An opinion paper: emphasis on white muscle development and growth to improve farmed fish flesh quality

Due to rapid depletion of wild stocks, the necessity to cultivate fish is eminent. Current fish farming practices seek to improve flesh quality. The notion that white muscles are the main target of the fishing industry is emphasized. A novel approach is suggested based on the development of white muscles in wild fish from eggs to adults. A compilation of facts about white muscle structure, function and ontogeny is followed by an account of the changes in swimming behaviour and performance related to the use of white muscle during growth from larva to adult. Ecological data narrate early swimming performance with white muscle development and growth, unveiling some of the important natural selection factors eliminating weak swimmers and poor growers from the breeding stock. A comparison between fish culture practise and natural conditions reveals fundamental differences. New approaches following wild breeding processes promise several important advantages regarding the quality of white muscle

Cruel to be kind but not cruel for cash : harm aversion in the dictator game

People regularly take prosocial actions, making individual sacrifices for the greater good. Similarly, people generally avoid causing harm to others. These twin desires to do good and avoid harm often align, but sometimes they can diverge, creating situations of moral conflict. Here, we examined this moral conflict using a modified dictator game. Participants chose how much money to allocate away from a recipient who was designated as an orphan, creating a sense of harm. This money was then reallocated to either the participant or a charity. People were strongly prosocial: they allocated more money away from the orphan for charity than for themselves. Furthermore, people left more money with the orphan when the harm was framed as a means (taking) than as a side effect (splitting). As is predicted by dual-process theories of moral decision making, response times were longer with the take action and were positively correlated with the amount taken from the orphan. We concluded that just as people take positive actions for the greater good, they are similarly more willing to cause harm when it benefits others rather than themselves

Designing a package of sexual and reproductive health and HIV outreach services to meet the heterogeneous preferences of young people in Malawi: results from a discrete choice experiment.

BACKGROUND: This article examines young people's preferences for integrated family planning (FP) and HIV services in rural Malawi. Different hypothetical configurations for outreach services are presented using a Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE). Responses are analysed using Random Parameters Logit and Generalised Mixed Logit (GMXL) models in preference space and a GMXL model parameterised in willingness-to-pay space. Simulations are used to estimate the proportion of respondents expected to choose different service packages as elements are varied individually and in combination. RESULTS: Responses were collected from 537 young people aged 15-24. Results show that when considering attending an outreach service to access family planning young people value confidentiality and the availability of HIV services including HIV counselling and testing (HCT) and HIV treatment, though significant observable and unobservable heterogeneity is present. Female respondents and those aged 20-24 were less concerned with service confidentiality compared to male respondents and those aged 15-19; respondents who were in a relationship at the time of the survey valued confidentiality more than those who reported being single. The addition of sports and recreation for young people may also be an attractive feature of a youth-friendly service; however, preferences for this attribute vary according to respondent gender. Results of the simulation modelling indicate that the most preferred service package is one that offers confidential services, both HCT and HIV treatment and sports for youth, with up to 32% of respondents expected to choose this service over a service where clients may have concerns over confidentiality, only HCT is available and there are no additional activities for young people. Estimates of willingness-to-pay for service attributes indicate that respondents were willing to pay up to USD$1.76 for confidentiality, USD$0.65 for a service offering both HCT and HIV treatment and USD$0.26 for a service including sports for youth. CONCLUSIONS: Young people were able to complete a complex DCE and appeared to trade between the different characteristics used to describe the outreach services. These findings may offer important insight to policy makers designing youth friendly SRH outreach services and providers aiming to improve the acceptability and uptake of FP services

Social Networking Technology, Social Network Composition, and Reductions in Substance Use Among Homeless Adolescents

Peer-based prevention programs for homeless youth are complicated by the potential for reinforcing high-risk behaviors among participants. The goal of this study is to understand how homeless youth could be linked to positive peers in prevention programming by understanding where in social and physical space positive peers for homeless youth are located, how these ties are associated with substance use, and the role of social networking technologies (e.g., internet and cell phones) in this process. Personal social network data were collected from 136 homeless adolescents in Los Angeles, CA. Respondents reported on composition of their social networks with respect to: home-based peers and parents (accessed via social networking technology; e.g., the internet, cell phone, texting), homeless peers and agency staff (accessed face-to-face) and whether or not network members were substance-using or non-substance-using. Associations between respondent’s lifetime cocaine, heroin, and methamphetamine use and recent (previous 30 days) alcohol and marijuana use were assessed by the number of non-substance-using versus substance-using ties in multivariate linear regression models. 43% of adolescents reported a non-substance-using home-based tie. More of these ties were associated with less recent alcohol use. 62% of adolescents reported a substance-using homeless tie. More of these ties were associated with more recent marijuana use as well as more lifetime heroin and methamphetamine use. For homeless youth, who are physically disconnected from positive peers, social networking technologies can be used to facilitate the sorts of positive social ties that effective peer-based prevention programs require

