Two Ways to Make Great Contributions

Two ways to make great contributions.

Simple ways to make friends

This paper describes a study of the effects of mimicry and social praise when used by an artificial social agent. An experiment (N=50) is described which shows that social praise increases the perceived friendliness of a chat-robot, while, mimicry displaying matching behavior enhances the perceived intelligence of the robot. We advice designers to incorporate both mimicry and social praise in t...

New ways to make a blood cell

In a niche under the skin in Drosophila larvae, blood cells called plasmatocytes can transform into other classes of blood cell.

100 Ways to Make a Japanese House

© 2012 Children’s Literature Association. Pp. 153–163. Scenes of children making dollhouses are something of a leitmotif in Rumer Godden’s celebrated doll stories. Her first children’s novel, The Dolls’ House (1947), has sisters Charlotte and Emily Dane refurbishing a Victorian dollhouse, while in 1956’s The Fairy Doll, the young protagonist Elizabeth fashions a more unassuming home for her dol...

Two ways to condense

Two ways to condense G ene-rich euchromatin and largely untranscribed heterochromatin may follow different rules to prepare for mitosis, according to J. Robert Manak, Joseph Lipsick, and colleagues (Stanford University, Stanford, CA). From S phase to prophase, chromatin must replicate and then condense to prepare for mitosis. In most eukaryotic cells, euchromatin starts the process by replicati...