose a partial interaction based spreading model, considering that the informed individuals would transmit information to only a certain fraction of their neighbors due to the transmission ability in real-world social networks. Simulation results on three representative networks (BA, ER, WS) indicate that the spreading efficiency is highly correlated with the network heterogeneity. In addition, a special phenomenon, namely \emph{Information Blind Areas} where the network is separated by several information-unreachable clusters, will emerge from the spreading process. Furthermore, we also find that the size distribution of such information blind areas obeys power-law-like distribution, which has very similar exponent with that of site percolation. Detailed analyses show that the critical value is decreasing along with the network heterogeneity for the spreading process, which is complete the contrary to that of random selection. Moreover, the critical value in the latter process is also larger that of the former for the same network. Those findings might shed some lights in in-depth understanding the effect of network properties on information spreading

Nonadiabatic effects in the H+H_2 exchange reaction: accurate quantum dynamics calculations at a state-to-state level

Real wave packet propagations were carried out on both a single ground electronic state and two-coupled-electronic states of the title reaction to investigate the extent of nonadiabatic effects on the distinguishable-atom reaction cross sections. The latest diabatic potential matrix of Abrol and Kuppermann [J. Chem. Phys. 116, 1035 (2002)] was employed in the present nonadiabatic quantum state-to-state scattering calculations over a total energy range-from threshold (the zero point of the reagent H_2) to 3.0 eV. Based on the assumption that the hydrogen atoms are distinguishable in the collisions where the inelastic and elastic ones are excluded, no significant nonadiabatic effects have been found in the calculations of the full state-to-state integral and differential cross sections up to a total energy of 3.0 eV for product vibrational levels v' = 0, 1, 2, 3. Our results therefore confirm the recent and the previous studies of the geometric phase effects in H+H_2 employing a different diabatic double many-body expansion potential matrix or a different BKMP2 potential energy surface

Conserved Extracellular Cysteines Differentially Regulate the Potentiation Produced by Zn2+ in Rat P2X4 Receptors

One feature of the amino acid sequence of P2X receptors identified from mammalian species, Xenopus laevis and zebrafish is the conservation of ten cysteines in the extracellular loop. Little information is available about the role of these conserved ectodomain cysteines in the function of P2X receptors. Here, we investigated the possibility that ten conserved cysteine residues in the extracellular loop of the rat P2X4 receptor may regulate zinc potentiation of the receptor using a series of individual cysteine to alanine point mutations and functional characterization of recombinant receptors expressed in Xenopus oocytes. For the C116A, C132A, C159A, C165A, C217A and C227A mutants, 10 µM zinc did not significantly affect the current activated by an EC40 concentration of ATP. By contrast, 5 µM zinc shifted the ATP concentration-response curve to the right in a parallel manner for both the C261A and C270A mutants and the magnitudes of those shifts were similar to that of the wildtype receptor. Interestingly, for the C126A and C149A mutants, 5 µM zinc potentiated ATP-activated current, but increased the maximal response to ATP by 90% and 81% respectively, without significantly changing the EC50 value of ATP. Thus, these results suggest that cysteines and disulfide bonds between cysteines are differentially involved in the potentiation of the rat P2X4 receptor by zinc

Genetic Dissection of Cardiac Remodeling in an Isoproterenol-Induced Heart Failure Mouse Model.

We aimed to understand the genetic control of cardiac remodeling using an isoproterenol-induced heart failure model in mice, which allowed control of confounding factors in an experimental setting. We characterized the changes in cardiac structure and function in response to chronic isoproterenol infusion using echocardiography in a panel of 104 inbred mouse strains. We showed that cardiac structure and function, whether under normal or stress conditions, has a strong genetic component, with heritability estimates of left ventricular mass between 61% and 81%. Association analyses of cardiac remodeling traits, corrected for population structure, body size and heart rate, revealed 17 genome-wide significant loci, including several loci containing previously implicated genes. Cardiac tissue gene expression profiling, expression quantitative trait loci, expression-phenotype correlation, and coding sequence variation analyses were performed to prioritize candidate genes and to generate hypotheses for downstream mechanistic studies. Using this approach, we have validated a novel gene, Myh14, as a negative regulator of ISO-induced left ventricular mass hypertrophy in an in vivo mouse model and demonstrated the up-regulation of immediate early gene Myc, fetal gene Nppb, and fibrosis gene Lgals3 in ISO-treated Myh14 deficient hearts compared to controls

A general condition of inflationary cosmology on trans-Planckian physics

We consider a more general initial condition satisfying the minimal uncertainty relationship. We calculate the power spectrum of a simple model in inflationary cosmology. The results depend on perturbations generated below a fundamental scale, e.g. the Planck scale.Comment: 7 pages, References adde