Preschool Behavioral and Social-Cognitive Problems as Predictors of (Pre)adolescent Disruptive Behavior

This article describes preschool social understanding and difficult behaviors (hot temper, disobedience, bossiness and bullying) as predictors of oppositional defiant disorder (ODD) and aggressive conduct disorder (ACD) in a Dutch population sample of (pre)adolescents (N = 1943), measured at age 10–12 and at age 13–15. ODD and ACD were assessed by the Child Behavior Checklist and the Youth Self-Report, preschool behavior was evaluated by the parental questionnaire ‹How was your child as a preschooler? (age 4–5)’. Adjusted for each other, all difficult preschool behaviors except bullying were associated with adolescent ODD, while only bullying significantly predicted adolescent ACD. Furthermore, the results suggest a qualitative difference between ODD and ACD in terms of the social component of the disorders: poor preschool social understanding was associated with the development of ACD but not of ODD; and poor social understanding interacted with difficult preschool behaviors to predict later ACD but not ODD. The associations did not differ between boys and girls, and were roughly similar for preadolescent (age 10–12) and early adolescent (age 13–15) outcomes. The finding that poor social understanding was implicated in the development of ACD but not in the development of ODD may help to demarcate the individuality of each disorder and offer leads for (differential) treatment strategies

The Mind and the Machine. On the Conceptual and Moral Implications of Brain-Machine Interaction

Brain-machine interfaces are a growing field of research and application. The increasing possibilities to connect the human brain to electronic devices and computer software can be put to use in medicine, the military, and entertainment. Concrete technologies include cochlear implants, Deep Brain Stimulation, neurofeedback and neuroprosthesis. The expectations for the near and further future are high, though it is difficult to separate hope from hype. The focus in this paper is on the effects that these new technologies may have on our ‘symbolic order’—on the ways in which popular categories and concepts may change or be reinterpreted. First, the blurring distinction between man and machine and the idea of the cyborg are discussed. It is argued that the morally relevant difference is that between persons and non-persons, which does not necessarily coincide with the distinction between man and machine. The concept of the person remains useful. It may, however, become more difficult to assess the limits of the human body. Next, the distinction between body and mind is discussed. The mind is increasingly seen as a function of the brain, and thus understood in bodily and mechanical terms. This raises questions concerning concepts of free will and moral responsibility that may have far reaching consequences in the field of law, where some have argued for a revision of our criminal justice system, from retributivist to consequentialist. Even without such a (unlikely and unwarranted) revision occurring, brain-machine interactions raise many interesting questions regarding distribution and attribution of responsibility

Azimuthal anisotropy of charged particles at high transverse momenta in PbPb collisions at sqrt(s[NN]) = 2.76 TeV

The azimuthal anisotropy of charged particles in PbPb collisions at nucleon-nucleon center-of-mass energy of 2.76 TeV is measured with the CMS detector at the LHC over an extended transverse momentum (pt) range up to approximately 60 GeV. The data cover both the low-pt region associated with hydrodynamic flow phenomena and the high-pt region where the anisotropies may reflect the path-length dependence of parton energy loss in the created medium. The anisotropy parameter (v2) of the particles is extracted by correlating charged tracks with respect to the event-plane reconstructed by using the energy deposited in forward-angle calorimeters. For the six bins of collision centrality studied, spanning the range of 0-60% most-central events, the observed v2 values are found to first increase with pt, reaching a maximum around pt = 3 GeV, and then to gradually decrease to almost zero, with the decline persisting up to at least pt = 40 GeV over the full centrality range measured.Comment: Replaced with published version. Added journal reference and DO

Search for new physics with same-sign isolated dilepton events with jets and missing transverse energy

A search for new physics is performed in events with two same-sign isolated leptons, hadronic jets, and missing transverse energy in the final state. The analysis is based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 4.98 inverse femtobarns produced in pp collisions at a center-of-mass energy of 7 TeV collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC. This constitutes a factor of 140 increase in integrated luminosity over previously published results. The observed yields agree with the standard model predictions and thus no evidence for new physics is found. The observations are used to set upper limits on possible new physics contributions and to constrain supersymmetric models. To facilitate the interpretation of the data in a broader range of new physics scenarios, information on the event selection, detector response, and efficiencies is provided.Comment: Published in Physical Review Letter

Compressed representation of a partially defined integer function over multiple arguments

In OLAP (OnLine Analitical Processing) data are analysed in an n-dimensional cube. The cube may be represented as a partially defined function over n arguments. Considering that often the function is not defined everywhere, we ask: is there a known way of representing the function or the points in which it is defined, in a more compact manner than the trivial one