How Effective are Policy Interventions in a Spatially-Embedded International Real Estate Market?

We introduce the role of `space' in analysing the effect of macroeconomic policy interventions on cross-country housing price movements. We build an empirically testable analytical model and test our theoretical predictions for a panel of European countries over the period 1985-2015. Our aim is to demonstrate that while macroeconomic policy exerts a significant impact on international housing markets, the magnitude of such impacts may be overestimated in the absence of spatial frictions. To test our hypotheses, we employ a spatial dynamic panel method and quantify \emph{intra}- and \emph{inter}-country differences of the effects of macroeconomic policy interventions on spatially interdependent housing markets. Endogeneity issues arise in our estimation, which we ameliorate by employing the spatial Durbin model for panel data. Following this approach, we include spatial, temporal and spatio-temporal lags for identification purposes. We show that a spatially-embedded model produces relatively smaller and correct signs for macroeconomic variables in contrast to the traditional non-spatial model. It is concluded that empirical estimates from the traditional model are consistently over-estimated. These have significant policy implications for the exact role of macroeconomic interventions in housing price movements. A battery of robustness tests and evaluations of predictive performance confirm our results

I Can’t Remember: The Effects of Machiavellianism, Mental Effort and Lying on Memory

Past research has demonstrated that lying about an event interferes with one’s later recall of that event (Pickel, 2004; Zaragoza, Belli, & Payment, 2007). This study examined the extent that individual differences in Machiavellianism (Christie & Geis, 1970) moderated the effect of lying on event recollection. In a multi-session study, participants were asked to either truthfully recount or lie about the events depicted in a video clip that they had just viewed. One week later, participants verbally recalled the actual events of the clip. Participants did not differ in the amounts of correct inferences and correct details recalled from the clip. However, low levels of Machiavellianism were associated with less memory distortion of the inferable information after lying whereas higher levels of Machiavellianism was related to increased reporting of incorrect inferences after lying. These results also found that high Machiavellian individuals who lied are better able to differentiate between correct and incorrect details during recall than low Machiavellian individuals

Parameterized Littlewood-Paley operators with variable kernels on Hardy spaces and weak Hardy spaces

In this paper, by using the atomic decomposition theory of Hardy space and weak Hardy space, we discuss the boundedness of parameterized Littlewood-Paley operator with variable kernel on these spaces.Comment: 15 pages. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1711.0961

Experimental design trade-offs for gene regulatory network inference: an in silico study of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell cycle

Time-series of high throughput gene sequencing data intended for gene regulatory network (GRN) inference are often short due to the high costs of sampling cell systems. Moreover, experimentalists lack a set of quantitative guidelines that prescribe the minimal number of samples required to infer a reliable GRN model. We study the temporal resolution of data vs quality of GRN inference in order to ultimately overcome this deficit. The evolution of a Markovian jump process model for the Ras/cAMP/PKA pathway of proteins and metabolites in the G1 phase of the Saccharomyces cerevisiae cell cycle is sampled at a number of different rates. For each time-series we infer a linear regression model of the GRN using the LASSO method. The inferred network topology is evaluated in terms of the area under the precision-recall curve AUPR. By plotting the AUPR against the number of samples, we show that the trade-off has a, roughly speaking, sigmoid shape. An optimal number of samples corresponds to values on the ridge of the sigmoid

Belief Change and Memory for Previous Beliefs after Comprehension of Contentious Scientific Information

We explored the relationship between belief change and recollection of previous beliefs. Subjects reported beliefs about TV violence. Later, subjects read a one-sided, belief inconsistent text. We manipulated whether subjects reported beliefs after reading first, or recollected previous beliefs first. A third group was told their previous beliefs before reporting current beliefs. Recollections were not improved when subjects recollected beliefs first. When told previous beliefs, belief change was reduced, suggesting a desire to appear consistent

Evidence from comparative genomics for a complete sexual cycle in the 'asexual' pathogenic yeast Candida glabrata

BACKGROUND: Candida glabrata is a pathogenic yeast of increasing medical concern. It has been regarded as asexual since it was first described in 1917, yet phylogenetic analyses have revealed that it is more closely related to sexual yeasts than other Candida species. We show here that the C. glabrata genome contains many genes apparently involved in sexual reproduction. RESULTS: By genome survey sequencing, we find that genes involved in mating and meiosis are as numerous in C. glabrata as in the sexual species Kluyveromyces delphensis, which is its closest known relative. C. glabrata has a putative mating-type (MAT) locus and a pheromone gene (MFALPHA2), as well as orthologs of at least 31 other Saccharomyces cerevisiae genes that have no known roles apart from mating or meiosis, including FUS3, IME1 and SMK1. CONCLUSIONS: We infer that C. glabrata is likely to have an undiscovered sexual stage in its life cycle, similar to that recently proposed for C. albicans. The two Candida species represent two distantly related yeast lineages that have independently become both pathogenic and 'asexual'. Parallel evolution in the two lineages as they adopted mammalian hosts resulted in separate but analogous switches from overtly sexual to cryptically sexual life cycles, possibly in response to defense by the host immune system

Attention mechanisms in the CHREST cognitive architecture

In this paper, we describe the attention mechanisms in CHREST, a computational architecture of human visual expertise. CHREST organises information acquired by direct experience from the world in the form of chunks. These chunks are searched for, and verified, by a unique set of heuristics, comprising the attention mechanism. We explain how the attention mechanism combines bottom-up and top-down heuristics from internal and external sources of information. We describe some experimental evidence demonstrating the correspondence of CHREST’s perceptual mechanisms with those of human subjects. Finally, we discuss how visual attention can play an important role in actions carried out by human experts in domains such as chess

Tailorable dispersion in a four-wave mixing laser

We present experimental results demonstrating controllable dispersion in a ring laser by monitoring the lasing-frequency response to cavity-length variations. Pumping on an N-type level configuration in Rb-87, we tailor the intra- cavity dispersion slope by varying experimental parameters, such as pump-laser frequency, atomic density, and pump power. As a result, we can tune the pulling factor, i.e., the ratio of the laser frequency shift to the empty cavity frequency shift, of our laser by more than an order of magnitude. (C) 2017 Optical Society of Americ