If cooperation is likely punish mildly: Insights from economic experiments based on the snowdrift game

Punishment may deter antisocial behavior. Yet to punish is costly, and the costs often do not offset the gains that are due to elevated levels of cooperation. However, the effectiveness of punishment depends not only on how costly it is, but also on the circumstances defining the social dilemma. Using the snowdrift game as the basis, we have conducted a series of economic experiments to determine whether severe punishment is more effective than mild punishment. We have observed that severe punishment is not necessarily more effective, even if the cost of punishment is identical in both cases. The benefits of severe punishment become evident only under extremely adverse conditions, when to cooperate is highly improbable in the absence of sanctions. If cooperation is likely, mild punishment is not less effective and leads to higher average payoffs, and is thus the much preferred alternative. Presented results suggest that the positive effects of punishment stem not only from imposed fines, but may also have a psychological background. Small fines can do wonders in motivating us to chose cooperation over defection, but without the paralyzing effect that may be brought about by large fines. The later should be utilized only when absolutely necessary.Comment: 15 pages, 6 figures; accepted for publication in PLoS ON

Electrosprayed core-shell nanoparticles of PVP and shellac for furnishing biphasic controlled release of ferulic acid

Coaxial electrospraying was explored to organize polymer excipients in a core-shell manner for providing biphasic controlled release of active ingredient. With ferulic acid (FA) as a model drug, and shellac and polyvinylpyrrolidone (PVP) as the core and shell polymeric matrices, core-shell nanoparticles were successfully fabricated. A series of tests were carried out to characterize the prepared core-shell nanoparticles and also the nanoparticles prepared using a single fluid electrospraying of the shell or core fluids alone. The core-shell nanoparticles had an average diameter of 530 ± 80 nm with clear core-shell structure. The contained FA was converted to an amorphous state both in the core and the shell parts due to the favorable hydrogen bonding between the components. In vitro dissolution tests demonstrated that the core-shell nanoparticles were able to provide the desired biphasic drug-controlled release profiles. Coaxial electrospraying is a useful tool for the development of novel nanodrug delivery systems from polymers

ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge

The ImageNet Large Scale Visual Recognition Challenge is a benchmark in object category classification and detection on hundreds of object categories and millions of images. The challenge has been run annually from 2010 to present, attracting participation from more than fifty institutions. This paper describes the creation of this benchmark dataset and the advances in object recognition that have been possible as a result. We discuss the challenges of collecting large-scale ground truth annotation, highlight key breakthroughs in categorical object recognition, provide a detailed analysis of the current state of the field of large-scale image classification and object detection, and compare the state-of-the-art computer vision accuracy with human accuracy. We conclude with lessons learned in the five years of the challenge, and propose future directions and improvements.Comment: 43 pages, 16 figures. v3 includes additional comparisons with PASCAL VOC (per-category comparisons in Table 3, distribution of localization difficulty in Fig 16), a list of queries used for obtaining object detection images (Appendix C), and some additional reference

The Functional DRD3 Ser9Gly Polymorphism (rs6280) Is Pleiotropic, Affecting Reward as Well as Movement

Abnormalities of motivation and behavior in the context of reward are a fundamental component of addiction and mood disorders. Here we test the effect of a functional missense mutation in the dopamine 3 receptor (DRD3) gene (ser9gly, rs6280) on reward-associated dopamine (DA) release in the striatum. Twenty-six healthy controls (HCs) and 10 unmedicated subjects with major depressive disorder (MDD) completed two positron emission tomography (PET) scans with [11C]raclopride using the bolus plus constant infusion method. On one occasion subjects completed a sensorimotor task (control condition) and on another occasion subjects completed a gambling task (reward condition). A linear regression analysis controlling for age, sex, diagnosis, and self-reported anhedonia indicated that during receipt of unpredictable monetary reward the glycine allele was associated with a greater reduction in D2/3 receptor binding (i.e., increased reward-related DA release) in the middle (anterior) caudate (p<0.01) and the ventral striatum (p<0.05). The possible functional effect of the ser9gly polymorphism on DA release is consistent with previous work demonstrating that the glycine allele yields D3 autoreceptors that have a higher affinity for DA and display more robust intracellular signaling. Preclinical evidence indicates that chronic stress and aversive stimulation induce activation of the DA system, raising the possibility that the glycine allele, by virtue of its facilitatory effect on striatal DA release, increases susceptibility to hyperdopaminergic responses that have previously been associated with stress, addiction, and psychosis

MSACompro: protein multiple sequence alignment using predicted secondary structure, solvent accessibility, and residue-residue contacts

