Twelve adult human subjects were exposed to a sunk-cost procedure with two options: a mixed-ratio schedule of points later exchangeable for money, and an escape schedule that cancelled the current trial and initiated a new one. The mixed ratio included four values, arranged probabilistically in such a way that the expected ratios favored either persistence or escape. These probabilities were va...

Infinite loops make applications unresponsive. Potential problems include lost work or output, denied access to application functionality, and a lack of responses to urgent events. We present Jolt, a novel system for dynamically detecting and escaping infinite loops. At the user’s request, Jolt attaches to an application to monitor its progress. Specifically, Jolt records the program state at t...

Elected in 1723, Isaac de Sequeira Samuda (1681-1729) was the first Jewish Fellow of the Royal Society. He had arrived in London just a few years earlier, escaping from the Portuguese Inquisition. Despite his past, he had no difficulty in establishing links with his country's diplomatic representatives in London. A physician and adviser on scientific subjects, he became a conduit between the em...

Abstract: Three new classes of N-body problems of goldfish type are identified, with N an arbitrary positive integer (N ě 2). These models are characterized by nonlinear Newtonian (“accelerations equal forces”) equations of motion describing N equal point-particles moving in the complex z-plane. These highly nonlinear equations feature many arbitrary coupling constants, yet they can be solved b...