“Do-Not-Call-List” Testimony: Before the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation

Senators, thank you for giving me this opportunity to testify before you today, on a matter of great importance to U.S. consumers, and business alike: the formation of a federal Do Not Call Registry. I am the Executive Director of the American Teleservices Association, which is the largest and only association dedicated exclusively to the interests of the teleservices industry. We are enjoying our twentieth anniversary this year, and represent approximately 650 rms involved in the teleservices industry. Our membership is tremendously diverse, and encompasses all aspects of telemarketing, customer service, market research, political calling, non- profit fundraising and technical product support. We also represent the rms that provide long distance, equipment providers, outsourced teleservices firms, consultants and in-house teleservices operations like banks, major retailers, cable television, local telephone service, etc

Do Not Call: Abdicating and Ignoring Responsibility

I am not a lawyer, but for nearly a decade and a half, I have dealt with the issues that gave rise to the Federal Do Not Call Registry. Regardless of what you have read or seen, this issue did not just appear on the scene with the updating of the FTC’s Telemarketing Sales Rule or the subsequent corollary changes made by the FCC in its rules implementing the Telephone Consumer Protection Act (“TCPA”). As a matter of fact, the original regulatory rulemaking by the FCC to implement the TCPA are over a decade old

Beyond aggression: Androgen-receptor blockade modulates social interaction in wild meerkats

In male vertebrates, androgens are inextricably linked to reproduction, social dominance, and aggression, often at the cost of paternal investment or prosociality. Testosterone is invoked to explain rank-related reproductive differences, but its role within a status class, particularly among subordinates, is underappreciated. Recent evidence, especially for monogamous and cooperatively breeding species, suggests broader androgenic mediation of adult social interaction. We explored the actions of androgens in subordinate, male members of a cooperatively breeding species, the meerkat (Suricata suricatta). Although male meerkats show no rank-related testosterone differences, subordinate helpers rarely reproduce. We blocked androgen receptors, in the field, by treating subordinate males with the antiandrogen, flutamide. We monitored androgen concentrations (via baseline serum and time-sequential fecal sampling) and recorded behavior within their groups (via focal observation). Relative to controls, flutamide-treated animals initiated less and received more high-intensity aggression (biting, threatening, feeding competition), engaged in more prosocial behavior (social sniffing, grooming, huddling), and less frequently initiated play or assumed a ‘dominant’ role during play, revealing significant androgenic effects across a broad range of social behavior. By contrast, guarding or vigilance and measures of olfactory and vocal communication in subordinate males appeared unaffected by flutamide treatment. Thus, androgens in male meerkat helpers are aligned with the traditional trade-off between promoting reproductive and aggressive behavior at a cost to affiliation. Our findings, based on rare endocrine manipulation in wild mammals, show a more pervasive role for androgens in adult social behavior than is often recognized, with possible relevance for understanding tradeoffs in cooperative systems

Search for dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks in √s = 13 TeV pp collisions with the ATLAS detector

A search for weakly interacting massive particle dark matter produced in association with bottom or top quarks is presented. Final states containing third-generation quarks and miss- ing transverse momentum are considered. The analysis uses 36.1 fb−1 of proton–proton collision data recorded by the ATLAS experiment at √s = 13 TeV in 2015 and 2016. No significant excess of events above the estimated backgrounds is observed. The results are in- terpreted in the framework of simplified models of spin-0 dark-matter mediators. For colour- neutral spin-0 mediators produced in association with top quarks and decaying into a pair of dark-matter particles, mediator masses below 50 GeV are excluded assuming a dark-matter candidate mass of 1 GeV and unitary couplings. For scalar and pseudoscalar mediators produced in association with bottom quarks, the search sets limits on the production cross- section of 300 times the predicted rate for mediators with masses between 10 and 50 GeV and assuming a dark-matter mass of 1 GeV and unitary coupling. Constraints on colour- charged scalar simplified models are also presented. Assuming a dark-matter particle mass of 35 GeV, mediator particles with mass below 1.1 TeV are excluded for couplings yielding a dark-matter relic density consistent with measurements