Homo Sapiens: Are We a Monogamous Species?

In order for the process of hominization to continue, with its prolonged and extreme period of juvenile defencelessness, it was necessary, or at least convenient, for males to more actively participate in the care of females and offspring. This necessity, together with the abrupt loss of hominid sexual dimorphism starting with Homo ergaster (more than 1.5 million years ago) suggests to the authors that our ancestor’s sexuality might have evolved around the same time from an earlier state of polygamy to monogamy. Taking into consideration our meagre dimorphism, small relative testicular size, and interest for living in partnerships, monogamy may still persist in modern Homo sapiens. This theory would allow for new perspectives regarding the complex suite of enigmatic emotions have plagued modern humans since our beginnings

Abstention, ideology and information acquisition

We consider an election in which each voter can collect information of different precision. Voters have asymmetric information and preferences that vary both in terms of ideology and intensity. In contrast to all other models of voting with endogenous information, in equilibrium voters collect information of different qualities. We show that information and abstention are not necessarily negatively correlated: some voters are more likely to abstain the more informed they are. We also discuss the manner in which incentives to acquire information are non-monotonic in terms of both ideology and the level of intensity. © 2013 Elsevier Inc

Confucian Ethics in the Analects as Virtue Ethics

The Confucian tradition embodies one of the most enduring and influential moral traditions in world history. Yet for Western readers Confucius remains little known, and perhaps even less approachable than the major thinkers of the Western philosophical tradition. While it is difficult to overstate his influence, Confucius himself left little if any written account of his moral outlook. What we know of the man and the origins of the Confucian tradition come from brief accounts of his life and teachings compiled primarily in the present text, the Analects. As such, Confucian ethics is best thought of as a tradition more than an explicit ethical theory

Search for new physics using events with two same-sign isolated leptons in the final state in pp collisions at 8 TeV

A search for new physics is performed based on events with jets and a pair of isolated, same-sign leptons. The results are obtained using a sample of proton-proton collision data collected by the CMS experiment at a centre-of-mass energy of 8 TeV at the LHC, corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 19.5 inverse femtobarns. In order to be sensitive to a wide variety of possible signals beyond the standard model, multiple search regions defined by the missing transverse energy, the hadronic energy, the number of jets and b-quark jets. No excess above the standard model background expectation is observed and constraints are set on a number of models for new physics.Comment: 4 pages, 7 figures, poster presented at LHCP201

Minimal Flavor Protection: A New Flavor Paradigm in Warped Models

We propose a new flavor paradigm for models with warped extra dimensions. The idea is to impose the minimal amount of flavor protection to make warped models compatible with all current flavor and electroweak precision constraints. We discuss a particular realization of this minimal flavor protection in the quark sector, by means of a flavor symmetry acting on the right handed down sector. Hierarchical quark masses and mixing angles are naturally reproduced through wave function localization, and flavor violating processes are predicted, in the absence of large brane kinetic terms for the right handed down quarks, below but not too far from current experimental limits in several channels. With this new flavor pattern, models with warped extra dimensions can be accessible through direct production of new resonances at the LHC and also through precision flavor experiments.Comment: 9 pages; v2 11 pages, extended discussion including the effect of brane kinetic terms, matches published versio