Search in an environment with an uncertain distribution of resources involves a trade-off between exploitation of past discoveries and further exploration. This extends to information foraging, where a knowledge-seeker shifts between reading in depth and studying new domains. To study this decision-making process, we examine the reading choices made by one of the most celebrated scientists of the modern era: Charles Darwin. From the full-text of books listed in his chronologically-organized reading journals, we generate topic models to quantify his local (...) (text-to-text) and global (text-to-past) reading decisions using Kullback-Liebler Divergence, a cognitively-validated, information-theoretic measure of relative surprise. Rather than a pattern of surprise-minimization, corresponding to a pure exploitation strategy, Darwin’s behavior shifts from early exploitation to later exploration, seeking unusually high levels of cognitive surprise relative to previous eras. These shifts, detected by an unsupervised Bayesian model, correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career as identified both by qualitative scholarship and Darwin’s own self-commentary. Our methods allow us to compare his consumption of texts with their publication order. We find Darwin’s consumption more exploratory than the culture’s production, suggesting that underneath gradual societal changes are the explorations of individual synthesis and discovery. Our quantitative methods advance the study of cognitive search through a framework for testing interactions between individual and collective behavior and between short- and long-term consumption choices. This novel application of topic modeling to characterize individual reading complements widespread studies of collective scientific behavior. (shrink)

In the target article, we presented the hypothesis that parasite-stress variation was a causal factor in the variation of in-group assortative sociality, cross-nationally and across the United States, which we indexed with variables that measured different aspects of the strength of family ties and religiosity. We presented evidence supportive of our hypothesis in the form of analyses that controlled for variation in freedom, wealth resources, and wealth inequality across nations and the states of the USA. Here, we respond to criticisms (...) from commentators and attempt to clarify and expand the parasite-stress theory of sociality used to fuel our research presented in the target article. (shrink)

We show how faceted search using a combination of traditional classification systems and mixed-membership topic models can go beyond keyword search to inform resource discovery, hypothesis formulation, and argument extraction for interdisciplinary research. Our test domain is the history and philosophy of scientific work on animal mind and cognition. The methods can be generalized to other research areas and ultimately support a system for semi-automatic identification of argument structures. We provide a case study for the application of the methods to (...) the problem of identifying and extracting arguments about anthropomorphism during a critical period in the development of comparative psychology. We show how a combination of classification systems and mixed-membership models trained over large digital libraries can inform resource discovery in this domain. Through a novel approach of “drill-down” topic modeling—simultaneously reducing both the size of the corpus and the unit of analysis—we are able to reduce a large collection of fulltext volumes to a much smaller set of pages within six focal volumes containing arguments of interest to historians and philosophers of comparative psychology. The volumes identified in this way did not appear among the first ten results of the keyword search in the HathiTrust digital library and the pages bear the kind of “close reading” needed to generate original interpretations that is the heart of scholarly work in the humanities. Zooming back out, we provide a way to place the books onto a map of science originally constructed from very different data and for different purposes. The multilevel approach advances understanding of the intellectual and societal contexts in which writings are interpreted. (shrink)

In contemporary culture, existing audiovisual recordings are constantly reused and repurposed for various ends, raising questions regarding the ethics of such appropriations, particularly when the recording depicts actual people and events. Every reuse of a preexisting recording is, on some level, a misuse in that it was not intended or at least anticipated by the original maker, but not all misuses are necessarily unethical. In fact, there are many instances of productive misuse that seem justified. At the same time, there (...) are other instances in which the misuse shades into abuse. Documentary scholars have long engaged with the question of the ethical responsibility of documentary makers in relation to their subjects. But what happens when this responsibility is set at a remove, when the recording already exists for the taking and repurposing? Reuse, Misuse and Abuse surveys a range of contemporary films and videos that appropriate preexisting footage and attempts to theorize their ethical implications. (shrink)

Hyperlink cinema is an emergent film genre that seeks to push the boundaries of the medium in order to mirror contemporary life in the globalized community. Films in the genre thus create an interacting network across space and time in such a way as to suggest that people’s lives can intersect on scales that would not have been possible without modern technologies of travel and communication. This allows us to test the hypothesis that new kinds of media might permit us (...) to break through the natural cognitive constraints that limit the number and quality of social relationships we can manage in the conventional face-to-face world. We used network analysis to test this hypothesis with data from 12 hyperlink films, using 10 motion pictures from a more conventional film genre as a control. We found few differences between hyperlink cinema films and the control genre, and few differences between hyperlink cinema films and either the real world or classical drama (e.g., Shakespeare’s plays). Conversation group size seems to be especially resilient to alteration. It seems that, despite many efficiency advantages, modern media are unable to circumvent the constraints imposed by our evolved psychology. (shrink)

The majority of adults in Britain cite the mass media as their main source of information about developments in science and technology. This alone makes it worth studying how the press covered the story of Dolly the cloned sheep. However, the media's reporting of Dolly revealed serious difficulties in the relationship of science to society. Although there were failures of journalistic accuracy and balance, these should not be allowed to obscure the deeper issues.

Van Lange et al. argue that variations in climate explain cross-societal variations in violence. We suggest that any approach seeking to understand cross-cultural variation in human behavior via an ecological framework must consider a wider array of ecological variables, and we find that income inequality and sex ratio are better predictors than climate of cross-societal variations in violence.

In this note I construct a proper o-minimal expansion of the ordered additive group of rationals.

