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Becoming speciesist:How children and adults differ in valuing animals by species and cognitive capacity
Get PDFChildren morally prioritize humans over animals less than adults do. Is this because children are less speciesist—meaning they place less moral weight on mere species membership? Or is it because they give less weight to differences in cognitive capacity between humans and other animals? We investigated this in two experiments, presenting children and adult participants in the United States and Spain with moral trade-off dilemmas. These dilemmas involved individuals who varied in species membership (human vs. monkey) and cognitive capacity. Across both cultures, children were less likely than adults to prioritize humans over animals, regardless of cognitive capacity. In addition, participants tended to prioritize individuals with higher cognitive capacities, regardless of species membership—though this effect was less robust in children. Our findings suggest that children in these Western contexts are indeed less speciesist than adults, though they do not rule out developmental changes in the moral weight assigned to cognitive capacity
Do politically connected board members influence firms’ debt choices? Public debt versus bank debt
Get PDFUsing a unique hand-collected data set on the political connections of board members of S&P 1500 companies, we find that board members with stronger government ties are positively associated with firms' preference for public debt over bank debt. This relationship is more pronounced in firms connected to high-ranking officials and appointed politicians. Additionally, using quarterly data from 2015 to 2018 and difference-in-differences (DID) analyses, we find that political ties are differently related to firms' debt choices based on different party affiliations, types of political connections, and geopolitical factors.</p
Intelligence, education, and society:Godfrey Thomson’s public and professional lectures
Get PDFGodfrey Thomson was an influential national (United Kingdom) and international researcher in intelligence theory and testing, education, and psychometric statistics during most of the first half of the 20th century. Until recently, there have been few archival resources for him. We discovered over 30 of his public and professional lectures, i.e., lectures delivered to audiences other than university students. We describe the physical appearance and the contents of the lectures. We describe the main themes covered in the lectures and how they give insights into Thomson’s thinking, beyond what can be understood from his books and journal articles. We make transcriptions of many of the lectures available for researchers
The role of university campus landscape characteristics in students’ mental health
Get PDFUniversity students frequently suffer from mental health challenges such as stress, depression, and anxiety during their studies. It is therefore crucial to offer spaces and landscapes on the university campus that offer mental restoration and promote well-being, given the substantial time spent there. Prior research has explored the impact of exposure to campus landscape on students' mental health and the types of spaces that could support activities with potential health benefits. However, further investigation is needed into the specific landscape characteristics that encourage space use and support students’ mental well-being. To address this knowledge gap, we explored how the characteristics of campus outdoor spaces affect students’ preferences concerning spaces they like and dislike to visit, and the subsequent effects on their mental health. We employed a Public Participatory Geographic Information System (PPGIS) approach, focusing on Heriot-Watt University Edinburgh campus in Scotland. Our findings indicate that students exhibit consistent preferences for areas on campus with a high level of greenery, diverse trees and flowers, views of blue spaces, peacefulness, quietness, pleasant smells, and sounds, as well as the presence of benches and tables. These characteristics were also found to facilitate restorative experiences. Conversely, the absence of these elements serves as barriers to students visiting outdoor spaces on campus. The results also revealed that students typically visit their preferred blue/green campus landscapes twice a week for 10–30-minutes on average, which was sufficient to experience the reported mental health benefits as measured through self-reported restorative outcomes. These insights offer valuable implications for the design and development of restorative university campuses
Universally composable SNARKs with transparent setup without programmable random oracle
Get PDFNon-interactive zero-knowledge (NIZK) proofs enable a prover to convince a verifier of an NP statement’s validity using a single message, without disclosing any additional information. These proofs are widely studied and deployed, especially in their succinct form, where proof length is sublinear in the size of the NP relation. However, efficient succinct NIZKs typically require an idealized setup, such as a common reference string, which complicates real-world deployment. A key challenge is developing NIZKs with simpler, more transparent setups. A promising approach is the random-oracle (RO) methodology, which idealizes hash functions as public random functions. It is commonly believed that UC NIZKs cannot be realized using a non-programmable global RO—the simplest incarnation of the RO as a form of setup—since existing techniques depend on the ability to program the oracle. We challenge this belief and present a methodology to build UC-secure NIZKs based solely on a global, non-programmable RO. By applying our framework we are able to construct a NIZK that achieves witness-succinct proofs of logarithmic size, breaking both the programmability barrier and polylogarithmic proof size limitations for UC-secure NIZKs with transparent setups. We further observe that among existing global RO formalizations put forth by Camenisch et al. (Eurocrypt 2018), our choice of setup is necessary to achieve this result. From the technical standpoint, our contributions span both modeling and construction. We leverage the shielded (super-poly) oracle model introduced by Broadnax et al. (Eurocrypt 2017) to define a UC NIZK functionality that can serve as a drop-in replacement for its standard variant—it preserves the usual soundness and zero-knowledge properties while ensuring its compositional guarantees remain intact. To instantiate this functionality under a non-programmable RO setup, we follow the framework of Ganesh et al. (Eurocrypt 2023) and provide new building blocks for it, around which are some of our core technical contributions: a novel polynomial encoding technique and the leakage analysis of its companion polynomial commitment, based on Bulletproofs-style folding. We also provide a second construction, based on a recent work by Chiesa and Fenzi (TCC 2024), and show that it achieves a slightly weaker version of the NIZK functionality.</p
Estimating sectoral livestock biomass and stock value using data from national diseases eradication programs: a case study based on the Irish cattle herd from 2011 to 2021
