Fairness, Public Good, and Emotional Aspects of Punishment Behavior

We report an experiment on two treatments of an ultimatum minigame.In one treatment, responders' reactions are hidden to proposers.We observe high rejection rates reflecting responders' intrinsic resistance to unfairness.In the second treatment, proposers are informed, allowing for dynamic effects over eight rounds of play.The higher rejection rates can be attributed to responders' provision of a public good: Punishment creates a group reputation for being "tough" and effectively "educate" proposers.Since rejection rates with informed proposers drop to the level of the treatment with non-informed proposers, the hypothesis of responders' enjoyment of overt punishment is not supported.game theory;public goods;bargaining;punishment;experimental economics

Vagal nerve stimulation therapy: what is being stimulated?

Vagal nerve stimulation in cardiac therapy involves delivering electrical current to the vagal sympathetic complex in patients experiencing heart failure. The therapy has shown promise but the mechanisms by which any benefit accrues is not understood. In this paper we model the response to increased levels of stimulation of individual components of the vagal sympathetic complex as a differential activation of each component in the control of heart rate. The model provides insight beyond what is available in the animal experiment in as much as allowing the simultaneous assessment of neuronal activity throughout the cardiac neural axis. The results indicate that there is sensitivity of the neural network to low level subthreshold stimulation. This leads us to propose that the chronic effects of vagal nerve stimulation therapy lie within the indirect pathways that target intrinsic cardiac local circuit neurons because they have the capacity for plasticity

Variable susceptibility of laboratory strains of Aspergillus nidulans to hygromycin B and other ribosomal antibiotics

Variable susceptibility of laboratory strains of Aspergillus nidulans to hygromycin and other ribosomal antibiotics

PlaNet - Photo Geolocation with Convolutional Neural Networks

Is it possible to build a system to determine the location where a photo was taken using just its pixels? In general, the problem seems exceptionally difficult: it is trivial to construct situations where no location can be inferred. Yet images often contain informative cues such as landmarks, weather patterns, vegetation, road markings, and architectural details, which in combination may allow one to determine an approximate location and occasionally an exact location. Websites such as GeoGuessr and View from your Window suggest that humans are relatively good at integrating these cues to geolocate images, especially en-masse. In computer vision, the photo geolocation problem is usually approached using image retrieval methods. In contrast, we pose the problem as one of classification by subdividing the surface of the earth into thousands of multi-scale geographic cells, and train a deep network using millions of geotagged images. While previous approaches only recognize landmarks or perform approximate matching using global image descriptors, our model is able to use and integrate multiple visible cues. We show that the resulting model, called PlaNet, outperforms previous approaches and even attains superhuman levels of accuracy in some cases. Moreover, we extend our model to photo albums by combining it with a long short-term memory (LSTM) architecture. By learning to exploit temporal coherence to geolocate uncertain photos, we demonstrate that this model achieves a 50% performance improvement over the single-image model

Physiochemical changes in tissue of edible oyster Crassostrea glomerata at refrigerated temperature

Oysters are bivalve molluscs in the family Osteridae of the order Ostereoida and are found throughout the world. Quality of stored muscle of oyster, Crossostrea glomerata depends on the temperature and storage time. Investigation on factors responsible for spoilage of oyster meat in refrigerator (7±2°C); in term of biochemical indices, indicated that in 1-2 days the following changes will accur: oyster tissue total protein from 7.6±0.44g% to 7.06±0.64g%, salt soluble protein from 3A6±0.52mg% to 2.53±0.14g%.Totallipid from 3.0±0.38g% to 2.5±0.29g%, TMA from 1.1±0.11 mg% to 1.46±0.09 and TVB, from 946±0.29mg% to 19.33±0.06 and on 7th day of storage, total protein to 4.5±0.32g%, salt soluble protein to 1.1±0.21g%, total lipid to 1.4±0.19g%, TMA, to 4.3±0.41 mg% and TVB to 83.3±3.5 changed. Amount of Glycogen in fresh meat was 5.3g% which decreased to 3.2g% during 7 days storage. Water content in fresh tissue was 79.0±0.57g% and increased at 7±2°C gradually with the increase of storage time. After 7 days it reached to the highly significant (p<0.001) value of 89.1±0.54g%.pH in fresh tissue was also noted 6.60±0.17and slightly non significant change was observed during 7 days of storage. On the 7th day it decreased to 6.3±0.05 from its fresh tissue value significantly (p£0.001) with storage time. Results concluded that oyster meat could be preserved for 4 days up to acceptable refrigeration temperature

Microbial and heavy metal contaminant of antidiabetic herbal preparations formulated in Bangladesh

The aim of the current study was to evaluate microbial contamination in terms of microbial load (total aerobic count and total coliform count) and specific pathogenic bacteria (Salmonella spp., Escherichia coli, particularly Escherichia coli 0157) in thirteen antidiabetic herbal preparations (ADHPs) from Dhaka City. All the thirteen ADHPs had been found contaminated with fungi and different pathogenic bacteria. From the data, it is found that only two of these preparations (ADHP-1 and ADHP-12) complied with the safety limit (as stated in different Pharmacopoeias and WHO guidelines) evaluated by all different microbial counts. None of these herbal preparations could assure the safety as all of them were contaminated by fungi. The overall safety regarding heavy metal content (Zn, Cu, Mn, Cr, Cd, and Pb) was assured as none of them exceeded the safety limit of the daily intake. Microbial contaminants in these herbal preparations pose a potential risk for human health and care should be taken in every step involved in the preparation of these herbal preparations to assure safety.Rausan Zamir, Anowar Hosen, M. Obayed Ullah, and Nilufar Naha