35 research outputs found
Distribution and Extinction of Ungulates during the Holocene of the Southern Levant
BACKGROUND: The southern Levant (Israel, Palestinian Authority and Jordan) has been continuously and extensively populated by succeeding phases of human cultures for the past 15,000 years. The long human impact on the ancient landscape has had great ecological consequences, and has caused continuous and accelerating damage to the natural environment. The rich zooarchaeological data gathered at the area provide a unique opportunity to reconstruct spatial and temporal changes in wild species distribution, and correlate them with human demographic changes. METHODOLOGY: Zoo-archaeological data (382 animal bone assemblages from 190 archaeological sites) from various time periods, habitats and landscapes were compared. The bone assemblages were sorted into 12 major cultural periods. Distribution maps showing the presence of each ungulate species were established for each period. CONCLUSIONS: The first major ungulate extinction occurred during the local Iron Age (1,200-586 BCE), a period characterized by significant human population growth. During that time the last of the largest wild ungulates, the hartebeest (Alcelaphus buselaphus), aurochs (Bos primigenius) and the hippopotamus (Hippopotamus amphibius) became extinct, followed by a shrinking distribution of forest-dwelling cervids. A second major wave of extinction occurred only in the 19th and 20th centuries CE. Furthermore, a negative relationship was found between the average body mass of ungulate species that became extinct during the Holocene and their extinction date. It is thus very likely that the intensified human activity through habitat destruction and uncontrolled hunting were responsible for the two major waves of ungulate extinction in the southern Levant during the late Holocene
Promises and lies: can observers detect deception in written messages
Abstract: We design a laboratory experiment to examine predictions of trustworthiness
in a novel three-person trust game. We investigate whether and why observers of the
game can predict the trustworthiness of hand-written communications. Observers report
their perception of the trustworthiness of messages, and make predictions about the
senders’ behavior. Using observers’ decisions, we are able to classify messages as
“promises” or “empty talk.” Drawing from substantial previous research, we hypothesize
that certain factors influence whether a sender is likely to honor a message and/or
whether an observer perceives the message as likely to behonored: the mention of money;
the use of encompassing words; and message length. We find that observers have more
trust in longer messages and “promises”; promises that mention money are significantly
more likely to be broken; and observers trust equally in promises that do and do not
mention money. Overall, observers perform slightly better than chance at predicting
whether a message will be honored. We attribute this result to observers’ ability to
distinguish promises from empty talk, and to trust promises more than empty talk.
However, within each of these two categories, observers are unable to discern between
messages that senders will honor from those that they will not
Iron Behaving Badly: Inappropriate Iron Chelation as a Major Contributor to the Aetiology of Vascular and Other Progressive Inflammatory and Degenerative Diseases
The production of peroxide and superoxide is an inevitable consequence of
aerobic metabolism, and while these particular "reactive oxygen species" (ROSs)
can exhibit a number of biological effects, they are not of themselves
excessively reactive and thus they are not especially damaging at physiological
concentrations. However, their reactions with poorly liganded iron species can
lead to the catalytic production of the very reactive and dangerous hydroxyl
radical, which is exceptionally damaging, and a major cause of chronic
inflammation. We review the considerable and wide-ranging evidence for the
involvement of this combination of (su)peroxide and poorly liganded iron in a
large number of physiological and indeed pathological processes and
inflammatory disorders, especially those involving the progressive degradation
of cellular and organismal performance. These diseases share a great many
similarities and thus might be considered to have a common cause (i.e.
iron-catalysed free radical and especially hydroxyl radical generation). The
studies reviewed include those focused on a series of cardiovascular, metabolic
and neurological diseases, where iron can be found at the sites of plaques and
lesions, as well as studies showing the significance of iron to aging and
longevity. The effective chelation of iron by natural or synthetic ligands is
thus of major physiological (and potentially therapeutic) importance. As
systems properties, we need to recognise that physiological observables have
multiple molecular causes, and studying them in isolation leads to inconsistent
patterns of apparent causality when it is the simultaneous combination of
multiple factors that is responsible. This explains, for instance, the
decidedly mixed effects of antioxidants that have been observed, etc...Comment: 159 pages, including 9 Figs and 2184 reference
Opportunistic customer claiming during service recovery
Although a potentially significant issue to managers and academics alike, opportunistic customer behavior in the service recovery context has been largely ignored. A multi-stage research program, comprising actual customer claims (Study 1), in depth customer interviews (Study 2) and three experimental studies (Studies 3, 4, 5), explored opportunistic customer claiming behavior during service recovery and yielded robust findings across methods, contexts and samples. Potential determinants of opportunistic claiming in a service recovery context were identified by drawing on the justice, self-concept maintenance and neutralization theories. The findings support the hypothesis that when experiencing lower distributive, procedural and interactional justice, respondents were more likely to be opportunistic in their claiming. Further more, consumers were more likely to be opportunistic when dealing with large compared to small firms, and when they were in one-time transactions compared to when they had an established relationship with the firm. Finally, increased claiming in general, and opportunistic claiming in particular, did not lead to increased satisfaction with the service recovery. © 2009 Academy of Marketing Science