The Good, the Bad, and the Rare: Memory for Partners in Social Interactions

For cooperation to evolve via direct reciprocity, individuals must track their partners' behavior to avoid exploitation. With increasing size of the interaction group, however, memory becomes error prone. To decrease memory effort, people could categorize partners into types, distinguishing cooperators and cheaters. We explored two ways in which people might preferentially track one partner type: remember cheaters or remember the rare type in the population. We assigned participants to one of three interaction groups which differed in the proportion of computer partners' types (defectors rare, equal proportion, or cooperators rare). We extended research on both hypotheses in two ways. First, participants experienced their partners repeatedly by interacting in Prisoner's Dilemma games. Second, we tested categorization of partners as cooperators or defectors in memory tests after a short and long retention interval (10 min and 1 week). Participants remembered rare partner types better than they remembered common ones at both retention intervals. We propose that the flexibility of responding to the environment suggests an ecologically rational memory strategy in social interactions

Phylogenetic ctDNA analysis depicts early-stage lung cancer evolution.

The early detection of relapse following primary surgery for non-small-cell lung cancer and the characterization of emerging subclones, which seed metastatic sites, might offer new therapeutic approaches for limiting tumour recurrence. The ability to track the evolutionary dynamics of early-stage lung cancer non-invasively in circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA) has not yet been demonstrated. Here we use a tumour-specific phylogenetic approach to profile the ctDNA of the first 100 TRACERx (Tracking Non-Small-Cell Lung Cancer Evolution Through Therapy (Rx)) study participants, including one patient who was also recruited to the PEACE (Posthumous Evaluation of Advanced Cancer Environment) post-mortem study. We identify independent predictors of ctDNA release and analyse the tumour-volume detection limit. Through blinded profiling of postoperative plasma, we observe evidence of adjuvant chemotherapy resistance and identify patients who are very likely to experience recurrence of their lung cancer. Finally, we show that phylogenetic ctDNA profiling tracks the subclonal nature of lung cancer relapse and metastasis, providing a new approach for ctDNA-driven therapeutic studies

Standard chemotherapy with or without bevacizumab for women with newly diagnosed ovarian cancer (ICON7): overall survival results of a phase 3 randomised trial

Background: The ICON7 trial previously reported improved progression-free survival in women with ovarian cancer with the addition of bevacizumab to standard chemotherapy, with the greatest effect in patients at high risk of disease progression. We report the final overall survival results of the trial. Methods: ICON7 was an international, phase 3, open-label, randomised trial undertaken at 263 centres in 11 countries across Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Eligible adult women with newly diagnosed ovarian cancer that was either high-risk early-stage disease (International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics [FIGO] stage I–IIa, grade 3 or clear cell histology) or more advanced disease (FIGO stage IIb–IV), with an Eastern Cooperative Oncology Group performance status of 0–2, were enrolled and randomly assigned in a 1:1 ratio to standard chemotherapy (six 3-weekly cycles of intravenous carboplatin [AUC 5 or 6] and paclitaxel 175 mg/m2 of body surface area) or the same chemotherapy regimen plus bevacizumab 7·5 mg per kg bodyweight intravenously every 3 weeks, given concurrently and continued with up to 12 further 3-weekly cycles of maintenance therapy. Randomisation was done by a minimisation algorithm stratified by FIGO stage, residual disease, interval between surgery and chemotherapy, and Gynecologic Cancer InterGroup group. The primary endpoint was progression-free survival; the study was also powered to detect a difference in overall survival. Analysis was by intention to treat. This trial is registered as an International Standard Randomised Controlled Trial, number ISRCTN91273375. Findings: Between Dec 18, 2006, and Feb 16, 2009, 1528 women were enrolled and randomly assigned to receive chemotherapy (n=764) or chemotherapy plus bevacizumab (n=764). Median follow-up at the end of the trial on March 31, 2013, was 48·9 months (IQR 26·6–56·2), at which point 714 patients had died (352 in the chemotherapy group and 362 in the bevacizumab group). Our results showed evidence of non-proportional hazards, so we used the difference in restricted mean survival time as the primary estimate of effect. No overall survival benefit of bevacizumab was recorded (restricted mean survival time 44·6 months [95% CI 43·2–45·9] in the standard chemotherapy group vs 45·5 months [44·2–46·7] in the bevacizumab group; log-rank p=0·85). In an exploratory analysis of a predefined subgroup of 502 patients with poor prognosis disease, 332 (66%) died (174 in the standard chemotherapy group and 158 in the bevacizumab group), and a significant difference in overall survival was noted between women who received bevacizumab plus chemotherapy and those who received chemotherapy alone (restricted mean survival time 34·5 months [95% CI 32·0–37·0] with standard chemotherapy vs 39·3 months [37·0–41·7] with bevacizumab; log-rank p=0·03). However, in non-high-risk patients, the restricted mean survival time did not differ significantly between the two treatment groups (49·7 months [95% CI 48·3–51·1]) in the standard chemotherapy group vs 48·4 months [47·0–49·9] in the bevacizumab group; p=0·20). An updated analysis of progression-free survival showed no difference between treatment groups. During extended follow-up, one further treatment-related grade 3 event (gastrointestinal fistula in a bevacizumab-treated patient), three grade 2 treatment-related events (cardiac failure, sarcoidosis, and foot fracture, all in bevacizumab-treated patients), and one grade 1 treatment-related event (vaginal haemorrhage, in a patient treated with standard chemotherapy) were reported. Interpretation: Bevacizumab, added to platinum-based chemotherapy, did not increase overall survival in the study population as a whole. However, an overall survival benefit was recorded in poor-prognosis patients, which is concordant with the progression-free survival results from ICON7 and GOG-218, and provides further evidence towards the optimum use of bevacizumab in the treatment of ovarian cancer. Funding: The National Institute for Health Research through the UK National Cancer Research Network, the Medical Research Council, and Roche

