Hampshire College

If two separated observers are supplied with entanglement, in the form of n pairs of particles in identical partly entangled pure states, one member of each pair being given to each observer, they can, by local actions of each observer, concentrate this entanglement into a smaller number of maximally entangled pairs of particles, for example, Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen singlets, similarly shared between the two observers. The concentration process asymptotically conserves entropy of entanglement---the von Neumann entropy of the partial density matrix seen by either observer---with the yield of singlets approaching, for large n, the base-2 entropy of entanglement of the initial partly entangled pure state. Conversely, any pure or mixed entangled state of two systems can be produced by two classically communicating separated observers, drawing on a supply of singlets as their sole source of entanglement. \textcopyright{} 1996 The American Physical Society.

An algorithmic proof that any discrete finite-dimensional unitary operator can be constructed in the laboratory using optical devices is given. Our recursive algorithm factorizes any N\ifmmode\times\else\texttimes\fi{}N unitary matrix into a sequence of two-dimensional beam splitter transformations. The experiment is built from the corresponding devices. This also permits the measurement of the observable corresponding to any discrete Hermitian matrix. Thus optical experiments with any type of radiation (photons, atoms, etc.) exploring higher-dimensional discrete quantum systems become feasible.

Dental enamel hypoplasias are deficiencies in enamel thickness resulting from physiological perturbations (stress) during the secretory phase of amelogenesis. The results of a wide variety of experimental, clinical, and epidemiological studies strongly suggest that these defects and their associated histological abnormalities (such as accentuated stria of Retzius and Wilson bands) are relatively sensitive and nonspecific indicators of stress. Because of the inability of enamel to remodel, and the regular and ring-like nature of their development, these defects can provide an indelible, chronological record of stress during tooth crown formation. For these reasons, along with the ease with which they are studied, enamel hypoplasias have been increasingly employed as indicators of nutritional and disease status in paleopathology, and their study has begun to extend into other subdisciplines of physical anthropology. In order to provide the reader with a better understanding of the current issues in this field, we first review normal enamel development, historical advances in the study of enamel developmental abnormalities, and provide a threshold model to help conceptualize the etiology of enamel developmental defects. Specific attention is then centered on extant, fundamental issues in the use of enamel hypoplasias and histological structures as epidemiological indicators of nonspecific stress. Most enamel hypoplasias are associated with abnormal histological changes (accentuated stria of Retzius or “Wilson” and “Cluster” bands). However, the lack of association of some mild surface irregularities, characteristically seen as thin, perikymata-like surface depressions, with abnormal prism morphology suggests that these surface features may not be evidence of physiological perturbation. Methods now exist to reliably identify both histological and enamel surface defects. However, further research is needed on methods for determining the size of defects and the epidemiological significance of defect widths and depths. Similarly, the general relationship between the location of enamel hypoplasias and associated histological structures on the one hand, and an individual's age at the time of their development on the other hand, is also well understood. However, better estimates of intra- and inter-population variation in the timing of enamel matrix formation are needed before these defects can reach their full potential as chronometric measures of stresses. Lack of understanding patterns of differential susceptibility of enamekl to developmental disruption has likely hindered interpretations of the results of a number of past experiments. The seemingly strong pattern of differential suscetibility of enamel to disruption-within teeth and across tooth classes, dentitions, and taxa-may yield a number of significant clues to understanding basic issues in enamel development. Populations that are exposed to a high degree of undernutrition and disease, from prehistoric to contemporary times, share high rates of linear enamel hypoplasias. While these defects seem to relate to bouts of undernutrition and infection, their specific etiology is still unknown. In the next decade we expect to develop more precise information on the specificity and sensitivity of secretory ameloblaste to disruption. A variety of research directions are suggested for further anthropological study.

