Human Communication Systems Evolve by Cultural Selection

Human communication systems, such as language, evolve culturally; their components undergo reproduction and variation. However, a role for selection in cultural evolutionary dynamics is less clear. Often neutral evolution (also known as 'drift') models, are used to explain the evolution of human communication systems, and cultural evolution more generally. Under this account, cultural change is unbiased: for instance, vocabulary, baby names and pottery designs have been found to spread through random copying. While drift is the null hypothesis for models of cultural evolution it does not always adequately explain empirical results. Alternative models include cultural selection, which assumes variant adoption is biased. Theoretical models of human communication argue that during conversation interlocutors are biased to adopt the same labels and other aspects of linguistic representation (including prosody and syntax). This basic alignment mechanism has been extended by computer simulation to account for the emergence of linguistic conventions. When agents are biased to match the linguistic behavior of their interlocutor, a single variant can propagate across an entire population of interacting computer agents. This behavior-matching account operates at the level of the individual. We call it the Conformity-biased model. Under a different selection account, called content-biased selection, functional selection or replicator selection, variant adoption depends upon the intrinsic value of the particular variant (e.g., ease of learning or use). This second alternative account operates at the level of the cultural variant. Following Boyd and Richerson we call it the Content-biased model. The present paper tests the drift model and the two biased selection models' ability to explain the spread of communicative signal variants in an experimental micro-society

The effect of a livelihoods intervention in an urban slum in India: Do vocational counseling and training alter the attitudes and behavior of adolescent girls?

This Population Council working paper examines whether an experimental intervention for girls aged 14–19 that provided reproductive health information, vocational counseling and training, and assistance with opening savings accounts in slum areas of Allahabad in Uttar Pradesh, India had an effect on their attitudes and behaviors. Although the livelihoods program was acceptable to parents and feasible to implement, the project had only a minimal impact on the behavior and attitudes of adolescent girls in the experimental slums. The greatest changes between the baseline and the endline surveys were found in those outcomes that most closely reflected the content of the intervention. Girls exposed to the intervention were significantly more likely to have knowledge of safe spaces, be a member of a group, score higher on the social skills index, be informed about reproductive health, and spend time on leisure activities than were the matched control respondents. No effect was found on gender-role attitudes, mobility, self-esteem, work expectations, or on number of hours visiting friends, performing domestic chores, or engaging in labor-market work

"MastiMIR" - A mastitis early warning system based on MIR spectra

peer reviewedAt farm level the mastitis disease appearance had decreased the milk production, produced veterinary costs, welfare issues, increased culling rate or caused lower milk payment. Because mastitis is associated with a wide range of characteristics that can be measured in milk and with recent advances in estimation of milk components using mid-infrared spectrometry, it is now possible to have the composition of several additional milk components such as fatty acids, lactoferrin, minerals, negative energy balance, non-esterified fatty acids and β-hydroxybutyrate or citrate, etc. The objective of this study was to build a spectrometric tool, such as MastiMIR for the determination in the milk quality of the animal health status, with the aim to evaluate the diagnosis usability and MIR indicators for the improvement of early mastitis prediction at LKV Baden-Württemberg. All data editing, modelling and calculations were done using the R statistical language and environment. The calibration data set contains around 9082 spectral data from around 1000 GMON herds. The validation approach was first cross validation 10 fold and a lot of 8 farms for an external validation. The 8 farms, chosen for the external validation, were the farms with the highest diagnosis registration and had to cover the important breeds e.g. 3 Holstein farms, 1 Red Holstein farm, 2 Brawn Swiss farms, 2 Simmental farms that are at LKV- Baden-Württemberg registered. To identify animal variables that were positively or negatively associated with mastitis determination, the spectral data set was first pre-processed by Savitzky-Golay first derivative to remove the offset differences between samples for baseline correction, before performimg Legendre polynomial modelling. Then the data was submitted to the combination of lasso regression using the “glmnet” R package. For the non-healthy group the spectral data with mastitis diagnosis for a given cow within 7 days before the new mastitis observation and the editing chosen was just test-day that had more than 400,000 somatic cell count (SCC). What come after the mastitis diagnostic was not taken into account for modelling. For the healthy group only spectra which had no diagnosis associated within ±60 days were used. For “glmnet” model were considered as fix effects the sampling moment, lactation stage and important LKV- Baden-Württemberg breeds and the Legendre polynomial data based on days in milk for the 212 OptiMIR wavenumbers of spectral data. Our MastiMIR calibration model showed a good accuracy (0.89) and medium prediction accuracy (0.83) we have to underline that was not finding until now any information in the literature of direct use of spectral data to predict the mastitis treat. The model provides four classes of Mastitis warning such as not, moderately, significantly and severely endangered. The moderately endangered class is a signal for the farmer. In that case the farmer would contact the veterinary and a control would be made in order to prevent the mastitis diseases. The MastiMIR model is a complementary tool for the SCC model

A Scintillator Beam Monitor for Real-Time FLASH Radiotherapy

FLASH Radiotherapy (RT) is a potentially new cancer radiotherapy technique where an entire therapeutic dose is delivered in about 0.1 s and at ~1000 times higher dose rate than in conventional RT. For clinical trials to be conducted safely, precise and fast beam monitoring that can generate an out-of-tolerance beam interrupt is required. A FLASH Beam Scintillator Monitor (FBSM) is being developed based in part on two novel proprietary scintillator materials: an organic polymeric material (PM) and inorganic hybrid (HM). The FBSM provides large area coverage, low mass profile, linear response over a broad dynamic range, radiation tolerance, and real-time analysis IEC-compliant fast beam-interrupt signal. This paper includes the design concept and test results from prototype devices in radiation beams that include heavy ions, low energy protons at nA currents, FLASH level dose per pulse electron beams, and in a hospital radiotherapy clinic with electron beams. Results include image quality, response linearity, radiation hardness, spatial resolution, and real-time data processing. PM and HM scintillator exhibited no measurable drop in signal after a cumulative dose of 9 kGy and 20 kGy respectively. HM showed a small -0.02%/kGy signal decrease after a 212 kGy cumulative dose resulting from continuous exposure for 15 minutes at a high FLASH dose rate of 234 Gy/s. These tests established the linear response of the FBSM with respect to beam currents, dose per pulse, and material thickness. Comparison with commercial Gafchromic film indicates that the FBSM produces a high resolution 2D beam image and can reproduce a nearly identical beam profile, including primary beam tails. At 20 kfps or 50 microsec/frame, the real-time FPGA based computation and analysis of beam position, beam shape, and beam dose takes < 1 microsec.Comment: 15 pages, 9 figure