An Internal Dilemma: Different Approaches to Handling Melancholia in Early Modern Spanish Religious Orders

This study argues that religious orders in early modern Spain developed informal sets of procedures to handle the consequences of melancholia in their communities. It also argues that three influential members of these orders, San Ignacio de Loyola of the Jesuits, and San Teresa de Avila and San Juan de la Cruz of the Discalced Carmelites, tailored these protocols according to their own private concerns and experience with the disease. The changing discourse surrounding melancholia and similar diseases during the early modern period, alongside the unique environmental concerns of these newly founded orders, created a need for new methods of dealing with the disruptions caused by melancholic members of the clergy. These solutions formed out of the immediate needs within each order, but ultimately defined the relationship between melancholic brothers and sisters and their communities

SHOP2: An HTN Planning System

The SHOP2 planning system received one of the awards for distinguished performance in the 2002 International Planning Competition. This paper describes the features of SHOP2 which enabled it to excel in the competition, especially those aspects of SHOP2 that deal with temporal and metric planning domains

Deforming the metric of cognitive maps distorts memory

Entorhinal grid cells, characterized by spatially periodic activity patterns, are thought to provide a universal spatial metric. However, grid cell firing-patterns are distorted in highly polarized environments such as trapezoids. Additionally, the functional role of grid cells in guiding behavior remains elusive. Here, we leverage immersive virtual reality using a novel motion platform to test the impact of environmental geometry on spatial memory in participants navigating a trapezoid arena. Object position memory in the trapezoid was degraded compared to a square control environment. Consistent with grid pattern distortions in rodents, this effect was more pronounced in the narrow than the broad part of the trapezoid. Remarkably, even outside of the encoding environment, these distortions persistently affected both navigated and judged distance estimates of never experienced paths between remembered positions and reconstructed memory maps. These distorted memory maps in turn explained behavior better than objective maps. Our findings demonstrate that environmental geometry interacts with human spatial memory similarly to how it affects rodent grid cells − thus strengthening the putative link between grid cells and behavior as well as cognitive functions beyond navigation

Hispanic-White Differences in Lifespan Variability in the United States

This study is the first to investigate whether and, if so, why Hispanics and non-Hispanic whites in the United States differ in the variability of their lifespans. Although Hispanics enjoy higher life expectancy than whites, very little is known about how lifespan variability—and thus uncertainty about length of life—differs by race/ethnicity. We use 2010 U.S. National Vital Statistics System data to calculate lifespan variance at ages 10 and older for Hispanics and whites, and then decompose the Hispanic-white variance difference into cause-specific spread, allocation, and timing effects. In addition to their higher life expectancy relative to whites, Hispanics also exhibit 7 % lower lifespan variability, with a larger gap among women than men. Differences in cause-specific incidence (allocation effects) explain nearly two-thirds of Hispanics’ lower lifespan variability, mainly because of the higher mortality from suicide, accidental poisoning, and lung cancer among whites. Most of the remaining Hispanic-white variance difference is due to greater age dispersion (spread effects) in mortality from heart disease and residual causes among whites than Hispanics. Thus, the Hispanic paradox—that a socioeconomically disadvantaged population (Hispanics) enjoys a mortality advantage over a socioeconomically advantaged population (whites)—pertains to lifespan variability as well as to life expectancy. Efforts to reduce U.S. lifespan variability and simultaneously increase life expectancy, especially for whites, should target premature, young adult causes of death—in particular, suicide, accidental poisoning, and homicide. We conclude by discussing how the analysis of Hispanic-white differences in lifespan variability contributes to our understanding of the Hispanic paradox

Identification and utilization of inter-species conserved (ISC) probesets on Affymetrix human GeneChip(® )platforms for the optimization of the assessment of expression patterns in non human primate (NHP) samples

BACKGROUND: While researchers have utilized versions of the Affymetrix human GeneChip(® )for the assessment of expression patterns in non human primate (NHP) samples, there has been no comprehensive sequence analysis study undertaken to demonstrate that the probe sequences designed to detect human transcripts are reliably hybridizing with their orthologs in NHP. By aligning probe sequences with expressed sequence tags (ESTs) in NHP, inter-species conserved (ISC) probesets, which have two or more probes complementary to ESTs in NHP, were identified on human GeneChip(® )platforms. The utility of human GeneChips(® )for the assessment of NHP expression patterns can be effectively evaluated by analyzing the hybridization behaviour of ISC probesets. Appropriate normalization methods were identified that further improve the reliability of human GeneChips(® )for interspecies (human vs NHP) comparisons. RESULTS: ISC probesets in each of the seven Affymetrix GeneChip(® )platforms (U133Plus2.0, U133A, U133B, U95Av2, U95B, Focus and HuGeneFL) were identified for both monkey and chimpanzee. Expression data was generated from peripheral blood mononuclear cells (PBMCs) of 12 human and 8 monkey (Indian origin Rhesus macaque) samples using the Focus GeneChip(®). Analysis of both qualitative detection calls and quantitative signal intensities showed that intra-species reproducibility (human vs. human or monkey vs. monkey) was much higher than interspecies reproducibility (human vs. monkey). ISC probesets exhibited higher interspecies reproducibility than the overall expressed probesets. Importantly, appropriate normalization methods could be leveraged to greatly improve interspecies correlations. The correlation coefficients between human (average of 12 samples) and monkey (average of 8 Rhesus macaque samples) are 0.725, 0.821 and 0.893 for MAS5.0 (Microarray Suite version 5.0), dChip and RMA (Robust Multi-chip Average) normalization method, respectively. CONCLUSION: It is feasible to use Affymetrix human GeneChip(® )platforms to assess the expression profiles of NHP for intra-species studies. Caution must be taken for interspecies studies since unsuitable probesets will result in spurious differentially regulated genes between human and NHP. RMA normalization method and ISC probesets are recommended for interspecies studies

A Planning Approach to Declarer Play in Contract Bridge

Although game-tree search works well in perfect-information games, it is less suitable for imperfect-information games such as contract bridge. The lack of knowledge about the opponents' possible moves gives the game tree a very large branching factor, making it impossible to search a significant portion of this tree in a reasonable amount of time. This paper describes our approach for overcoming this problem. We represent information about bridge in a task network that is extended to represent multi-agency and uncertainty. Our game-playing procedure uses this task network to generate game trees in which the set of alternative choices is determined not by the set of possible actions, but by the set of available tactical and strategic schemes. We have tested this approach on declarer play in the game of bridge, in an implementation called Tignum 2. On 5000 randomly generated notrump deals, Tignum 2 beat the strongest commercially available program by 1394 to 1302, with 2304 ties. These results are statistically significant at the alpha = 0.05 level. Tignum~2 searched an average of only 8745.6 moves per deal in an average time of only 27.5 seconds per deal on a Sun SPARCstation 10. Further enhancements to Tignum~2 are currently underway. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-85