Uncover the Offensive Side of Disparagement Humor: An fMRI Study

Disparagement humor is a kind of humor that denigrates, belittles an individual or a social group. In the aim to unveil the offensive side of these kinds of jokes, we have run an event-related fMRI study asking 30 healthy volunteers to judge the level of fun of a series of verbal stimuli that ended with a sentence that was socially inappropriate but funny (disparagement joke -DJ), socially inappropriate but not funny (SI) or neutral (N). Behavioral results showed disparagement jokes are perceived as funny and at the same time offensive. However, the level of offense in DJ is lower than that registered in SI stimuli. Functional data showed that DJ activated the insula, the SMA, the precuneus, the ACC, the dorsal striatum (the caudate nucleus), and the thalamus. These activations suggest that in DJ a feeling of mirth (and/or a desire to laugh) derived from the joke (e.g., SMA and precuneus) and the perception of the jokes\u2019 social inappropriateness (e.g., ACC and insula) coexist. Furthermore, DJ and SI share a common network related to mentalizing and to the processing of negative feelings, namely the medial prefrontal cortex, the putamen and the right thalamus

Consistency conditions and trace anomalies in six dimensions

Conformally invariant quantum field theories develop trace anomalies when defined on curved backgrounds. We study again the problem of identifying all possible trace anomalies in d=6 by studying the consistency conditions to derive their 10 independent solutions. It is known that only 4 of these solutions represent true anomalies, classified as one type A anomaly, given by the topological Euler density, and three type B anomalies, made up by three independent Weyl invariants. However, we also present the explicit expressions of the remaining 6 trivial anomalies, namely those that can be obtained by the Weyl variation of local functionals. The knowledge of the latter is in general necessary to disentangle the universal coefficients of the type A and B anomalies from calculations performed on concrete models.Comment: 16 pages, LaTe

Brain Activation Patterns Characterizing Different Phases of Motor Action: Execution, Choice and Ideation.

Motor behaviour is controlled by a large set of interacting neural structures, subserving the different components involved in hierarchical motor processes. Few studies have investigated the neural substrate of higher-order motor ideation, i.e. the mental operation of conceiving a movement. The aim of this functional magnetic resonance imaging study was to segregate the neural structures involved in motor ideation from those involved in movement choice and execution. An index finger movement paradigm was adopted, including three different conditions: performing a pre-specified movement, choosing and executing a movement and ideating a movement of choice. The tasks involved either the right or left hand, in separate runs. Neuroimaging results were obtained by comparing the different experimental conditions and computing conjunction maps of the right and left hands for each contrast. Pre-specified movement execution was supported by bilateral fronto-parietal motor regions, the cerebellum and putamen. Choosing and executing finger movement involved mainly left fronto-temporal areas and the anterior cingulate. Motor ideation activated almost exclusively left hemisphere regions, including the inferior, middle and superior frontal regions, middle temporal and middle occipital gyri. These findings show that motor ideation is controlled by a cortical network mainly involved in abstract thinking, cognitive and motor control, semantic and visual imagery processes

Greater Mutual Aggravation

A large strand of research has identified conditions on preferences under which (i) a single risk is undesirable and (ii) two independent risks aggravate each other. We extend this line of inquiry by establishing conditions such that (iii) the degree of mutual aggravation is greater for more severe risks. Here, the severity of risks is characterized by means of general stochastic dominance shifts and also via moment-preserving stochastic transformations. Greater mutual aggravation is implied by all commonly used utility functions and may thus be regarded a typical property of expected utility preferences. We show that greater mutual aggravation determines the comparative statics of risk changes in several risk management problems, including precautionary saving, intertemporal risk-taking, and self-protection. Greater mutual aggravation further explains recent experimental findings on higher-order risk preferences. Finally, it offers a new, simple, and efficient method to elicit risk preferences up to “very” high orders

Computación tolerante a fallas aplicada en el mantenimiento automático del microsatélite Sátex

Se ha desarrollado una arquitectura de cómputo tolerante a fallas con capacidades para realizar mantenimiento remoto y automático a la computadora de vuelo del microsatélite experimental Satex (MES). Los pequeños satélites como el MES presentan una tendencia a incrementar el valor agregado y el costo de sus experimentos, lo que justifica una instrumentación tolerante a fallas y de larga vida, sobre todo si resulta económica y realmente aplicable. La arquitectura de cómputo tolerante a fallas propuesta en este trabajo incorpora todos los recursos de procesamiento del satélite para realizar las tareas de diagnóstico y detección de fallas, así como la reconfiguración de la arquitectura en caso de fallas

Computadora de vuelo triplex de diseño y manufactura mexicana para el microsatélite Sátex

Este trabajo describe la arquitectura diseñada y fabricada para la computadora de vuelo (CV) del microsatélite experimental Satex (MES) la cual utiliza un sistema triplex de procesadores que se basa en una tarjeta de procesamiento principal y dos refacciones completas de respaldo. La CV está compuesta por seis circuitos impresos, cada uno con componentes de montaje superficial ensamblados en ambas caras de los tabloides para reducir el número de tarjetas y por tanto su peso. La mayor parte de los componentes utilizados son de calificación militar, sólo los procesadores son de tipo industrial con rango de temperatura extendida por lo cual se le agregan protecciones electrónicas contra radiación. Se ofrecen las características globales de la computadora, sus procesos de validación y resultados de confiabilidad operativa obtenidos con la norma militar MIL-HDBK217f

Optimal cluster sizes for wireless sensor networks: An experimental analysis

Node clustering and data aggregation are popular techniques to reduce energy consumption in large WSNs and a large body of literature has emerged describing various clustering protocols. Unfortunately, for practitioners wishing to exploit clustering in deployments, there is little help when trying to identify a protocol that meets their needs. This paper takes a step back from specific protocols to consider the fundamental question: what is the optimal cluster size in terms of the resulting communication generated to collect data. Our experimental analysis considers a wide range of parameters that characterize the WSN, and shows that in the most common cases, clusters in which all nodes can communicate in one hop to the cluster head are optimal