Heterotrimeric G proteins, consisting of α, β, and γ subunits, couple ligand-bound seven transmembrane domain receptors to the regulation of effector proteins and production of intracellular second messengers. G protein signaling mediates the perception of environmental cues in all higher eukaryotic organisms, including yeast, Dictyostelium, plants, and animals. The nematode Caenorhabditis elegans is the first animal to have complete descriptions of its cellular anatomy, cell lineage, neuronal wiring diagram, and genomic sequence. In a recent paper, Jansen et al.(1) used sequence (...) searches of the C. elegans genome database to identify all heterotrimeric G protein genes (20 Gα, 2 Gβ, 2 Gγ). C. elegans encodes one ortholog of each of the four Gα classes found in metazoans and 16 new Gα genes. The orthologous genes are widely expressed, whereas 14 of the divergent Gα genes are almost exclusively expressed in sensory neurons where they may regulate perception and chemotaxis.BioEssays 21:713–717, 1999. © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

Working in an o-minimal expansion of the real field, we investigate when a germ of a complex analytic function has a definable analytic continuation to its Mittag–Leffler star. As an application we show that any algebro-logarithmic function that is complex analytic in a neighborhood of the origin in $\mathbb {C}$ has an analytic continuation to all but finitely many points in $\mathbb {C}$.

Individuals with Acquired Brain Injury (ABI) suffer chronic impairment across cognitive, physical and psycho-social domains, and the experience of anxiety, isolation and apathy has been amplified by the COVID-19 pandemic. A qualitative evaluation was conducted of 14 individuals with ABI who had participated in series of COVID adapted group-based intervention(s) that had been designed to improve wellbeing. Eight themes were identified: Facilitating Safety, Fostering Positive Emotion, Managing and Accepting Difficult Emotions, Promoting Meaning, Finding Purpose and Accomplishment, Facilitating Social Ties, (Re)Connecting (...) to Nature, and Barriers to Efficacy. Findings are discussed with respects to recent theoretical developments in positive psychology and wellbeing science and support the use of online and outdoor interventions to enhance wellbeing in individuals living with ABI during the COVID-19 pandemic. This paper makes a unique contribution to second wave positive psychology (PP2.0) through the application of recent advances in wellbeing science to an ABI population during the COVID-19 pandemic. In doing so, this paper lays the foundation for new interventions that not only reduce impairment and distress, but also create opportunities for meaning and enhanced wellbeing in people living with chronic conditions and those individuals living with ABI in particular. (shrink)

This article examines changes in men's attitudes toward the family provider role using data from the National Opinion Research Center, General Social Surveys for 1972 through 1989. Men's attitudes have become more egalitarian over this period; however, men approve more of sharing provider-role enactment than of sharing provider-role responsibility. Cohort succession was a more important source of change than change within cohorts. Differences among men in attitudes toward the provider role were associated with differences in men's provider-role experiences, although there (...) was a time lag between change in actual experience and change in attitudes. The findings suggest that structural change in the economy of the family that has changed men's experience as breadwinners is the major force altering gender expectations about family roles. Attitudes among some groups of men, those not directly affected by these changes and married men who gain privileges from the breadwinner status, however, continue to reflect past ideology. (shrink)

Three questions of major historical interest may be asked concerning the neglect and the rediscovery of Mendel's work.1. Why was it so little noticed between its publication in 1866 and its rediscovery in 1900?2. What factors determined its rediscovery?3. What factors favoured the rapid growth of Mendelian genetics?It is with the second and third of these questions that this paper is concerned.

This article considers how the figure of the ``user'' is deployed to imagine the assembling of location-based mobile phone technologies in the context of UK policy. Drawing on the sociology of expectations, we address the performativity of the ``user'' in the think tank Demos' publication Mobilisation. In the process, we analyze how discourses about users enact particular futures that feature arrangements of, for example, persons, mobile phone technologies, and political institutions. We present two narrative strategies operating in Mobilisation: first, the (...) purification of the social and technological in the portrayal of futures and their impediments; second, how existing, emergent, and future users serve as ``narrative joints'', reconnecting the social and technological in the enactment of preferred policy trajectories. In conclusion, we explore Mobilisation as a `catalogue of expectations' in which the representation of a multiplicity of users is itself performative, enacting a particular future policy terrain while bracketing off others. (shrink)

This paper develops the outlines of a pragmatic, adaptive management-based approach toward the control of invasive nonnative species (INS) through a case study of Kings Bay/crystal River, a large artesian springs ecosystem that is one of Florida’s most important habitats for endangered West Indian manatees (Trichechus manatus). Building upon recent critiques of invasion biology, principles of adaptive management, and our own interview and participant–observer research, we argue that this case study represents an example in which rigid application of invasion biology’s (...) a␣priori imperative to minimize INS has produced counterproductive results from both an ecological and social standpoint. As such, we recommend that INS control in Kings Bay should be relaxed in conjunction with an overall program of adaptive ecosystem management that includes meaningful participation and input from non-institutional stakeholders. However, we also note that adaptive management and INS control are by no means mutually exclusive, in Kings Bay or elsewhere. Instead, we suggest that adaptive management offers a means by which INS control efforts can emerge from—and be evaluated through—ongoing scientific research and participatory dialogue about the condition of specific places, rather than non-contextual assumptions about the harmfulness of INS as a general class. (shrink)

The spectre of determinism stalks many of the concerns surrounding the impact of genetic research into both disease and normal behaviour. The ability accurately to predict a person's actions would certainly have profound implications for notions of individuality and free will. But to what extent will the current explosion in genetic research provide more accurate predictors than have been available for millennia in the form of wealth, social status and perceived family resemblance? The genetic research program is at too early (...) a stage to answer this question with confidence, but various indicators tend to point in the same direction: the predictive ability of genetic analysis will generally be low. This conclusion runs counter to widely perceived popular notions. The deconstruction of genetic determinism is an essential safeguard against the real concern that genetic information may be used for discrimination by unscrupulous powers. (shrink)