197 research outputs found
Benevolent characteristics promote cooperative behaviour among humans
Cooperation is fundamental to the evolution of human society. We regularly
observe cooperative behaviour in everyday life and in controlled experiments
with anonymous people, even though standard economic models predict that they
should deviate from the collective interest and act so as to maximise their own
individual payoff. However, there is typically heterogeneity across subjects:
some may cooperate, while others may not. Since individual factors promoting
cooperation could be used by institutions to indirectly prime cooperation, this
heterogeneity raises the important question of who these cooperators are. We
have conducted a series of experiments to study whether benevolence, defined as
a unilateral act of paying a cost to increase the welfare of someone else
beyond one's own, is related to cooperation in a subsequent one-shot anonymous
Prisoner's dilemma. Contrary to the predictions of the widely used inequity
aversion models, we find that benevolence does exist and a large majority of
people behave this way. We also find benevolence to be correlated with
cooperative behaviour. Finally, we show a causal link between benevolence and
cooperation: priming people to think positively about benevolent behaviour
makes them significantly more cooperative than priming them to think
malevolently. Thus benevolent people exist and cooperate more
A Semantic Framework for Enabling Radio Spectrum Policy Management and Evaluation
Because radio spectrum is a finite resource, its usage and sharing is
regulated by government agencies. These agencies define policies to manage
spectrum allocation and assignment across multiple organizations, systems, and
devices. With more portions of the radio spectrum being licensed for commercial
use, the importance of providing an increased level of automation when
evaluating such policies becomes crucial for the efficiency and efficacy of
spectrum management. We introduce our Dynamic Spectrum Access Policy Framework
for supporting the United States government's mission to enable both federal
and non-federal entities to compatibly utilize available spectrum. The DSA
Policy Framework acts as a machine-readable policy repository providing policy
management features and spectrum access request evaluation. The framework
utilizes a novel policy representation using OWL and PROV-O along with a
domain-specific reasoning implementation that mixes GeoSPARQL, OWL reasoning,
and knowledge graph traversal to evaluate incoming spectrum access requests and
explain how applicable policies were used. The framework is currently being
used to support live, over-the-air field exercises involving a diverse set of
federal and commercial radios, as a component of a prototype spectrum
management system
New Glueball-Meson Mass Relations
Using the ``glueball dominance'' picture of the mixing between q\bar{q}
mesons of different hidden flavors, we establish new glueball-meson mass
relations which serve as a basis for glueball spectral systematics. For the
tensor glueball mass 2.3\pm 0.1 GeV used as an input parameter, these relations
predict the following glueball masses: M(0^{++})\simeq 1.65\pm 0.05 GeV,
M(1^{--})\simeq 3.2\pm 0.2 GeV, M(2^{-+})\simeq 2.95\pm 0.15 GeV,
M(3^{--})\simeq 2.8\pm 0.15 GeV. We briefly discuss the failure of such
relations for the pseudoscalar sector. Our results are consistent with
(quasi)-linear Regge trajectories for glueballs with slope \simeq 0.3\pm 0.1
GeV^{-2}.Comment: Extensive revision including response to comments received, value of
glueball Regge slope, and a consideration of radial excitations. 14 pages,
LaTe
Study of below 1 GeV using Integral Equation Approach
The scattering of is studied using the axial
anomaly, elastic unitarity, analyticity and crossing symmetry. Using the
technique to derive the Roy's equation, an integral equation for the P-wave
amplitude is obtained in terms of the strong P-wave pion pion phase shifts. Its
solution is obtained numerically by an iteration procedure using the starting
point as the solution of the integral equation of the Muskelshsvilli-Omnes
type. It is, however, ambiguous and depends sensitively on the second
derivative of the P-wave amplitude at which cannot directly be
measured.Comment: 26 pages, 10 figure
Increasing altruistic and cooperative behaviour with simple moral nudges
The conflict between pro-self and pro-social behaviour is at the core of many key problems of our time, as, for example, the reduction of air pollution and the redistribution of scarce resources. For the well-being of our societies, it is thus crucial to find mechanisms to promote pro-social choices over egoistic ones. Particularly important, because cheap and easy to implement, are those mechanisms that can change people's behaviour without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives, the so-called "nudges". Previous research has found that moral nudges (e.g., making norms salient) can promote pro-social behaviour. However, little is known about whether their effect persists over time and spills across context. This question is key in light of research showing that pro-social actions are often followed by selfish actions, thus suggesting that some moral manipulations may backfire. Here we present a class of simple moral nudges that have a great positive impact on pro-sociality. In Studies 1-4 (total N = 1,400), we use economic games to demonstrate that asking subjects to self-report "what they think is the morally right thing to do" does not only increase pro-sociality in the choice immediately after, but also in subsequent choices, and even when the social context changes. In Study 5, we explore whether moral nudges promote charity donations to humanitarian organisations in a large (N = 1,800) crowdfunding campaign. We find that, in this context, moral nudges increase donations by about 44 percent
