The impact of financial histories on individuals and societies: A replication of and extension of Berg el al. (1995)

We replicate and extend the social history treatment of the Berg, Dickhaut, and McCabe (1995) investment game, to further document how the reporting of financial history influences how laboratory societies organize themselves over time. We replicate Berg et al. (1995) by conducting a No History and a Financial History session to determine whether a report summarizing the financial transactions of a previous experimental session will significantly reduce entropy in the amounts sent by Investors and returned by Stewards in the investment game, as Berg et al. (1995) found. We extend Berg et al. (1995) in two ways. First, we conduct a total of five sessions (one No History and four Financial History sessions). Second, we introduce Shannon's (1948) measure of entropy from information theory to assess whether the introduction of financial transaction history reduces the amount of dispersion in the amounts invested and returned across generations of players. Results across sessions indicate that entropy declined in both the amounts sent by Investors and the percentage returned by Stewards, but these patterns are weaker and mixed compared to those in the Berg et al. (1995) study. Additional research is needed to test how initial conditions, path dependencies, actors' strategic reasoning about others' behavior, multiple sessions, and communication may mediate the impact of financial history. The study's multiple successive Financial History sessions and entropy measure are new to the investment game literature

Large magnetoresistance in bcc Co/MgO/Co and FeCo/MgO/FeCo tunneling junctions

By use of first-principles electronic structure calculations, we predict that the magnetoresistance of the bcc Co(100)/MgO(100)/bcc Co(100) and FeCo(100)/MgO(100)/FeCo(100) tunneling junctions can be several times larger than the very large magnetoresistance predicted for the Fe(100)/MgO(100)/Fe(100) system. The origin of this large magnetoresistance can be understood using simple physical arguments by considering the electrons at the Fermi energy travelling perpendicular to the interfaces. For the minority spins there is no state with $\Delta_1$ symmetry whereas for the majority spins there is only a $\Delta_1$ state. The $\Delta_1$ state decays much more slowly than the other states within the MgO barrier. In the absence of scattering which breaks the conservation of momentum parallel to the interfaces, the electrons travelling perpendicular to the interfaces undergo total reflection if the moments of the electrodes are anti-parallel. These arguments apply equally well to systems with other well ordered tunnel barriers and for which the most slowly decaying complex energy band in the barrier has $\Delta_1$ symmetry. Examples include systems with (100) layers constructed from Fe, bcc Co, or bcc FeCo electrodes and Ge, GaAs, or ZnSe barriers.Comment: 8 figure files in eps forma

'BioNessie(G) - a grid enabled biochemical networks simulation environment

The simulation of biochemical networks provides insight and understanding about the underlying biochemical processes and pathways used by cells and organisms. BioNessie is a biochemical network simulator which has been developed at the University of Glasgow. This paper describes the simulator and focuses in particular on how it has been extended to benefit from a wide variety of high performance compute resources across the UK through Grid technologies to support larger scale simulations

First-principles study of phenyl ethylene oligomers as current-switch

We use a self-consistent method to study the distinct current-switch of $2^{'}$-amino-4-ethynylphenyl-4'-ethynylphenyl-5'-nitro-1-benzenethiol, from the first-principles calculations. The numerical results are in accord with the early experiment [Reed et al., Sci. Am. \textbf{282}, 86 (2000)]. To further investigate the transport mechanism, we calculate the switching behavior of p-terphenyl with the rotations of the middle ring as well. We also study the effect of hydrogen atom substituting one ending sulfur atom on the transport and find that the asymmetry of I-V curves appears and the switch effect still lies in both the positive and negative bias range.Comment: 6 pages, 6 figure

Helical motions in the jet of blazar 1156+295

The blazar 1156+295 was observed by VLBA and EVN + MERLIN at 5 GHz in June 1996 and February 1997 respectively. The results show that the jet of the source has structural oscillations on the milliarcsecond scale and turns through a large angle to the direction of the arcsecond-scale extension. A helical jet model can explain most of the observed properties of the radio structure in 1156+295.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, to appear in New Astronomy Reviews (EVN/JIVE Symposium No. 4, special issue

Thermodynamical quantities of lattice full QCD from an efficient method

I extend to QCD an efficient method for lattice gauge theory with dynamical fermions. Once the eigenvalues of the Dirac operator and the density of states of pure gluonic configurations at a set of plaquette energies (proportional to the gauge action) are computed, thermodynamical quantities deriving from the partition function can be obtained for arbitrary flavor number, quark masses and wide range of coupling constants, without additional computational cost. Results for the chiral condensate and gauge action are presented on the $10^4$ lattice at flavor number $N_f=0$, 1, 2, 3, 4 and many quark masses and coupling constants. New results in the chiral limit for the gauge action and its correlation with the chiral condensate, which are useful for analyzing the QCD chiral phase structure, are also provided.Comment: Latex, 11 figures, version accepted for publicatio