<p>Abstract</p> <p>Background</p> <p>Multiple Sequence Alignment (MSA) is a basic tool for bioinformatics research and analysis. It has been used essentially in almost all bioinformatics tasks such as protein structure modeling, gene and protein function prediction, DNA motif recognition, and phylogenetic analysis. Therefore, improving the accuracy of multiple sequence alignment is important for advancing many bioinformatics fields.</p> <p>Results</p> <p>We designed and developed a new method, MSACompro, to synergistically incorporate predicted secondary structure, relative solvent accessibility, and residue-residue contact information into the currently most accurate posterior probability-based MSA methods to improve the accuracy of multiple sequence alignments. The method is different from the multiple sequence alignment methods (e.g. 3D-Coffee) that use the tertiary structure information of some sequences since the structural information of our method is fully predicted from sequences. To the best of our knowledge, applying predicted relative solvent accessibility and contact map to multiple sequence alignment is novel. The rigorous benchmarking of our method to the standard benchmarks (i.e. BAliBASE, SABmark and OXBENCH) clearly demonstrated that incorporating predicted protein structural information improves the multiple sequence alignment accuracy over the leading multiple protein sequence alignment tools without using this information, such as MSAProbs, ProbCons, Probalign, T-coffee, MAFFT and MUSCLE. And the performance of the method is comparable to the state-of-the-art method PROMALS of using structural features and additional homologous sequences by slightly lower scores.</p> <p>Conclusion</p> <p>MSACompro is an efficient and reliable multiple protein sequence alignment tool that can effectively incorporate predicted protein structural information into multiple sequence alignment. The software is available at <url>http://sysbio.rnet.missouri.edu/multicom_toolbox/</url>.</p

Cryptosporidium Priming Is More Effective than Vaccine for Protection against Cryptosporidiosis in a Murine Protein Malnutrition Model

Cryptosporidium is a major cause of severe diarrhea, especially in malnourished children. Using a murine model of C. parvum oocyst challenge that recapitulates clinical features of severe cryptosporidiosis during malnutrition, we interrogated the effect of protein malnutrition (PM) on primary and secondary responses to C. parvum challenge, and tested the differential ability of mucosal priming strategies to overcome the PM-induced susceptibility. We determined that while PM fundamentally alters systemic and mucosal primary immune responses to Cryptosporidium, priming with C. parvum (106 oocysts) provides robust protective immunity against re-challenge despite ongoing PM. C. parvum priming restores mucosal Th1-type effectors (CD3+CD8+CD103+ T-cells) and cytokines (IFNγ, and IL12p40) that otherwise decrease with ongoing PM. Vaccination strategies with Cryptosporidium antigens expressed in the S. Typhi vector 908htr, however, do not enhance Th1-type responses to C. parvum challenge during PM, even though vaccination strongly boosts immunity in challenged fully nourished hosts. Remote non-specific exposures to the attenuated S. Typhi vector alone or the TLR9 agonist CpG ODN-1668 can partially attenuate C. parvum severity during PM, but neither as effectively as viable C. parvum priming. We conclude that although PM interferes with basal and vaccine-boosted immune responses to C. parvum, sustained reductions in disease severity are possible through mucosal activators of host defenses, and specifically C. parvum priming can elicit impressively robust Th1-type protective immunity despite ongoing protein malnutrition. These findings add insight into potential correlates of Cryptosporidium immunity and future vaccine strategies in malnourished children

Finding Semantically Related Videos in Closed Collections

Modern newsroom tools offer advanced functionality for automatic and semi-automatic content collection from the web and social media sources to accompany news stories. However, the content collected in this way often tends to be unstructured and may include irrelevant items. An important step in the verification process is to organize this content, both with respect to what it shows, and with respect to its origin. This chapter presents our efforts in this direction, which resulted in two components. One aims to detect semantic concepts in video shots, to help annotation and organization of content collections. We implement a system based on deep learning, featuring a number of advances and adaptations of existing algorithms to increase performance for the task. The other component aims to detect logos in videos in order to identify their provenance. We present our progress from a keypoint-based detection system to a system based on deep learning

Numerical analysis of seepage–deformation in unsaturated soils

A coupled elastic–plastic finite element analysis based on simplified consolidation theory for unsaturated soils is used to investigate the coupling processes of water infiltration and deformation. By introducing a reduced suction and an elastic–plastic constitutive equation for the soil skeleton, the simplified consolidation theory for unsaturated soils is incorporated into an in-house finite element code. Using the proposed numerical method, the generation of pore water pressure and development of deformation can be simulated under evaporation or rainfall infiltration conditions. Through a parametric study and comparison with the test results, the proposed method is found to describe well the characteristics during water evaporation/infiltration into unsaturated soils. Finally, an unsaturated soil slope with water infiltration is analyzed in detail to investigate the development of the displacement and generation of pore water pressure

Biophysical and electrochemical studies of protein-nucleic acid interactions

This review is devoted to biophysical and electrochemical methods used for studying protein-nucleic acid (NA) interactions. The importance of NA structure and protein-NA recognition for essential cellular processes, such as replication or transcription, is discussed to provide background for description of a range of biophysical chemistry methods that are applied to study a wide scope of protein-DNA and protein-RNA complexes. These techniques employ different detection principles with specific advantages and limitations and are often combined as mutually complementary approaches to provide a complete description of the interactions. Electrochemical methods have proven to be of great utility in such studies because they provide sensitive measurements and can be combined with other approaches that facilitate the protein-NA interactions. Recent applications of electrochemical methods in studies of protein-NA interactions are discussed in detail