Since the Great East Japan Earthquake of March 11, 2011, and the tsunami and meltdowns that followed in its wake, there have been many moving stories about how the disaster impacted, and continues to impact, especially Japanese living in Fukushima and the Sanriku Coast. Meanwhile, in Tokyo, life returned to normal for the vast majority of the population within a few years. March 2011 and its aftermath seem like distant memories, something that happened a long time ago in a region far, far away.

In this paper, the strategy method's impact on behavior in sequential bargaining games is investigated. Besides the decision procedure (hot versus cold), we varied the second mover punishment costs (high versus low). Significant impacts of both treatment variables were observed. For example, second movers punished significantly more often in the hot version of the low cost game. Furthermore, first mover behavior was significantly different in the hot and cold versions of both games. In the hot games, first mover behavior suggests an expectation of decreased rewards and/or punishments from second movers. We observed, however, no decrease in reward and an increase in punishment. The hot cold variable only informs first movers that the decision procedure used by second movers has changed. Therefore, first mover behavior must be shaped by their perceived assessment concerning how second movers make decisions. We argue that first mover behavior can be explained by the interaction of two well-known psychological effects: the consensus and positive self-image effects.

Recently, there has been a Renaissance for multi-level selection models to explain the persistence of unselfish behavior in social dilemmas, in which assortative/correlated matching plays an important role. In the current study of a multi-round prisoners’ dilemma experiment, we introduce two correlated matching procedures that match subjects with similar action histories together. We discover significant treatment effects, compared to the control procedure of random matching. Particularly with the weighted history matching procedure we find bifurcations regarding group outcomes. Some groups converge to the all-defection equilibrium even more pronouncedly than the control groups do, while other groups generate much higher rate of cooperation, which is also associated with higher relative reward for a typical cooperative action. All in all, the data show that cooperation does have a much better chance to persist in a correlated/assortative-matching environment, as predicted in the literature.

In this study, we report experimental results on the dictator decision collected in two neighboring ethnic minority groups, the matrilineal Mosuo and the patriarchal Yi, in southwestern China. We follow the double-blind protocol as in Eckel and Grossman (in Handbook of experimental economics results, 1998), who find that women in the U.S. donate more than men. We find this pattern reversed in the Mosuo society and find no gender difference in the Yi society. This is highly suggestive that societal factors play an important role in shaping the gender differences in pro-social behavior such as dictator giving.

Introduction

Recently, the influential American political pundit, Bill O'Reilly, demonstrated that no nationality or ethnicity holds a monopoly on retrograde views of slavery, on what it means as a human being not to have possession of one's own life. In response to first lady Michelle Obama's evocative observation that her African-American daughters were growing up in a house built by slaves — a house, moreover, they loved — O'Reilly tried to negate this moment's deep significance by quipping that the slaves who built the White House were “well fed and had decent lodgings.”

Artist Tetsu Takeda left Japan for America in 1986 and returned to Japan in 2011. Shortly after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, Takeda started identifying himself as a “professional artist” and only doing “high art” by rethinking life and our role as human beings interfering with nature. Takeda is an eccentric collector of ocean rubbish flushed ashore by waves. In his tiny home studio, he creates various big-eyed rubbish creatures in diverse forms, shapes, dimensions, and colors in his unorthodox way reminiscent of Victor Frankenstein in this lab. For him, doing new artistic endeavors is a ritual of giving life—to “vitalize” rubbish—and inhabiting a reformulated society of nature, whether privately (in his home) or publicly (in galleries).

The analysis of data from experiments in economics routinely involves testing multiple null hypotheses simultaneously. These different null hypotheses arise naturally in this setting for at least three different reasons: when there are multiple outcomes of interest and it is desired to determine on which of these outcomes a treatment has an effect; when the effect of a treatment may be heterogeneous in that it varies across subgroups defined by observed characteristics and it is desired to determine for which of these subgroups a treatment has an effect; and finally when there are multiple treatments of interest and it is desired to determine which treatments have an effect relative to either the control or relative to each of the other treatments. In this paper, we provide a bootstrap-based procedure for testing these null hypotheses simultaneously using experimental data in which simple random sampling is used to assign treatment status to units. Using the general results in Romano and Wolf (Ann Stat 38:598–633, 2010), we show under weak assumptions that our procedure (1) asymptotically controls the familywise error rate—the probability of one or more false rejections—and (2) is asymptotically balanced in that the marginal probability of rejecting any true null hypothesis is approximately equal in large samples. Importantly, by incorporating information about dependence ignored in classical multiple testing procedures, such as the Bonferroni and Holm corrections, our procedure has much greater ability to detect truly false null hypotheses. In the presence of multiple treatments, we additionally show how to exploit logical restrictions across null hypotheses to further improve power. We illustrate our methodology by revisiting the study by Karlan and List (Am Econ Rev 97(5):1774–1793, 2007) of why people give to charitable causes.

Desminopathy is a rare heritable cardiac and skeletal muscle disease caused by variants in the DES gene, which encodes the primary muscle-specific intermediate filament protein, known as desmin. Childhood-onset is commonly associated with severe early-onset myopathy and early death. Here, we reported an 11-year-old Chinese girl presenting with complete atrioventricular block and cardiomyopathy, without skeletal muscle involvement. Genetic analysis identified a de novo variant (c.152C > T/p.Ser51Phe) in the DES gene.

In this paper, we complete the proof of the conjecture of Gross and Zagier concerning algebraicity of higher Green functions at a single CM point on the product of modular curves. The new ingredient is an analogue of the incoherent Eisenstein series over a real quadratic field, which is constructed as the Doi-Naganuma theta lift of a deformed theta integral on hyperbolic 1-space.

