13,121 research outputs found
Money and happiness : rank of income, not income, affects life satisfaction
Does money buy happiness, or does happiness come indirectly from the higher rank in society that money brings? Here we test a rank hypothesis, according to which people gain utility from the ranked position of their income within a comparison group. The rank hypothesis contrasts with traditional reference income hypotheses, which suggest utility from income depends on comparison to a social group reference norm. We find that the ranked position of an individualâs income predicts general life satisfaction, while absolute income and reference income have no effect. Furthermore, individuals weight upward comparisons more than downward comparisons. According to the rank hypothesis, income and utility are not directly linked: Increasing an individualâs income will only increase their utility if ranked position also increases and will necessarily reduce the utility of others who will lose rank
Differential dependencies of monocytes and neutrophils on dectin-1, dectin-2 and complement for the recognition of fungal particles in inflammation
Peer reviewedPublisher PD
Candida albicans colonization and dissemination from the murine gastrointestinal tract : the influence of morphology and Th17 immunity
This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved. This work was supported by the Wellcome Trust (086558, 080088, 102705), a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award (097377) and a studentship from the University of Aberdeen. D.K. was supported by grant 5R01AI083344 from the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and by a Voelcker Young Investigator Award from the Max and Minnie Tomerlin Voelcker Fund.Peer reviewedPublisher PD
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Quantifying the value of ecosystem services: a case study of honeybee pollination in the UK
There is concern that insect pollinators, such as honey bees, are currently declining in abundance, and are under serious threat from environmental changes such as habitat loss and climate change; the use of pesticides in intensive agriculture, and emerging diseases. This paper aims to evaluate how much public support there would be in preventing further decline to maintain the current number of bee colonies in the UK. The contingent valuation method (CVM) was used to obtain the willingness to pay (WTP) for a theoretical pollinator protection policy. Respondents were asked whether they would be WTP to support such a policy and how much would they pay? Results show that the mean WTP to support the bee protection policy was ÂŁ1.37/week/household. Based on there being 24.9 million households in the UK, this is equivalent to ÂŁ1.77 billion per year. This total value can show the importance of maintaining the overall pollination service to policy makers. We compare this total with estimates obtained using a simple market valuation of pollination for the UK
Determination of the size, mass, and density of "exomoons" from photometric transit timing variations
Precise photometric measurements of the upcoming space missions allow the
size, mass, and density of satellites of exoplanets to be determined. Here we
present such an analysis using the photometric transit timing variation
(). We examined the light curve effects of both the transiting planet
and its satellite. We define the photometric central time of the transit that
is equivalent to the transit of a fixed photocenter. This point orbits the
barycenter, and leads to the photometric transit timing variations. The exact
value of depends on the ratio of the density, the mass, and the size of
the satellite and the planet. Since two of those parameters are independent, a
reliable estimation of the density ratio leads to an estimation of the size and
the mass of the exomoon. Upper estimations of the parameters are possible in
the case when an upper limit of is known. In case the density ratio
cannot be estimated reliably, we propose an approximation with assuming equal
densities. The presented photocenter analysis predicts the size of the
satellite better than the mass. We simulated transits of the Earth-Moon system
in front of the Sun. The estimated size and mass of the Moon are 0.020
Earth-mass and 0.274 Earth-size if equal densities are assumed. This result is
comparable to the real values within a factor of 2. If we include the real
density ratio (about 0.6), the results are 0.010 Earth-Mass and 0.253
Earth-size, which agree with the real values within 20%.Comment: 6 pages, 5 figures, to appear in Astronomy and Astrophysic
Duality between Electric and Magnetic Black Holes
A number of attempts have recently been made to extend the conjectured
duality of Yang Mills theory to gravity. Central to these speculations has been
the belief that electrically and magnetically charged black holes, the solitons
of quantum gravity, have identical quantum properties. This is not obvious,
because although duality is a symmetry of the classical equations of motion, it
changes the sign of the Maxwell action. Nevertheless, we show that the chemical
potential and charge projection that one has to introduce for electric but not
magnetic black holes exactly compensate for the difference in action in the
semi-classical approximation. In particular, we show that the pair production
of electric black holes is not a runaway process, as one might think if one
just went by the action of the relevant instanton. We also comment on the
definition of the entropy in cosmological situations, and show that we need to
be more careful when defining the entropy than we are in an asymptotically-flat
case.Comment: 23 pages, revtex, no figures. Major revision: two sections on the
electric Ernst solution adde
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