Instinctive Response in the Ultimatum Game

In a series of recent papers, Ariel Rubinstein claims that the study of response time sheds light on the process of reasoning involved in classical economic decision problems. In particular, he considers that a distinction can be drawn between instinc- tive and cognitive reasoning. This paper complements and expands upon Rubinstein's study on time responses. We show that strategic risk is the key element in explaining differences in median response time in ultimatum behavior.Economic experiments, Ultimatum game, Yes-or-No game, median response time.

La percepción de la guitarra en las ediciones mexicanas: Desde finales del virreinato al siglo de independencia

Este artículo pretende dar cuenta de la difusión de la guitarra en todos los estratos sociales, por medio de las publicaciones periódicas y los escritores en el México del siglo XIX. Basado en la historia cultural, se analizan factores relacionados con la percepción social del instrumento, y las categorías en las que fue ubicado por los cronistas de la época, destacando su relación con la cultura mexicana. Mi propuesta es que la guitarra se convirtió en un símbolo de identidad y del incipiente nacionalismo

Fine-Grained Workflow Interoperability in Life Sciences

In den vergangenen Jahrzehnten führten Fortschritte in den Schlüsseltechnologien der Lebenswissenschaften zu einer exponentiellen Zunahme der zur Verfügung stehenden biologischen Daten. Um Ergebnisse zeitnah generieren zu können werden sowohl spezialisierte Rechensystem als auch Programmierfähigkeiten benötigt: Desktopcomputer oder monolithische Ansätze sind weder in der Lage mit dem Wachstum der verfügbaren biologischen Daten noch mit der Komplexität der Analysetechniken Schritt zu halten. Workflows erlauben diesem Trend durch Parallelisierungsansätzen und verteilten Rechensystemen entgegenzuwirken. Ihre transparenten Abläufe, gegeben durch ihre klar definierten Strukturen, ebenso ihre Wiederholbarkeit, erfüllen die Standards der Reproduzierbarkeit, welche an wissenschaftliche Methoden gestellt werden. Eines der Ziele unserer Arbeit ist es Forschern beim Bedienen von Rechensystemen zu unterstützen, ohne dass Programmierkenntnisse notwendig sind. Dafür wurde eine Sammlung von Tools entwickelt, welche jedes Kommandozeilenprogramm in ein Workflowsystem integrieren kann. Ohne weitere Anpassungen kann unser Programm zwei weit verbreitete Workflowsysteme unterstützen. Unser modularer Entwurf erlaubt zudem Unterstützung für weitere Workflowmaschinen hinzuzufügen. Basierend auf der Bedeutung von frühen und robusten Workflowentwürfen, haben wir außerdem eine wohl etablierte Desktop–basierte Analyseplattform erweitert. Diese enthält über 2.000 Aufgaben, wobei jede als Baustein in einem Workflow fungiert. Die Plattform erlaubt einfache Entwicklung neuer Aufgaben und die Integration externer Kommandozeilenprogramme. In dieser Arbeit wurde ein Plugin zur Konvertierung entwickelt, welches nutzerfreundliche Mechanismen bereitstellt, um Workflows auf verteilten Hochleistungsrechensystemen auszuführen—eine Aufgabe, die sonst technische Kenntnisse erfordert, die gewöhnlich nicht zum Anforderungsprofil eines Lebenswissenschaftlers gehören. Unsere Konverter–Erweiterung generiert quasi identische Versionen desselben Workflows, welche im Anschluss auf leistungsfähigen Berechnungsressourcen ausgeführt werden können. Infolgedessen werden nicht nur die Möglichkeiten von verteilten hochperformanten Rechensystemen sowie die Bequemlichkeit eines für Desktopcomputer entwickelte Workflowsystems ausgenutzt, sondern zusätzlich werden Berechnungsbeschränkungen von Desktopcomputern und die steile Lernkurve, die mit dem Workflowentwurf auf verteilten Systemen verbunden ist, umgangen. Unser Konverter–Plugin hat sofortige Anwendung für Forscher. Wir zeigen dies in drei für die Lebenswissenschaften relevanten Anwendungsbeispielen: Strukturelle Bioinformatik, Immuninformatik, und Metabolomik.Recent decades have witnessed an exponential increase of available biological data due to advances in key technologies for life sciences. Specialized computing resources and scripting skills are now required to deliver results in a timely fashion: desktop computers or monolithic approaches can no longer keep pace with neither the growth of available biological data nor the complexity of analysis techniques. Workflows offer an accessible way to counter against this trend by facilitating parallelization and distribution of computations. Given their structured and repeatable nature, workflows also provide a transparent process to satisfy strict reproducibility standards required by the scientific method. One of the goals of our work is to assist researchers in accessing computing resources without the need for programming or scripting skills. To this effect, we created a toolset able to integrate any command line tool into workflow systems. Out of the box, our toolset supports two widely–used workflow systems, but our modular design allows for seamless additions in order to support further workflow engines. Recognizing the importance of early and robust workflow design, we also extended a well–established, desktop–based analytics platform that contains more than two thousand tasks (each being a building block for a workflow), allows easy development of new tasks and is able to integrate external command line tools. We developed a converter plug–in that offers a user–friendly mechanism to execute workflows on distributed high–performance computing resources—an exercise that would otherwise require technical skills typically not associated with the average life scientist's profile. Our converter extension generates virtually identical versions of the same workflows, which can then be executed on more capable computing resources. That is, not only did we leverage the capacity of distributed high–performance resources and the conveniences of a workflow engine designed for personal computers but we also circumvented computing limitations of personal computers and the steep learning curve associated with creating workflows for distributed environments. Our converter extension has immediate applications for researchers and we showcase our results by means of three use cases relevant for life scientists: structural bioinformatics, immunoinformatics and metabolomics