Performance drivers of private real estate funds

Despite the growth seen in the private real estate fund market, there remains a paucity of academic work on their performance drivers and risk characteristics. This study empirically examines the characteristics and drivers who influence the performance and investment activity of private real estate funds. A detailed sample of US-focused closed-ended Value add and Opportunity funds is used to do this. Both absolute and relative performance measures are used, including the public market equivalent measure. This is more widely used in the private equity studies but to date has been little used in real estate work. The analysis showed that there was generally little statistical significance observed for fund characteristics being drivers of fund performance. Fund size was found to have limited influence upon subsequent performance and sector specialisation was only accretive for outperforming funds. Total vintage year capital flows negatively impacted performance irrespective of measure used. Fund investment activity, as measured by observed cash flows, was found to be pro-cyclical with the results being most significant for distributions

Four arguments against the adult-rating of movies with smoking scenes.

Simon Chapman and Matthew Farrelly argue against recent calls in the US and elsewhere for movies with smoking scenes to be adult-rated

OpenH: A Novel Programming Model and API for Developing Portable Parallel Programs on Heterogeneous Hybrid Servers

Heterogeneous nodes composed of a multicore CPU and accelerators are today’s norm in high-performance computing (HPC) platforms due to their superior performance and energy efficiency. Tools such as OpenCL and hybrid combinations such as OpenMP plus OpenACC are used for developing portable parallel programs for such nodes. However, these tools have some drawbacks, including a lack of compiler support for nested parallelism, performance portability, automatic heterogeneous workload distribution, user-friendly thread placement, and processor affinity essential to the portable performance of hybrid programs executing on such nodes. In this paper, we propose OpenH, a novel programming model and library API for developing portable parallel programs on heterogeneous hybrid servers composed of a multicore CPU and one or more different types of accelerators. OpenH integrates Pthreads, OpenMP, and OpenACC seamlessly to facilitate the development of hybrid parallel programs. An OpenH hybrid parallel program starts as a single main thread, creating a group of Pthreads called hosting Pthreads. A hosting Pthread then leads the execution of a software component of the program, either an OpenMP multithreaded component running on the CPU cores or an OpenACC (or OpenMP) component running on one of the accelerators of the server. The OpenH library provides API functions that allow programmers to get the configuration of the executing environment and bind the hosting Pthreads (and hence the execution of components) of the program to the CPU cores of the hybrid server to get the best performance. We illustrate the OpenH programming model and library API using two hybrid parallel applications based on matrix multiplication and 2D fast Fourier transform for the most general case of a hybrid hyperthreaded server comprising $p$ computing devices. Finally, we demonstrate the practical performance and energy consumption of OpenH for the hybrid parallel matrix multiplication application on a server comprising an Intel Icelake multicore CPU and two Nvidia A40 GPUs

The block: lives, plans and futures

More than any other urban area in Australia, the Block in Sydney\u27s inner-city suburb of Redfern, has become a meeting place and, some say, spiritual home for city-dwelling    The area in Redfern known as The Block, sits on about 8000 square metres on a rise overlooking Sydney\u27s CBD. Lived in by generations of Aboriginal residents and desired by developers, its future will be both a test of governmental response to Aboriginal needs and urban planning in Sydney. The speakers on the panel bring three distinct perspectives to the issues surrounding The Block.Bill Simon, Redfern based pastor and author of the recently published Back on the Block: Bill Simon\u27s Story, brings his understanding of the day to day realities of this community and the community\u27s responses to the social challenges faced. Mick Mundine, as chair of the Redfern Aboriginal Housing Company discusses the political realities which have shaped The Block, and threaten its future. Elizabeth Farrelly, writer and architect, author of Glenn Murcutt; Three Houses, and Blubberland, has written on how planning and design politics impact on The Block and moderates the discussion. 59.53 minute