Body shape preferences: Associations with rater body shape and sociosexuality

Copyright @ 2013 Price et al.This article has been made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund.There is accumulating evidence of condition-dependent mate choice in many species, that is, individual preferences varying in strength according to the condition of the chooser. In humans, for example, people with more attractive faces/bodies, and who are higher in sociosexuality, exhibit stronger preferences for attractive traits in opposite-sex faces/bodies. However, previous studies have tended to use only relatively simple, isolated measures of rater attractiveness. Here we use 3D body scanning technology to examine associations between strength of rater preferences for attractive traits in opposite-sex bodies, and raters' body shape, self-perceived attractiveness, and sociosexuality. For 118 raters and 80 stimuli models, we used a 3D scanner to extract body measurements associated with attractiveness (male waist-chest ratio [WCR], female waist-hip ratio [WHR], and volume-height index [VHI] in both sexes) and also measured rater self-perceived attractiveness and sociosexuality. As expected, WHR and VHI were important predictors of female body attractiveness, while WCR and VHI were important predictors of male body attractiveness. Results indicated that male rater sociosexuality scores were positively associated with strength of preference for attractive (low) VHI and attractive (low) WHR in female bodies. Moreover, male rater self-perceived attractiveness was positively associated with strength of preference for low VHI in female bodies. The only evidence of condition-dependent preferences in females was a positive association between attractive VHI in female raters and preferences for attractive (low) WCR in male bodies. No other significant associations were observed in either sex between aspects of rater body shape and strength of preferences for attractive opposite-sex body traits. These results suggest that among male raters, rater self-perceived attractiveness and sociosexuality are important predictors of preference strength for attractive opposite-sex body shapes, and that rater body traits -with the exception of VHI in female raters- may not be good predictors of these preferences in either sex.This study is funded by the Brunel University School of Social Sciences and made available through the Brunel Open Access Publishing Fund

State space collapse and diffusion approximation for a network operating under a fair bandwidth sharing policy

We consider a connection-level model of Internet congestion control, introduced by Massouli\'{e} and Roberts [Telecommunication Systems 15 (2000) 185--201], that represents the randomly varying number of flows present in a network. Here, bandwidth is shared fairly among elastic document transfers according to a weighted $\alpha$-fair bandwidth sharing policy introduced by Mo and Walrand [IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking 8 (2000) 556--567] [$\alpha\in (0,\infty)$]. Assuming Poisson arrivals and exponentially distributed document sizes, we focus on the heavy traffic regime in which the average load placed on each resource is approximately equal to its capacity. A fluid model (or functional law of large numbers approximation) for this stochastic model was derived and analyzed in a prior work [Ann. Appl. Probab. 14 (2004) 1055--1083] by two of the authors. Here, we use the long-time behavior of the solutions of the fluid model established in that paper to derive a property called multiplicative state space collapse, which, loosely speaking, shows that in diffusion scale, the flow count process for the stochastic model can be approximately recovered as a continuous lifting of the workload process.Comment: Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/08-AAP591 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org

A novel element upstream of the Vgamma2 gene in the murine T cell receptor gamma locus cooperates with the 3 enhancer to act as a locus control region.

Transgenic expression constructs were employed to identify a cis-acting transcription element in the T cell receptor (TCR)-gamma locus, called HsA, between the Vgamma5 and Vgamma2 genes. In constructs lacking the previously defined enhancer (3E(Cgamma1)), HsA supports transcription in mature but not immature T cells in a largely position-independent fashion. 3E(Cgamma1), without HsA, supports transcription in immature and mature T cells but is subject to severe position effects. Together, the two elements support expression in immature and mature T cells in a copy number-dependent, position-independent fashion. Furthermore, HsA was necessary for consistent rearrangement of transgenic recombination substrates. These data suggest that HsA provides chromatin-opening activity and, together with 3E(Cgamma1), constitutes a T cell-specific locus control region for the TCR-gamma locus

Modulation of the Curie Temperature in Ferromagnetic/Ferroelectric Hybrid Double Quantum Wells

We propose a ferromagnetic/ferroelectric hybrid double quantum well structure, and present an investigation of the Curie temperature (Tc) modulation in this quantum structure. The combined effects of applied electric fields and spontaneous electric polarization are considered for a system that consists of a Mn \delta-doped well, a barrier, and a p-type ferroelectric well. We calculate the change in the envelope functions of carriers at the lowest energy sub-band, resulting from applied electric fields and switching the dipole polarization. By reversing the depolarizing field, we can achieve two different ferromagnetic transition temperatures of the ferromagnetic quantum well in a fixed applied electric field. The Curie temperature strongly depends on the position of the Mn \delta-doped layer and the polarization strength of the ferroelectric well.Comment: 9 pages, 5 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev. B (2006) minor revision: One of the line types is changed in Fig.

Triple sign reversal of Hall effect in HgBa_{2}CaCu_{2}O_{6} thin films after heavy-ion irradiations

Triple sign reversal in the mixed-state Hall effect has been observed for the first time in ion-irradiated HgBa_{2}CaCu_{2}O_{6} thin films. The negative dip at the third sign reversal is more pronounced for higher fields, which is opposite to the case of the first sign reversal near T_c in most high-T_c superconductors. These observations can be explained by a recent prediction in which the third sign reversal is attributed to the energy derivative of the density of states and to a temperature-dependent function related to the superconducting energy gap. These contributions prominently appear in cases where the mean free path is significantly decreased, such as our case of ion-irradiated thin films.Comment: 4 pages, 3 eps figures, submitted Phys. Rev. Let

High-Energy Forward Scattering and the Pomeron: Simple Pole versus Unitarized Models

Using the largest data set available, we determine the best values that the data at t=0 (total cross sections and real parts of the hadronic amplitudes) give for the intercepts and couplings of the soft pomeron and of the rho/omega and a/f trajectories. We show that these data cannot discriminate between a simple-pole fit and asymptotic log square s and log s fits, and hence are not sufficient to reveal the ultimate nature of the pomeron. However, we evaluate the existing evidence (factorization, universality, quark counting) favouring the simple-pole hypothesis. We also examine the range of validity in energy of the fits, and show that one cannot rely on such fits in the region sqrt(s)<9 GeV. We also establish bounds on the odderon and the hard pomeron.Comment: 20 pages, 10 figures. Predictions of Table 4 corrected and acknowledgements adde

Probing Majorana neutrinos in rare K and D, D_s, B, B_c meson decays

We study lepton number violating decays of charged K, D, D_s, B and B_c mesons of the form M^+\to {M'}^-\ell^+\ell^+, induced by the existence of Majorana neutrinos. These processes provide information complementary to neutrinoless double nuclear beta decays, and are sensitive to neutrino masses and lepton mixing. We explore neutrino mass ranges m_N from below 1 eV to several hundred GeV. We find that in many cases the branching ratios are prohibitively small, however in the intermediate range m_\pi < m_N < m_{B_c}, in specific channels and for specific neutrino masses, the branching ratios can be at the reach of high luminosity experiments like those at the LHC-b and future Super flavor-factories, and can provide bounds on the lepton mixing parameters.Comment: 25 page

Solid particle erosion of environmental barrier coatings and ceramic matrix composites

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