The recently discovered social place cells and grid cells in hippocampal formation are believed to be the neural basis underlying relative navigation of conspecifics. In this paper, we propose a new brain-inspired relative navigation model in a large-scale 3D environment for collective UAVs that translates the neurodynamics of the social place cell–grid cell circuit to robotic relative navigation algorithm for the first time. Our approach comprises three key parts: (1) a 3D isotropic Gaussian function-based cube social place cell network (cube-SPCNet), (2) a 3D continuous attractor neural network-based cube grid cell network (cube-GCNet), and (3) a population vector-based neural decoding module. The resulting brain-inspired relative navigation model incorporates the good relative information abstraction capabilities of the cube-SPCNet with the powerful temporal filtering capabilities of the cube-GCNet, yielding robustness and accuracy performance improvement for relative navigation. Experimental results show the new method can provide more robust and precise relative navigation results than its conventional counterpart, displaying a possible brain-inspired solution for relative navigation enhancement for collective UAVs.

Systematic searches of published literature are a vital component of systematic reviews. When search strings are not “sensitive,” they may miss many relevant studies limiting, or even biasing, the range of evidence available for synthesis. Concerningly, conducting and reporting evaluations (validations) of the sensitivity of the used search strings is rare, according to our survey of published systematic reviews and protocols. Potential reasons may involve a lack of familiarity or inaccessibility of complex sensitivity evaluation approaches. We first clarify the main concepts and principles of search string evaluation. We then present a simple procedure for estimating a relative recall of a search string. It is based on a pre-defined set of “benchmark” publications. The relative recall, that is, the sensitivity of the search string, is the retrieval overlap between the evaluated search string and a search string that captures only the benchmark publications. If there is little overlap (i.e., low recall or sensitivity), the evaluated search string should be improved to ensure that most of the relevant literature can be captured. The presented benchmarking approach can be applied to one or more online databases or search platforms. It is illustrated by five accessible, hands-on tutorials for commonly used online literature sources. Overall, our work provides an assessment of the current state of search string evaluations in published systematic reviews and protocols. It also paves the way to improve evaluation and reporting practices to make evidence synthesis more transparent and robust.

In 2023 all Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) participants were allowed to start grocery shopping online. This paper provides the first answer to the question: What is online shopping worth to the SNAP participant in dollars? Using meal-kit pricing and time-use data, an implicit wage rate and dollar value distribution are estimated for time saved in home food production from online grocery shopping. We report the 95th, 75th, 50th, 25th, and 5th percentile results. We simulate saving 50%, 75%, and 90% of grocery shopping time and estimate the savings per hour per meal. For example, if online shopping saved 75% of shopping time, the median saving per hour per meal would be $2.59. If a family of four made 15 to 30 meals a month, this corresponds to an implicit 5% to 11% increase in the benefits per month due to the time saved. The implicit wage rate provides simple and elegant economic insights into many aspects of food production and consumption not obtainable by just considering the money price.

Milk fat synthesis is tightly regulated by hormones and growth factors. Leptin is a versatile peptide hormone that exerts pleiotropic effects on metabolic pathways. In this study, we evaluated the expression and function of leptin and its long form receptor OB-Rb in dairy cow mammary tissues from different physiological stages and in cultured mammary epithelial cells. The results showed that the expression of leptin and OB-Rb were significantly higher in the mammary tissues of lactating cows as compared with dry cows, suggesting that they are related to milk component synthesis. In cultured dairy cow mammary epithelial cells, leptin treatment significantly increased OB-Rb expression and intracellular triacylglycerol content. Transcriptome analysis identified the difference in gene expression between leptin treated cells and control cells, and 317 differentially expressed genes were identified. Gene ontology and pathway mapping showed that lipid metabolism-related gene expression increased and signal transduction pathway-related genes were the most significantly enriched. Mechanistic studies showed that leptin stimulation enhanced sterol regulatory element-binding protein 1 expression via activating the phosphatidylinositol 3-kinase/protein kinase B/mammalian target of rapamycin (PI3K/AKT/mTOR) signaling pathway, which in turn up-regulated the expression of genes related to milk fat synthesis. Moreover, we found that fatty acid synthesis precursors, acetate and β-hydroxybutyrate, could positively regulate the expression of leptin and OB-Rb in bovine mammary epithelial cells, thereby potentially increasing milk fat synthesis. Our study provided novel evidence in the regulation of leptin on milk fat production in mammary glands of dairy cows, as well as experimental basis for artificial regulation of milk fat

Robotic manipulation inherently involves contact with objects for task accomplishment. Traditional motion planning techniques, while having shown their success in collision-free scenarios, may not handle manipulation tasks effectively because they typically avoid contact. Although geometric constraints have been introduced into classical motion planners for tasks that involve interactions, they still lack the capability to fully incorporate contact. In addition, these planning methods generally do not operate on objects that cannot be directly controlled. In this work, building on a recently proposed framework for energy-based quasi-static manipulation, we propose an approach to manipulation planning by adapting a numerical continuation algorithm to compute the equilibrium manifold (EM), which is implicitly derived from physical laws. By defining a manipulation potential energy function that captures interaction and natural potentials, the numerical continuation approach is integrated with adaptive ordinary differential equations that converge to the EM. This allows discretizing the implicit manifold as a graph with a finite set of equilibria as nodes interconnected by weighted edges defined via a haptic metric. The proposed framework is evaluated with an inverted pendulum task, where the explored branch of the manifold demonstrates effectiveness.