Social-aware drone navigation using social force model

Robot’s navigation is one of the hardest challenges to deal with, because real environments imply highly dynamic objects moving in all directions. The main ideal goal is to conduct a safe navigation within the environment, avoiding obstacles and reaching the final proposed goal. Nowadays, with the last advances in technology, we are able to see robots almost everywhere, and this can lead us to think about the robot’s role in the future, and where we would find them, and it is no exaggerated to say, that practically, flying and land-based robots are going to live together with people, interacting in our houses, streets and shopping centers. Moreover, we will notice their presence, gradually inserted in our human societies, every time doing more human tasks, which in the past years were unthinkable. Therefore, if we think about robots moving or flying around us, we must consider safety, the distance the robot should take to make the human feel comfortable, and the different reactions people would have. The main goal of this work is to accompany people making use of a flying robot. The term social navigation gives us the path to follow when we talk about a social environment. Robots must be able to navigate between humans, giving sense of security to those who are walking close to them. In this work, we present a model called Social Force Model, which states that the human social interaction between persons and objects is inspired in the fluid dynamics de- fined by Newton’s equations, and also, we introduce the extended version which complements the initial method with the human-robot interaction force. In the robotics field, the use of tools for helping the development and the implementation part are crucial. The fast advances in technology allows the international community to have access to cheaper and more compact hardware and software than a decade ago. It is becoming more and more usual to have access to more powerful technology which helps us to run complex algorithms, and because of that, we can run bigger systems in reduced space, making robots more intelligent, more compact and more robust against failures. Our case was not an exception, in the next chapters we will present the procedure we followed to implement the approaches, supported by different simulation tools and software. Because of the nature of the problem we were facing, we made use of Robotic Operating System along with Gazebo, which help us to have a good outlook of how the code will work in real-life experiments. In this work, both real and simulated experiments are presented, in which we expose the interaction conducted by the 3D Aerial Social Force Model, between humans, objects and in this case the AR.Drone, a flying drone property of the Instituto de Robótica e Informática Industrial. We focus on making the drone navigation more socially acceptable by the humans around; the main purpose of the drone is to accompany a person, which we will call the "main" person in this work, who is going to try to navigate side-by-side, with a behavior being dictated with some forces exerted by the environment, and also is going to try to be the more socially close acceptable possible to the remaining humans around. Also, it is presented a comparison between the 3D Aerial Social Force Model and the Artificial Potential Fields method, a well-known method and widely used in robot navigation. We present both methods and the description of the forces each one involves. Along with these two models, there is also another important topic to introduce. As we said, the robot must be able to accompany a pedestrian in his way, and for that reason, the forecasting capacity is an important feature since the robot does not know the final destination of the human to accompany. It is essential to give it the ability to predict the human movements. In this work, we used the differential values between the past position values to know how much is changing through time. This gives us an accurate idea of how the human would behave or which direction he/she would take next. Furthermore, we present a description of the human motion prediction model based on linear regression. The motivation behind the idea of building a Regression Model was the simplicity of the implementation, the robustness and the very accurate results of the approach. The previous main human positions are taken, in order to forecast the new position of the human, the next seconds. This is done with the main purpose of letting the drone know about the direction the human is taking, to move forward beside the human, as if the drone was accompanying him. The optimization for the linear regression model, to find the right weights for our model, was carried out by gradient descent, implementing also de RMSprop variant in order to reach convergence in a faster way. The strategy that was followed to build the prediction model is explained with detail later in this work. The presence of social robots has grown during the past years, many researchers have contributed and many techniques are being used to give them the capacity of interacting safely and effectively with the people, and it is a hot topic which has matured a lot, but still there is many research to be investigated