Mediterranean winter rainfall in phase with African monsoons during the past 1.36 million years
Mediterranean climates are characterized by strong seasonal contrasts between dry summers and wet winters. Changes in winter rainfall are critical for regional socioeconomic development, but are difficult to simulate accurately1 and reconstruct on Quaternary timescales. This is partly because regional hydroclimate records that cover multiple glacial–interglacial cycles2,3 with different orbital geometries, global ice volume and atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations are scarce. Moreover, the underlying mechanisms of change and their persistence remain unexplored. Here we show that, over the past 1.36 million years, wet winters in the northcentral Mediterranean tend to occur with high contrasts in local, seasonal insolation and a vigorous African summer monsoon. Our proxy time series from Lake Ohrid on the Balkan Peninsula, together with a 784,000-year transient climate model hindcast, suggest that increased sea surface temperatures amplify local cyclone development and refuel North Atlantic low-pressure systems that enter the Mediterranean during phases of low continental ice volume and high concentrations of atmospheric greenhouse gases. A comparison with modern reanalysis data shows that current drivers of the amount of rainfall in the Mediterranean share some similarities to those that drive the reconstructed increases in precipitation. Our data cover multiple insolation maxima and are therefore an important benchmark for testing climate model performance
Multi-Scaled Explorations of Binding-Induced Folding of Intrinsically Disordered Protein Inhibitor IA3 to its Target Enzyme
Biomolecular function is realized by recognition, and increasing evidence shows that recognition is determined not only by structure but also by flexibility and dynamics. We explored a biomolecular recognition process that involves a major conformational change – protein folding. In particular, we explore the binding-induced folding of IA3, an intrinsically disordered protein that blocks the active site cleft of the yeast aspartic proteinase saccharopepsin (YPrA) by folding its own N-terminal residues into an amphipathic alpha helix. We developed a multi-scaled approach that explores the underlying mechanism by combining structure-based molecular dynamics simulations at the residue level with a stochastic path method at the atomic level. Both the free energy profile and the associated kinetic paths reveal a common scheme whereby IA3 binds to its target enzyme prior to folding itself into a helix. This theoretical result is consistent with recent time-resolved experiments. Furthermore, exploration of the detailed trajectories reveals the important roles of non-native interactions in the initial binding that occurs prior to IA3 folding. In contrast to the common view that non-native interactions contribute only to the roughness of landscapes and impede binding, the non-native interactions here facilitate binding by reducing significantly the entropic search space in the landscape. The information gained from multi-scaled simulations of the folding of this intrinsically disordered protein in the presence of its binding target may prove useful in the design of novel inhibitors of aspartic proteinases
Predicting attitudinal and behavioral responses to COVID-19 pandemic using machine learning
At the beginning of 2020, COVID-19 became a global problem. Despite all the efforts to emphasize the relevance of preventive measures, not everyone adhered to them. Thus, learning more about the characteristics determining attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic is crucial to improving future interventions. In this study, we applied machine learning on the multi-national data collected by the International Collaboration on the Social and Moral Psychology of COVID-19 (N = 51,404) to test the predictive efficacy of constructs from social, moral, cognitive, and personality psychology, as well as socio-demographic factors, in the attitudinal and behavioral responses to the pandemic. The results point to several valuable insights. Internalized moral identity provided the most consistent predictive contribution—individuals perceiving moral traits as central to their self-concept reported higher adherence to preventive measures. Similar was found for morality as cooperation, symbolized moral identity, self-control, open-mindedness, collective narcissism, while the inverse relationship was evident for the endorsement of conspiracy theories. However, we also found a non-negligible variability in the explained variance and predictive contributions with respect to macro-level factors such as the pandemic stage or cultural region. Overall, the results underscore the importance of morality-related and contextual factors in understanding adherence to public health recommendations during the pandemic
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