The two-dimensional model which emerges from low-energy considerations of string theory is written down. Solutions of this classical model are noted, including some examples which have nontrivial tachyon field. One such represents the classical backreaction of the tachyon field on the black hole for a two parameter set of tachyon potentials. Assuming the classical black hole background in the ‘...

This paper proposes a collateral view of financial innovation: Many innovations are partly motivated by alleviating collateral constraints for trading (speculation or hedging). We analyze a model of investors with disagreement. The trading need motivates them to introduce derivatives, which are endogenously determined in equilibrium. In the presence of a collateral friction in cross-netting, th...

Empathy features a tension between automaticity and context dependency. On the one hand, people often take on each other's internal states reflexively and outside of awareness. On the other hand, empathy shifts with characteristics of empathizers and situations. These 2 characteristics of empathy can be reconciled by acknowledging the key role of motivation in driving people to avoid or approac...

Moral judgments are important, intuitive, and complex. These factors make moral judgment particularly fertile ground for motivated reasoning. This chapter reviews research (both our own and that of others) examining two general pathways by which motivational forces can alter the moral implications of an act: by affecting perceptions of an actor’s moral accountability for the act, and by influen...

Early adopters of unfamiliar, but nutritious foods can do so because of a combination of taste-motivations and health-motivations. Yet because taste can provide an enduring motivation for dietary change, profiling the taste-motivated segment of a particular food might prove useful in identifying and stimulating adoption among similar predisposed segments. This manuscript describes a basic quali...

In this paper, we describe the architecture of a sub-sentential alignment system that links linguistically motivated phrases in parallel texts. We conceive our sub-sentential aligner as a cascade model consisting of two phases. In the first phase, anchor chunks are linked on the basis of lexical correspondences and syntactic similarity. In the second phase, we will focus on the more complex tra...

This paper presents an extension of the Motivated Learning model that includes environment masking, and opportunistic behavior of the motivated learning agent. Environment masking improves an agent’s ability to learn by helping to filter out distractions, and the addition of a more complex environment increases the simulation’s realism. If conditions call for it opportunistic behavior allows an...

Natural language processing techniques are increasingly applied to identify social trends and predict behavior based on large text collections. Existing methods typically rely on surface lexical and syntactic information. Yet, research in psychology shows that patterns of human conceptualisation, such as metaphorical framing, are reliable predictors of human expectations and decisions. In this ...

FINAL PHYSIOLOGICAL REGULATION of eating resides in the hypothalamus. There signals from the periphery (e.g., leptin, insulin, glucose) activate and inhibit circuits that drive ingestive behavior. Thus leptin and insulin act on neurons in the arcuate nucleus. Leptin inhibits neurons that coexpress neuropeptide Y (NPY) and agouti-related peptide (AGRP) and also activates proopiomelanocortin (POM...