No full textIntroduction: Livestock biomass is a denominator for a wide range of important production metrics, including productivity, environmental impact, greenhouse gas emissions, and antimicrobial usage. Accurate biomass estimates allow cross-sectoral and international comparisons for these important indices across a range of high-priority areas, which can then inform policy risk assessments and decision-making. Similarly, accurate estimates of the value of livestock are needed to monitor economic efficiency and productivity and understand the costs associated with animal health policy decisions. Previous methods to estimate biomass have relied on assigning an average liveweight for a given species and multiplying this by the number of individual animals of that species in a region. However, without taking into account the population’s demographics and structure, these approaches cannot be relied upon to accurately represent the cattle population.Methods: Using data from the Irish cattle herd as a case study, this study developed liveweight and value models and applied these models to a cattle registration and movement database to estimate the biomass (kg) and economic stock value (€) of each animal and herd, aggregated by herd type based on a herd classification tree model, and explored trends in biomass and stock value over time.Results: The Irish cattle sector biomass increased from 2,924,800 tonnes in 2011 to 3,317,100 tonnes in 2021, and the cattle sector stock value increased from €6,323.7 m in 2011 to €8,792.3 m in 2021. Furthermore, this study demonstrated the biomass and stock value within-year and between years.Discussion: We illustrate a novel approach using real-time movement data for dynamic estimates of biomass and stock value at animal-, herd- and national-level that can be applied in countries with existing animal registration and movement tracing systems
Rapid autofluorescence flow cytometric analysis of agonist-induced neutrophil and eosinophil polarization reveals novel insights into 5-oxo-ETE-mediated granulocyte activation
No full textMinimizing unintended granulocyte activation while measuring functional responsiveness is essential, as the use of external probes, antibodies, or fluorescent dyes can potentially alter cellular responsiveness. To address this, we employed an antibody free flow cytometry approach that measures forward scatter (FSC) to detect variations in cell-size, morphology, and shape; some key indicators of neutrophil and eosinophil activation. Human peripheral blood neutrophils, containing contaminating eosinophils, were isolated using discontinuous Percoll gradients and pre-treated with receptor antagonists [e.g., cyclosporin-H (an FPR1 antagonist) and CP105696 (a BLT1 receptor antagonist)] prior to stimulation with agonists such as fMLF (an FPR1 agonist) and LTB4 (a BLT1 agonist). Furthermore, fMLF stimulation resulted in a loss CD62L and an increase in CD11b expression along with an increase in intracellular ROS production compared to control as analysed using flow cytometry. Imaging flow cytometry, together with FSC analysis, enabled assessment of cell polarization and associated morphological changes. Importantly, auto fluorescence-based gating allowed for the identification of contaminating eosinophils within the mixed granulocyte population, allowing parallel assessment of shape-change in both neutrophils and eosinophils in response to the same ligands. Stimulation of neutrophils with fMLF resulted in distinct FSC shifts compared to unstimulated controls across all flow cytometers tested, which were inhibited by cyclosporin-H, but not CP105696. Morphological analysis confirmed these changes corresponded with increased cell area and perimeter and decreased circularity, hallmarks of cell polarisation. Additionally, selective activation of eosinophils (but not neutrophils) by eotaxin, and dual activation of both cell types by the arachidonic acid metabolite 5-oxo-ETE, were confirmed through specific gating strategies. Taken together, these findings support the use of FSC-based flow cytometry as a rapid, scalable and effective method for evaluating granulocyte polarisation and screening candidate therapeutics targeting immune cell activation in disease contexts
Role of RNA in genome folding:It's all about affinity
No full textIn mammalian cells, RNA species make up ∼10% of chromatin by mass and play a structural role in the nucleus by acting as scaffolds and influencing genome organisation. Although many proteins bind nuclear RNAs, these interactions are often non-specific, making it challenging to define RNA's role in genome folding. Nonetheless, a clearer picture is emerging. Some RNAs, like NEAT1 and MALAT1, have high affinity for specific RNA-binding proteins and form the basis for nuclear bodies. In contrast, many nuclear proteins bind RNA weakly, resulting in numerous low-affinity interactions. We propose that these interactions generate a complex RNA-protein network with dynamic, gel-like properties that modulate chromatin folding and transcription factor mobility. This suggests an exciting feedback mechanism in which newly transcribed RNA contributes directly to shaping chromatin architecture.</p
Happily ever after:The effect of dyadic regulation on retirees' subjective well-being in romantic couples
Get PDFImproving retirees' subjective well-being is crucial, and yet we know little about how retiree subjective well-being develops over time. The existing research has also largely neglected the dynamic role of significant others in shaping retiree adjustment outcomes, which is an important omission because social relationships become more important with age, as romantic partners take a particularly central role in the lives of retiring/retired individuals. Drawing on action regulation and transactive goal dynamics theories, this conceptual article addresses these concerns by developing the self- and dyadic-regulation pathways to retiree subjective well-being. The selfregulation pathway conceptualizes retirement planning as an iterative action process that involves setting retirement-related goals and generating, deciding on, and executing plans to pursue those goals. We propose that retirement planning leads to higher levels of retiree subjective well-being via the attainment of resources and that retiree subjective well-being has a reversed positive effect on retirement planning. Assuming that Partner A is a retiring/retired individual and Partner B is their partner, we conceptualize the dyadic-regulation pathway to retiree subjective well-being, whereby Partner B’s action process is interlinked with Partner A’s retirement planning process and Partner A’s attainment of resources. These links between both partners should be weakened by Partner A’s power and strengthened by couple-level intimacy. Couple-level intimacy and retiree subjective well-being are posited as reciprocally and positively related. Together, both pathways suggest that retirement planning is a dynamic and iterative process in which the retiring/retired individuals and their partners jointly engage, ultimately leading to better retirement adjustment
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