Seekers of information in libraries either go through a librarian intermediary or they help themselves. When they go through librarians they must develop their questions through four levels of need, referred to here as the visceral, conscious, formalized, and compromised needs. In his pre-search interview with an information-seeker the reference librarian attempts to help him arrive at an understanding of his “compromised” need by determining: (1) the subject of his interest; (2) his motivation; (3) his personal characteristics; (4) the relationship of the inquiry to file organization; and (5) anticipated answers. The author contends that research is needed into the techniques of conducting this negotiation between the user and the reference librarian.

Coral reefs of north Jamaica, normally sheltered, were severely damaged by Hurricane Allen, the strongest Caribbean hurricane of this century. Immediate studies were made at Discovery Bay, where reef populations were already known in some detail. Data are presented to show how damage varied with the position and orientation of the substraturn and with the shape, size, and mechanical properties of exposed organisms. Data collected over succeeding weeks showed striking differences in the ability of organisms to heal and survive.

For proponents of the view that anthropogenic climate change will become a ‘threat multiplier’ for instability in the decades ahead, the Syrian civil war has become a recurring reference point, providing apparently compelling evidence that such conflict effects are already with us. According to this view, human-induced climatic change was a contributory factor in the extreme drought experienced within Syria prior to its civil war; this drought in turn led to large-scale migration; and this migration in turn exacerbated the socio-economic stresses that underpinned Syria's descent into war. This article provides a systematic interrogation of these claims, and finds little merit to them. Amongst other things it shows that there is no clear and reliable evidence that anthropogenic climate change was a factor in Syria's pre-civil war drought; that this drought did not cause anywhere near the scale of migration that is often alleged; and that there exists no solid evidence that drought migration pressures in Syria contributed to civil war onset. The Syria case, the article finds, does not support ‘threat multiplier’ views of the impacts of climate change; to the contrary, we conclude, policymakers, commentators and scholars alike should exercise far greater caution when drawing such linkages or when securitising climate change.

Abstract This paper critically examines the perceived threat of ‘climate refugees’ and ‘climate conflict’. It locates the ideological roots of these concepts in development theories and policy narratives about demographically induced migration, environmental refugees and environmental security. While alarmist rhetoric around climate refugees and conflict has been deployed by a variety of actors, including U.N. agencies, development NGOs, national governments, security pundits and popular media, the paper concentrates on its strategic use by U.S. defence interests. It raises the question of how the portrayal of climate change as a security threat could further militarise the provision of development assistance and distort climate policy. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

We have initiated a search for extended ultraviolet disk (XUV-disk) galaxies in the local universe. Here we compare GALEX UV and visible-NIR images of 189 nearby (D < 40 Mpc) S0-Sm galaxies included in the GALEX Atlas of Nearby Galaxies and present the first catalog of XUV-disk galaxies. We find that XUV-disk galaxies are surprisingly common but have varied relative (UV/optical) extent and morphology. Type 1 objects (≳20% incidence) have structured, UV-bright/optically faint emission features in the outer disk, beyond the traditional star formation threshold. Type 2 XUV-disk galaxies (~10% incidence) exhibit an exceptionally large, UV-bright/optically low surface brightness (LSB) zone having blue UV-K_s outside the effective extent of the inner, older stellar population, but not reaching extreme galactocentric distance. If the activity occurring in XUV-disks is episodic, a higher fraction of present-day spirals could be influenced by such outer disk star formation. Type 1 disks are associated with spirals of all types, whereas Type 2 XUV-disks are predominantly found in late-type spirals. Type 2 XUV-disks are forming stars quickly enough to double their (currently low) stellar mass in the next Gyr (assuming a constant star formation rate). XUV-disk galaxies of both types are systematically more gas-rich than the general galaxy population. Minor external perturbation may stimulate XUV-disk incidence, at least for Type 1 objects. XUV-disks are the most actively evolving galaxies growing via inside-out disk formation in the current epoch, and may constitute a segment of the galaxy population experiencing significant, continued gas accretion from the intergalactic medium or neighboring objects.

