The red-yolked egg of the touraco, Tauraco corythaix

The touracos are of biochemical interest because of the striking red and green colors imparted to their plumage by the copper porphyrins turacin and turacoverdin…

Interest Rate Caps, State Legislation, and Public Opinion: Does the Law Reflect the Public\u27s Desires?

In scholarly circles, debates about the benefits and burdens of high-costs lending are prevalent, as are debates about whether to cap interest on certain kinds of consumer loan. Despite this scholarly interest, few scholars actually know what the general public thinks or knows about interest rates on common consumer credit products. This article tries to close this gap through an empirical study of consumer attitudes about interest rates in the state of New Mexico, a state in which high-cost loans such as payday loans and title loans are ubiquitous. Our data show that the general public overwhelmingly supports interest rate caps both in general and for certain types of loans. We also found that many consumers are unaware that there are no interest rate caps on many forms of consumer loans. These data could be useful in explaining why consumers do not do more to change the law on interest rate caps

Interest Rate Caps, State Legislation, and Public Opinion: Does the Law Reflect the Public\u27s Desires?

In scholarly circles, debates about the benefits and burdens of high-costs lending are prevalent, as are debates about whether to cap interest on certain kinds of consumer loan. Despite this scholarly interest, few scholars actually know what the general public thinks or knows about interest rates on common consumer credit products. This article tries to close this gap through an empirical study of consumer attitudes about interest rates in the state of New Mexico, a state in which high-cost loans such as payday loans and title loans are ubiquitous. Our data show that the general public overwhelmingly supports interest rate caps both in general and for certain types of loans. We also found that many consumers are unaware that there are no interest rate caps on many forms of consumer loans. These data could be useful in explaining why consumers do not do more to change the law on interest rate caps

A Model of Human Categorization and Similarity Based Upon Category Theory

Categorization and the judgement of similarity are fundamental in cognition. We propose that these and other activities are based upon an underlying structure of knowledge, or concept representation, in the brain. Further, we propose that this structure can be represented mathematically in a declarative form via category theory, the mathematical theory of structure. We test the resulting mathematical model in an experiment in which human subjects provide judgements of similarity for pairs of line drawings using a numerical scale to represent degrees of similarity. The resulting numerical similarities are compared with those derived from the category-theoretic model by comparing diagrams. The diagrams represent distributed concept structures underlying the line drawings. To compare with a more conventional analysis technique, we also compare the human judgements with those provided by a two-dimensional feature space model equipped with a distance metric for the line drawings. The results are equally favorable for both models. Because of this and the putative explanatory power of the category-theoretic model, we propose that this model is worthy of further exploration as a mathematical model for cognitive science

Law and Behavioral Biology

Society uses law to encourage people to behave differently than they would behave in the absence of law. This fundamental purpose makes law highly dependent on sound understandings of the multiple causes of human behavior. The better those understandings, the better law can achieve social goals with legal tools. In this Article, Professors Jones and Goldsmith argue that many long held understandings about where behavior comes from are rapidly obsolescing as a consequence of developments in the various fields constituting behavioral biology. By helping to refine law\u27s understandings of behavior\u27s causes, they argue, behavioral biology can help to improve law\u27s effectiveness and efficiency. Part I examines how and why law and behavioral biology are connected. Part II provides an introduction to key concepts in behavioral biology. Part III identifies, explores, and illustrates a wide variety of contexts in which behavioral biology can be useful to law. Part IV addresses concerns that sometimes arise when considering biological influences on human behavior

Vitamin A in the Vision of Insects

Acetone-methanol extracts of honeybees (Apis mellifera) were chromatographed from petroleum ether on columns of aluminum oxide and magnesium oxide:celite. Vitamin A1 was identified by the Carr-Price (antimony chloride) reaction. These experiments provide the first demonstration of vitamin A in the tissues of an insect. Like retinene, vitamin A is confined to the heads and is not found in either thoraces or abdomens. Dark-adapted bees have very little vitamin A. During light adaptation the vitamin A increases, but at the expense of retinene, which decreases. As much as 0.1 µg of vitamin A/gm of heads has been recovered from light-adapted bees. Two methods are described for demonstrating the enzymic reduction of retinene to vitamin A, using an extract of the heads of honeybees