Music Industries on the Border of Northeast Mexico and South Texas: The Case of Norteño and Tejano Conjunto

When we talk about the music industry the first idea that comes to mind is the sales of records (in physical or digital format). However, the term is much broader: “music… is a system of objects, a structure of commodities with symbolic values attached to them”. Music generates several parallel businesses, ranging from the publication of scores and methods, specialized magazines and books, movies and documentaries, and many other things. This article aims to make visible the commercial exchanges generated by the “other” music industry on both sides of the border between Texas, in the US, and the Mexican states of Coahuila and Tamaulipas. Based on ethnographic interviews and field work carried out in the region, I demonstrate that the music industry creates wealth and jobs, both for musicians, as well as for sellers of musical instruments, scores, strings, accessories, and those in charge of making repairs.Cuando hablamos de “industria musical” la primera idea que viene a la mente es la venta de discos (en formato físico o digital). Sin embargo, el término es mucho más amplio: “la música ...es un sistema de objetos, una estructura de mercancías con valores simbólicos unidos a ellas.” La música genera diversas empresas paralelas, que van desde la publicación de partituras y métodos, revistas especializadas y libros, películas y documentales, y muchas otras cosas. Este artículo pretende visibilizar los intercambios comerciales que genera la “otra” industria musical en ambos lados de la frontera entre el sur de Texas, en Estados Unidos de América, y los estados mexicanos de Coahuila y Tamaulipas. Basado en entrevistas etnográficas, y trabajo de campo realizado en la región, quiero mostrar que la música genera riqueza y empleos, tanto para los músicos y maestros como para los vendedores de instrumentos musicales, partituras, cuerdas, accesorios, y los especialistas en reparaciones

Verblunsky parameters and linear spectral transformations

18 pages, no figures.-- MSC2000 codes: 42C05.In this paper we analyze the behavior of Verblunsky parameters for hermitian linear functionals deduced from canonical linear spectral transformations of a quasi-definite hermitian linear functional. Some illustrative examples are studied.The work of the first author has been supported by a grant of Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas. The work of the second author has been supported by Dirección General de Investigación, Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia of Spain, grant MTM06-13000-C03-02. Both authors have been supported by project CCG07-UC3M/ESP-3339 with the financial support of Comunidad de Madrid-Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.Publicad

Linear spectral transformations and Laurent polynomials

17 pages, 2 figures.-- MSC2000 codes: Primary 42C05; Secondary 15A23.In this manuscript we analyze some linear spectral transformations of a Hermitian linear functional using the multiplication by some class of Laurent polynomials. We focus our attention in the behavior of the Verblunsky parameters of the perturbed linear functional. Some illustrative examples are pointed out.The work of the first author has been supported by a grant of Universidad Autónoma de Tamaulipas. The work of the second author has been supported by Dirección General de Investigación, Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia of Spain, grant MTM06-13000-C03-02. Both authors have been supported by project CCG07-UC3M/ESP-3339 with the financial support of Comunidad de Madrid-Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.Publicad