OBJECTIVE: To investigate the basis of disturbed moral judgment in patients with frontotemporal dementia (FTD). BACKGROUND: FTD is characterized by difficulty in modulating social behavior. Patients lack social propriety and may perform sociopathic acts. In addition, FTD patients often lack empathy for others. These findings suggest alterations in the nature of morality in patients with FTD. METHOD: We administered an inventory of moral knowledge and two moral dilemmas to 26 patients with the frontal variant of FTD, 26 patients with Alzheimer disease (AD), and 26 normal control subjects. The FTD patients met Consensus Criteria for FTD and had corroborative frontal abnormalities on functional neuroimaging. The FTD and AD patients were comparably impaired on dementia measures. RESULTS: All these groups showed the retention of knowledge for moral behavior and the ability to make "impersonal" moral judgments. In contrast, the FTD patients were impaired in their ability to make immediate, emotionally based moral judgments compared with the patients with AD and the normal control subjects. CONCLUSIONS: These findings are consistent with an attenuation of the automatic emotional identification with others that is part of the innate moral sense. Such a disturbance may result from neurodegenerative disease affecting the ventromedial frontal cortex.

Cognitive Science is a single-source undergraduate text that broadly surveys the theories and empirical results of cognitive science within a consistent computational perspective. In addition to covering the individual contributions of psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and artificial intelligence to cognitive science, the book has been revised to introduce the connectionist approach as well as the classical symbolic approach and adds a new chapter on cognitively related advances in neuroscience. Cognitive science is a rapidly evolving field that is characterized by considerable contention among different views and approaches. Cognitive Science presents these in a relatively neutral manner. It covers many new orientations theories and findings, embedding them in an integrated computational perspective and establishing a sense of continuity and contrast with more traditional work in cognitive science. The text assumes no prerequisite knowledge, introducing all topics in a uniform, accessible style. Many topics, such as natural language processing and vision, however, are developed in considerable depth, which allows the book to be used with more advanced undergraduates or even in beginning graduate settings. A Bradford Book

SUMMARY Research on the control of action has made it clear that the performance of movement sequences is governed by central plans. This article is concerned with the structure of these plans and the course of events that underlies their construction. We conduct choice reaction-time experiments in which subjects choose between sequences of motor responses; the responses are similar to those used in piano playing. The initial goal of the experiments is to distinguish between two models of sequence choice developed to account for results from preliminary experiments on this topic. One model, the motor-program editor model, assumes that subjects prepare for a choice between two sequences by constructing an ordered set of motor subprograms each of which has a list of the motor features shared by the alternative responses at the corresponding serial position; the subsequent choice time is assumed to depend on the number of features to be supplied to the initially readied feature lists. The alternative, hierarchical decisions model, assumes that choosing between sequences of motor responses is achieved by carrying out a series of choices among competing elements at each of a number of distinct functional levels. Five experiments are reported that require subjects to choose between response sequences consisting of one to four button presses. Among the phenomena found are the following: (a) systematic effects of the serial positions of uncertain responses in the alternative sequences; (b) effects of the structural similarity of the two sequences, both on the time to choose between the sequences and on the time to perform responses within them; and (c) effects of the requirement to cancel some responses depending on the structural relationships between those responses and the other responses in the same sequence and in the other sequence. On the basis of these and other results, we propose a hybrid of the motor-program editor model and the hierarchical decisions model. The new, hierarchical editor (HED) model assumes that motor plans are hierarchically structured and that subjects prepare for forthcoming sequence choices by readying responses shared by the two possible sequences. The essential new ideas in the HED model are that the physical production of planned motor sequences is controlled by the successive of nested subprograms and that before this unpacking process begins, it is gone through once in advance to ensure that all uncertain nesting relations are resolved. An important implication of the model is that the performance of movement sequences is achieved through rapid access to symbolic memory stores rather than through linear readout from low-level command stores. Another important implication is that the control of manual response sequences may be based on the same fundamental mechanisms as the control of language production.

