Cultural transmission results in convergence towards colour term universals.

As in biological evolution, multiple forces are involved in cultural evolution. One force is analogous to selection, and acts on differences in the fitness of aspects of culture by influencing who people choose to learn from. Another force is analogous to mutation, and influences how culture changes over time owing to errors in learning and the effects of cognitive biases. Which of these forces need to be appealed to in explaining any particular aspect of human cultures is an open question. We present a study that explores this question empirically, examining the role that the cognitive biases that influence cultural transmission might play in universals of colour naming. In a large-scale laboratory experiment, participants were shown labelled examples from novel artificial systems of colour terms and were asked to classify other colours on the basis of those examples. The responses of each participant were used to generate the examples seen by subsequent participants. By simulating cultural transmission in the laboratory, we were able to isolate a single evolutionary force-the effects of cognitive biases, analogous to mutation-and examine its consequences. Our results show that this process produces convergence towards systems of colour terms similar to those seen across human languages, providing support for the conclusion that the effects of cognitive biases, brought out through cultural transmission, can account for universals in colour naming

A current-driven six-channel potentiostat for rapid performance characterization of microbial electrolysis cells

Knowledge of the performance of microbial electrolysis cells under a wide range of operating conditions is crucial to achieve high production efficiencies. Characterizing this performance in an experiment, however, is challenging due to either the long measurement times of steady-state procedures or the transient errors of dynamic procedures. Moreover, wide parallelization of the measurements is not feasible due to the high measurement equipment cost per channel. Hence, to speedup this characterization and to facilitate low-cost, yet widely parallel measurements, this paper presents a novel rapid polarization curve measurement procedure with a dynamic measurement resolution that runs on a custom six-channel potentiostat with a current-driven topology. As case study, the procedure is used to rapidly assess the impact of altering pH values on a microbial electrolysis cell that produces H-2. A $\times 2$ - $\times 12$ speedup could be obtained in comparison with the state-of-the-art, depending on the characterization resolution (16-128 levels). On top of this speedup, measurements can be parallelized up to $6\times$ on the presented, affordable-42-per-channel-potentiostat

Confrontation and the Law of Evidence: Can the Language Conduit Theory Survive in the Wake of Crawford?

A foreign traveler flies into John F. Kennedy International Airport, supposedly on a business trip. At the airport, a customs inspector detains him after discovering what appear to be bags of cocaine concealed in his luggage. The traveler speaks limited English, so the inspector requests the aid of a certified government interpreter to question him. An English-speaking Drug Enforcement Administration ( DEA ) agent thereafter interrogates the traveler by having the interpreter translate his questions to Spanish, the traveler\u27s native tongue. The interpreter then translates the traveler\u27s responses from Spanish to English, and the inspector records the translated responses. At trial, the court denies the traveler\u27s motion to suppress his statements to the customs inspector and DEA agent. The jury subsequently convicts him. This fact pattern comes from an influential Second Circuit case illustrating an evidentiary tool long used by courts to assess the reliability of out-of-court, translated statements offered against criminal defendants. Popularly referred to as the language conduit theory, this tool allows courts to infer an agency relationship between a defendant and an interpreter for hearsay purposes if certain factors are met. These factors vary among the federal circuits but generally aim to ensure that translations are reliable. For instance, courts often ask if the interpreter had a motive to mislead or if there is reason to believe that the translation is inaccurate. If the facts suggest that the statements are reliable, then they are admissible as nonhearsay under Federal Rules of Evidence 801(d)(2)(C) or (D)

A quality integrated spectral minutiae fingerprint recognition system

Many fingerprint recognition systems are based on minutiae matching. However, the recognition accuracy of minutiae-based matching algorithms is highly dependent on the fingerprint minutiae quality. Therefore, in this paper, we introduce a quality integrated spectral minutiae algorithm, in which the minutiae quality information is incorporated to enhance the performance of the spectral minutiae fingerprint recognition system. In our algorithm, two types of quality data are used. The first is the minutiae reliability, expressing the probability that a given point is indeed a minutia; the second is the minutiae location accuracy, quantifying the error on the minutiae location. We integrate these two types of quality information into the spectral minutiae representation algorithm and achieve a decrease of 1% in equal error rate in the experiment