An Extremely Compensatible Cigarette by Design: Documentary Evidence on Industry Awareness and Reactions to the Barclay Filter Design Cheating the Tar Testing System

BACKGROUND; The Barclay cigarette (Brown & Williamson) was introduced in 1980 in the USA in the most expensive launch in history. In the USA and around the world, Barclay was later determined to have a grooved filter design that was compromised by human smokers in the normal act of smoking, but that was measured as ultra-low tar using the standard tar testing protocol. OBJECTIVES; To evaluate whether Brown & Williamson knew of the compensatability of Barclay during the design process and before it was released; to evaluate initial responses of competing tobacco companies to Barclay, before complaints were made to the Federal Trade Commission in 1981.METHODS; Internet databases of industry documents (Tobacco Documents Online, Legacy Tobacco Documents Library, Brown & Williamson Litigation discovery website, Guildford and major company websites) were searched using key words, key dates, and targeted searches. Documents related specifically to the development, evaluation and release of the Barclay cigarette and related to the responses by competing tobacco companies were examined. RESULTS; Documents indicate the manufacturer was aware of Barclay design problems and was planning, before release, to respond to criticism. Competing companies quickly detected the filter groove stratagem and considered developing their own similar filter, but eventually backed off. CONCLUSION; The design problems with Barclay were readily understood by cigarette manufacturers, including the maker of Barclay, before official governmental evaluations occurred. Testing involving measured exposures to human smokers may in the end be crucial to identifying problems with novel cigarette designs

Meson exchange and nucleon polarizabilities in the quark model

Modifications to the nucleon electric polarizability induced by pion and sigma exchange in the q-q potentials are studied by means of sum rule techniques within a non-relativistic quark model. Contributions from meson exchange interactions are found to be small and in general reduce the quark core polarizability for a number of hybrid and one-boson-exchange q-q models. These results can be explained by the constraints that the baryonic spectrum impose on the short range behavior of the mesonic interactions.Comment: 11 pages, 1 figure added, expanded discussio

Human Perception of Fear in Dogs Varies According to Experience with Dogs

To investigate the role of experience in humans’ perception of emotion using canine visual signals, we asked adults with various levels of dog experience to interpret the emotions of dogs displayed in videos. The video stimuli had been pre-categorized by an expert panel of dog behavior professionals as showing examples of happy or fearful dog behavior. In a sample of 2,163 participants, the level of dog experience strongly predicted identification of fearful, but not of happy, emotional examples. The probability of selecting the “fearful” category to describe fearful examples increased with experience and ranged from.30 among those who had never lived with a dog to greater than.70 among dog professionals. In contrast, the probability of selecting the “happy” category to describe happy emotional examples varied little by experience, ranging from.90 to.93. In addition, the number of physical features of the dog that participants reported using for emotional interpretations increased with experience, and in particular, more-experienced respondents were more likely to attend to the ears. Lastly, more-experienced respondents provided lower difficulty and higher accuracy self-ratings than less-experienced respondents when interpreting both happy and fearful emotional examples. The human perception of emotion in other humans has previously been shown to be sensitive to individual differences in social experience, and the results of the current study extend the notion of experience-dependent processes from the intraspecific to the interspecific domain

Investigating determinants of yawning in the domestic (Equus caballus) and Przewalski (Equus ferus przewalskii) horses

International audienceYawning is rare in herbivores which therefore may be an interesting group to disentangle the potential function(s) of yawning behaviour. Horses provide the opportunity to compare not only animals living in different conditions but also wild versus domestic species. Here, we tested three hypotheses by observing both domestic and Przewalski horses living in semi-natural conditions: (i) that domestic horses may show an elevated rate of yawning as a result of the domestication process (or as a result of life conditions), (ii) that individuals experiencing a higher level of social stress would yawn more than individuals with lower social stress and (iii) that males would yawn more often than females. The study involved 19 Przewalski horses (PHs) and 16 domestic horses (DHs) of different breeds living in large outdoor enclosures. The results showed that there was no difference between the PH and DH in yawning frequency (YF). PHs exhibited much higher levels of social interactions than DHs. There was a positive correlation between yawning frequency and aggressive behaviours in PHs, especially males, supporting the idea that yawning may be associated with more excitatory/stressful social situations. A correlation was found between yawning frequency and affiliative behaviours in DHs, which supports the potential relationship between yawning and social context. Finally, the entire males, but not castrated males, showed much higher levels of yawning than females in both species. The intensity (rather than the valence) of the interaction may be important in triggering yawning, which could therefore be a displacement activity that helps reduce tension

A systematic review and meta-analysis of salivary cortisol measurement in domestic canines

Salivary cortisol is widely used as an indicator of stress and welfare in canine research. However, much remains unclear about the basic features of this hormone marker in domestic dogs. This systematic review and meta-analysis aimed to determine a reference range for cortisol concentration in the saliva of dogs and examine how canine characteristics, environmental effects and experimental considerations relate to salivary cortisol concentrations. A systematic review of literature databases and conference proceedings from 1992 to 2012 identified 61 peer-reviewed studies using domestic dog salivary cortisol. Researchers were contacted via email, and 31 raw data sets representing a total of 5,153 samples from 1,205 dogs were shared. Meta-analysis provided a cortisol concentration range of 0 to 33.79 μg/dL (mean 0.45 μg/dL, SEM 0.13). Significant effects (P < 0.05) were found for sex and neuter status, age, regular living environment, time in environment before testing, testing environment, owner presence during testing, and collection media. Significant effects were not found for dog breed, body weight, dog type, coat color, assay type, exercise, eating, or use of salivary stimulant. Care should be taken when using cortisol studies for dogs at a group or population level as there is a large amount of intraindividual and interindividual variability and external variables could influence salivary cortisol concentration. This analysis highlights the importance of carefully controlling experimental design to compare samples within and between individual dogs, as well as establishing and using best practices for saliva collection. Caution should be exercised in comparing different studies, as the results could be the reflection of a plethora of factors