Stress, a concept addressing the consequences of disruptive events on individuals and populations, can be a useful integrative idea. The stress process has much in common with its sister concept of adaptation. However, where adaptation focuses on “adaptive” or positive consequences, stress redresses an imbalance by focusing on the costs and limits of adaptation. In this paper we first review the interdisciplinary roots of the stress concept. While most stress research derives from research in environmental physiology, Selyean concepts of stress (involving increased catecholamine and corticosteroid output) have forced an expansion toward greater concern for perceptual and psychosocial stressors. What is largely missing from all traditions, however, is concern for sociopolitical processes which are not easily adapted to and consequently are persistent and pervasive causes of stress. Studies of stress in prehistoric, historical, and contemporary populations by biological anthropologists vary, in a complementary way, as to ability to delineate aspects of the stress process. Whereas the paleopathological methods of the prehistorian provide a suite of skeletal indicators of stress response, and the demographic measures of the historian provide a detailed analysis of consequence, a wide variety of techniques for examining all levels of the stress process are potentially available to those studying contemporary populations. In order to better utilize information from different levels of analysis one needs to focus on measures of stress, such as infant mortality, which are accessible at all levels. Biological anthropologists are in a unique position to elucidate the human condition if, via concepts such as stress, attention is paid to both human adaptive and political economic processes.

There is a paradoxical relationship between "race" and genetics. Whereas genetic data were first used to prove the validity of race, since the early 1970s they have been used to illustrate the invalidity of biological races. Indeed, race does not account for human genetic variation, which is continuous, complexly structured, constantly changing, and predominantly within "races." Despite the disproof of race-as-biology, genetic variation continues to be used to explain racial differences. Such explanations require the acceptance of 2 disproved assumptions: that genetic variation explains variation in disease and that genetic variation explains racial variation in disease. While the former is a form of geneticization, the notion that genes are the primary determinants of biology and behavior, the latter represents a form of racialization, an exaggeration of the salience of race. Using race as a proxy for genetic differences limits understandings of the complex interactions among political-economic processes, lived experiences, and human biologies. By moving beyond studies of racialized genetics, we can clarify the processes by which varied and interwoven forms of racialization and racism affect individuals "under the skin."

Are movement sequences executed in a hierarchically controlled fashion? We first state explicitly what such control would entail, and we observe that if a movement sequence is planned hierarchically, that does not imply that its execution is hierarchical. To find evidence for hierarchically controlled execution, we require subjects to perform memorized sequences of finger responses like those used in playing the piano. The error data we obtain are consistent with a hierarchical planning as well as execution model, but the interresponse-time data provide strong support for a hierarchical execution model. We consider three alternatives to the hierarchical execution model and reject them. We also consider the implications of our results for the role of timing in motor programs, the characteristics of motor buffers, and the relations between memory for symbolic and motor information.

This article develops an analytic framework for comparing dispute processing within a single institution and across different cultures, by focusing on the transformation of disputes. Case studies from diverse nonwestern and western settings are examined to show how disputes change as they are processed in response to the interests of various participants. Disputants, supporters, third parties, and relevant publics seek to rephrase and thus transform a dispute by imposing established categories for classifying events and relationships (narrowing), or by developing a framework which challenges established categories (expansion). Disputes may be expanded by adding new issues, by enlarging the arena of discussion, or by increasing the number and type of active participants. Thus, how the dispute is defined (language) and the roles played by various participants are critical features of the dispute. We focus on the agent of transformation, with special attention to the degree of audience participation, particularly in dispute expansion. We suggest the importance of expansion as a mechanism through which new rules emerge in the legal process, and through which social change is linked to legal change.

