After GAVI pledges surpass goals, focus shifts to keeping promises

Behaviour Change for Sustainability: Keeping Promises: Do Pledges Work?

"A popular component of many behaviour change efforts involves asking a person to make a commitment, or “pledge”, to undertake the desired behaviour. This typically involves getting them to sign their name to a promise to save water/energy/emissions. The common perception is that this will make them more accountable, and thus more likely to follow through on the requested behaviours. This month...

New health minister promises open door, pledges to work with doctors.

Keeping focus on the science

Control of public funding for some of the fastest moving areas of biological research is now in the hands of Julia Goodfellow from the University of London. As chief executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, Goodfellow took charge last month of an annual research portfolio worth more than £250 million, becoming one of the most influential scientists in the UK and ...

The Focus Shifts to the Heart

Of the molecules that transmit an extracellular message to alter cardiomyocyte physiology, the cyclic nucleotides are among the better understood as regulators of cell function. The relatively recent identification of nitric oxide (NO) as a stimulus of cGMP production by soluble guanyl cyclase,1 as well as of the natriuretic peptides as a stimulating membrane-bound guanylate cyclase,2 has led t...

On Learning, Lower Bounds and (un)Keeping Promises

We extend the line of research initiated by Fortnow and Klivans [FK09] that studies the relationship between efficient learning algorithms and circuit lower bounds. In [FK09], it was shown that if a Boolean circuit class C has an efficient deterministic exact learning algorithm, (i.e. an algorithm that uses membership and equivalence queries) then EXP 6⊆ P/poly[C] . Recently, in [KKO13] EXP was...