Can Trust Facilitate Bribery? Experimental Evidence From China, Italy, Japan, and the Netherlands

This article investigates the impact of trust on bribery. We measure trust with a survey question from the World Values Survey on whether respondents think others would take advantage of them if given the chance, and we observe bribery behavior in an experimental bribery game. The research was conducted in China and Italy, which have relatively high perceived-corruption levels, as well as in Japan and the Netherlands, which have relatively low perceived-corruption levels. In the bribery game, participants have the opportunity to bribe another participant to cheat to their advantage. We hypothesized that honoring bribing agreements depends on trust, the endorsement of such agreements is independent of trust. We find evidence that trust enables bribery in the two low-corruption countries, but no evidence that trust enables bribery in the two high-corruption countries. More specifically, trust predicts bribers\u27 trustworthiness in honoring the bribery agreement once they enter into one. The results reveal a dark side of trust: It supports socially detrimental cooperation when a deal is unenforceable

A Social Norms Perspective on Child Marriage: The General Framework

This paper offer a general theoretical framework that can, first, help integrate the different explanations of child marriage and, second, guide the development of measurement tools indispensable for child marriage M&E. Our theoretical framework is based on insights into how individuals make decisions. The collective practice of child marriage is ultimately a cluster of individual behaviors, so that, if we want to understand it, we have to understand why individuals behave in certain ways. This paper was written in collaboration with UNICEF and benefited from the technical input of UNICEF staff

Transcobalamin II-mediated uptake of vitamin B12 by rat liver cells

Vitamin B12 plays a unique role in mammalian metabolism not only because, as a coenzyme, it is involved in two completely different and unrelated biochemical pathways, - the synthesis of nucleic acid precursors and the catabolism of some fatty acids -, but even more because it gives an excellent example how different groups of living organisms work together and depend on each other for the supply of vital nutrients. Vitamin B12 is almost exclusively found in animal products. However, it is not synthesized by the animals themselves but, they are able in one or the other way to absorb vitamin B12 which is produced bv microorganisms. For instance in ruminants the bacteria in the rumen are the source of the vitamin, which is taken up by the gut, distributed over the tissues and which is subsequently consumed by man with the meat or with the milk. However, the quantity of vitamin B12 , which is available in the food. is so low, that it would be lost if not an elaborate system of carrier proteins and cellular receotor mechanisms selectively collected it from the food and delivered it to the tissues. Intrinsic factor, produced and secreted by the qastric mucosa, binds the vitamin, which enters the body with the food, and hands it over to the ileal mucosa cells, which carry specific receptors for this protein. When the vitamin enters the blood, the plasma transport proteins, the transcobalamins, take it up immediately and deliver it to the tissues

A Structured Approach to a Diagnostic of Collective Practices

“How social norms change” is not only a theoretical question but also an empirical one. Many organizations have implemented programs to abandon harmful social norms. These programs are standardly monitored and evaluated with a set of empirical tools. While monitoring and evaluation (M&E) of changes in objective outcomes and behaviors is well developed, we will argue that M&E of changes in the wide range of beliefs and preferences important to social norms is still problematic. In this paper, we first present a theoretical framework and then show how it should guide social norms measurement. As a case study, we focus on the harmful practice of child marriage. We show how an operational theory of social norms can guide the design of surveys, experiments, and vignettes. We use examples from existing research to illustrate how to study social norms change

A new representation of acid-base disturbances

The acid-base status of intensive care patients is monitored on the basis of three quantities. The graphical representation which may be of help for the monitoring task is therefore cumbersome. The classical Siggaard-Andersen acid-base chart is such a representation, but it is only suited for evaluating one acid-base status at a time and not for representing acid-base paths. A new representation, obtained after a principal components transformation is presented. It is shown that the representation is characteristic for the laboratory instrument used. Its most attractive feature is that it is distortionless with respect to the three-dimensional configuration

Serum protein markers for the early detection of lung cancer:a focus on autoantibodies

Lung cancer has the highest mortality rate among cancer patients in the world, in particular because most patients are only diagnosed at an advanced and non-curable stage. Computed tomography (CT) screening on high-risk individuals has shown that early detection could reduce the mortality rate. However, the still high false-positive rate of CT screening may harm healthy individuals because of unnecessary follow-up scans and invasive follow-up procedures. Alternatively, false-negative and indeterminate results may harm patients due to the delayed diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer. Non-invasive biomarkers, complementary to CT screening, could lower the false-positive and false-negative rate of CT screening at baseline and thereby reduce the number of patients that need follow-up and diagnose patients at an earlier stage of lung cancer. Lung cancer tissue generates lung cancer-associated proteins to which the immune system might produce high-affinity autoantibodies. This autoantibody response to tumor-associated antigens starts during early-stage lung cancer and may endure over years. Identification of tumor-associated antigens or the corresponding autoantibodies in body fluids as potential non-invasive biomarkers could thus be an effective approach for early detection and monitoring of lung cancer. In this review we provide an overview of differentially expressed protein, antigen and autoantibody biomarkers that combined with CT imaging might be of clinical use for early detection of lung cancer.</p

Effect of nitrous oxide on folate coenzyme distribution and de novo synthesis of thymidylate in human bone marrow cells

Abstract The effect of nitrous oxide on intracellular folate metabolism of the human bone marrow was studied in vitro. Bone marrow cells, obtained from healthy volunteers, were incubated with 5 × 10−8m-[3H]5-formyltetrahydrofolate (5-formylTHF) for 18 hr to label intracellular folate pools. Subsequently the cells were exposed to nitrous oxide for up to 10 hr, and the intracellular folate coenzyme levels were quantitated by HPLC. The dU suppression test was carried out on part of the bone marrow samples in order to measure folate-dependent synthesis of the DNA precursor thymidylate (dTMP). After 5 hr exposure to nitrous oxide the de novo dTMP synthesis of the bone marrow cells was significantly decreased (P < 0.05), and this reduced synthesis persisted at 10 hr. After both 5 and 10 hr of exposure to nitrous oxide the amount of 10-formylTHF was reduced (P < 0.05) while that of 5-methylTHF was increased (P < 0.05). At 10 hr the level of THF was also decreased (P < 0.05). This study shows that nitrous oxide exposure of human bone marrow cells causes a redistribution of the various folate coenzymes which supports the idea of ‘functional cobalamin deficiency’. Moreover it seems probable that following prolonged exposure to nitrous oxide, not only folate-dependent dTMP synthesis but also de novo purine synthesis is reduced