Although large international studies have found consistent patterns of sex differences in personality traits among adults (i.e., women scoring higher on most facets), less is known about cross-cultural sex differences in adolescent personality and the role of culture and age in shaping them. The present study examines the NEO Personality Inventory-3 (McCrae, Costa, & Martin, 2005) informant ratings of adolescents from 23 cultures (N = 4,850), and investigates culture and age as sources of variability in sex differences of adolescents' personality. The effect for Neuroticism (with females scoring higher than males) begins to take on its adult form around age 14. Girls score higher on Openness to Experience and Conscientiousness at all ages between 12 and 17 years. A more complex pattern emerges for Extraversion and Agreeableness, although by age 17, sex differences for these traits are highly similar to those observed in adulthood. Cross-sectional data suggest that (a) with advancing age, sex differences found in adolescents increasingly converge toward adult patterns with respect to both direction and magnitude; (b) girls display sex-typed personality traits at an earlier age than boys; and (c) the emergence of sex differences was similar across cultures. Practical implications of the present findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).

Abstract Infants and children are nearly universally found to be among the most vulnerable subgroups of a population. Their health can be a sensitive indicator of the health of the population as a whole. Furthermore, repeated bouts of illness during infancy and childhood, periods of rapid development, can have lasting functional effects on the individual and the group. In this paper we provide a framework for studying infant and childhood health in archaeological populations, briefly review methods for studying infant‐childhood health in skeletal remains, and provide examples of the sensitivity and adaptive significance of this segment of the population by examining infant and childhood health at Dickson Mounds, Illinois and Wadi Haifa, Sudanese Nubia. A variety of methods are available for studying infant and childhood health in archaeological groups. Taken together, these methods can provide insights into the patterns and consequences of health in prehistory.

OBJECTIVE: The objective of this study was to evaluate the use of social media among healthcare workers in an attempt to identify how it affects the quality of patient care. RESULTS: An anonymous survey of 35 questions was conducted in South Texas, on 366 healthcare workers. Of the 97% of people who reported owning electronic devices, 87.9% indicated that they used social media. These healthcare workers indicated that they spent approximately 1 h on social media every day. The healthcare workers below the age of 40 were more involved in social media compared to those above 40 (p < 0.05). The use of social media among physicians and nurses was noted to be identical (88% for each group), and both groups encouraged their patients to research their clinical conditions on social media (p < 0.05). A higher number of physicians reported awareness of a social media policy in their hospital compared to nurses (p < 0.05). However, a large proportion of healthcare workers (40%) were unaware of their workplace policy, which could potentially cause a privacy breach of confidential medical information. Further studies are required to evaluate specific effects of these findings on the quality of patient care.

Decades ago, pioneering petroleum geologist Wallace Pratt pointed out that oil is first found in the human mind. His insight remains true today: Across geoscience specialties, the human mind is arguably the geoscientist's most important tool. It is the mind that converts colors and textures of dirt, or blotches on a satellite image, or wiggles on a seismogram, into explanatory narratives about the formation and migration of oil, the rise and fall of mountain ranges, the opening and closing of oceans. Improved understanding of how humans think and learn about the Earth can help geoscientists and geoscience educators do their jobs better, and can highlight the strengths that geoscience expertise brings to interdisciplinary problem solving.

Attention is given to the role of Ca(2+) at the interface between the cell wall and the cytoplast, especially as seen in pollen tubes. While the cytoplasm directs the synthesis and deposition of the wall, it is less well appreciated that the wall exerts considerable self control and influences activities of the cytoplasm. Ca(2+) participates as a crucial factor in this two way communication. In the cytoplasm, a [Ca(2+)] above 0.1 microM, regulates myriad processes, including secretion of cell wall components. In the cell wall Ca(2+), at 10 microM to 10 mM, binds negative charges on pectins and imparts structural rigidity to the wall. The plasma membrane occupies a pivotal position between these two compartments, where selective channels regulate influx of Ca(2+), and specific carriers pump the ion back into the wall. In addition we draw attention to different factors, which either respond to the wall or are present in the wall, and usually generate elevated [Ca(2+)] in the cytoplasm. These factors include: (i) stretch activated channels; (ii) calmodulin; (iii) annexins; (iv) wall associated kinases; (v) oligogalacturonides; and (vi) extracellular adenosine 5'-triphosphate. Together they provide evidence for a rich and multifaceted system of communication between the cytoplast and cell wall, with Ca(2+) as a carrier of information.