Argument as an Act of Friendship

Those who are said to argue are typically seen as annoying, domineering types who treat conversation as a duel in which the goal is in the words of Gerry Spence\u27s recent bestseller, to win every time. The most immediate manifestation of this resistance to argument as both inescapable and healthful comes from our students; even when they learn to appreciate and evaluate tropes at an advanced level, they still often wonder aloud, Should I engage openly in argument? This paper aspires to paste a happy face on the practice of argument as a partial antidote to this resistance

Selection strategies for marker-assisted background selection with chromosome-wise SSR multiplexes in pseudo-backcross programs for grapevine breeding

Organizing SSR markers located on one chromosome into PCR multiplexes has the potential to reduce the costs of marker analysis. The optimal selection strategies for such chromosome-wise multiplexes have not yet been investigated. We investigated with computer simulations three different selection strategies for gene introgression with a pseudo-backcross scheme and a marker density of one marker every 10 cM. Selecting individuals with the highest number of chromosomes carrying V. vinifera alleles at all background marker loci reduced the number of required multiplexes by 7.24-7.87 % in generations pBC4-pBC6 for population sizes nt = 150-300 individuals per pseudo-backcross generation.

Communication and Group Perception: Extending the `Saying is Believing' Effect

The saying-is-believing (SIB) effect occurs when tailoring a message to suit an audience influences a communicator's subsequent memories and impressions about the communication topic. Previous studies were restricted to one-person audiences and individuals as the communication topic. The present studies explored the SIB effect with multiple-person audiences and groups as the communication topic. In Study 1, the SIB effect occurred with a 1-person, but not a 3-person, audience. In Study 2, the SIB effect occurred with a 3-person audience when the audience explicitly validated communicators' messages. These findings demonstrate the generalizability of the SIB effect to group contexts, provide further evidence for a shared reality interpretation of this effect, and suggest a potentially important mechanism underlying stereotype development

The randomly driven Ising ferromagnet, Part I: General formalism and mean field theory

We consider the behavior of an Ising ferromagnet obeying the Glauber dynamics under the influence of a fast switching, random external field. After introducing a general formalism for describing such systems, we consider here the mean-field theory. A novel type of first order phase transition related to spontaneous symmetry breaking and dynamic freezing is found. The non-equilibrium stationary state has a complex structure, which changes as a function of parameters from a singular-continuous distribution with Euclidean or fractal support to an absolutely continuous one.Comment: 12 pages REVTeX/LaTeX format, 12 eps/ps figures. Submitted to Journal of Physics

Quantifying wildlife watchers’ preferences to investigate the overlap between recreational and conservation value of natural areas

Peer reviewedPostprin

Moduli spaces of toric manifolds

We construct a distance on the moduli space of symplectic toric manifolds of dimension four. Then we study some basic topological properties of this space, in particular, path-connectedness, compactness, and completeness. The construction of the distance is related to the Duistermaat-Heckman measure and the Hausdorff metric. While the moduli space, its topology and metric, may be constructed in any dimension, the tools we use in the proofs are four-dimensional, and hence so is our main result.Comment: To appear in Geometriae Dedicata, minor changes to previous version, 19 pages, 6 figure

The Dynamics of Nestedness Predicts the Evolution of Industrial Ecosystems

In economic systems, the mix of products that countries make or export has been shown to be a strong leading indicator of economic growth. Hence, methods to characterize and predict the structure of the network connecting countries to the products that they export are relevant for understanding the dynamics of economic development. Here we study the presence and absence of industries at the global and national levels and show that these networks are significantly nested. This means that the less filled rows and columns of these networks' adjacency matrices tend to be subsets of the fuller rows and columns. Moreover, we show that nestedness remains relatively stable as the matrices become more filled over time and that this occurs because of a bias for industries that deviate from the networks' nestedness to disappear, and a bias for the missing industries that reduce nestedness to appear. This makes the appearance and disappearance of individual industries in each location predictable. We interpret the high level of nestedness observed in these networks in the context of the neutral model of development introduced by Hidalgo and Hausmann (2009). We show that, for the observed fills, the model can reproduce the high level of nestedness observed in these networks only when we assume a high level of heterogeneity in the distribution of capabilities available in countries and required by products. In the context of the neutral model, this implies that the high level of nestedness observed in these economic networks emerges as a combination of both, the complementarity of inputs and heterogeneity in the number of capabilities available in countries and required by products. The stability of nestedness in industrial ecosystems, and the predictability implied by it, demonstrates the importance of the study of network properties in the evolution of economic networks.Comment: 26 page

Temporally disordered Ising models

We present a study of the influence of different types of disorder on systems in the Ising universality class by employing both a dynamical field theory approach and extensive Monte Carlo simulations. We reproduce some well known results for the case of quenched disorder (random temperature and random field), and analyze the effect of four different types of time-dependent disorder scarcely studied so far in the literature. Some of them are of obvious experimental and theoretical relevance (as for example, globally fluctuating temperatures or random fields). All the predictions coming from our field theoretical analysis are fully confirmed by extensive simulations in two and three dimensions, and novel qualitatively different, non-Ising transitions are reported. Possible experimental setups designed to explore the described phenomenologies are also briefly discussed.Comment: Submitted to Phys. Rev. E. Rapid Comm. 4 page