The nematode C. elegans is an important model for the study of social behaviors. Recent investigations have shown that a family of small molecule signals, the ascarosides, controls population density sensing and mating behavior. However, despite extensive studies of C. elegans aggregation behaviors, no intraspecific signals promoting attraction or aggregation of wild-type hermaphrodites have be...

What kind of things are social rules? The paper starts from the critique of social rules articulated by ethnomethodologists and proposes an alternative conception of rules as situated, often tacit, imperatives. This ontological theorization borrows insights from critical realism and post-structuralism to explore general features of rules. For instance: they under-determine fields of legitimate ...

Given a set of propositions with unknown truth values, a ‘judgement aggregation rule’ is a way to aggregate the personal truth-valuations of a set of jurors into some ‘collective’ truth valuation. We introduce the class of ‘quasimajoritarian’ judgement aggregation rules, which includes majority vote, but also includes some rules which use different weighted voting schemes to decide the truth of...

A divisible public resource is to be divided among projects. We study rules that decide on a distribution of the budget when voters have ordinal preference rankings over Examples such portioning problems are participatory budgeting, time shares, and parliament elections. introduce family for portioning, inspired by positional scoring rules. Rules in this given vector (such as plurality or Borda...

Judgment aggregation is an abstract framework for studying collective decision making by aggregating individual opinions on logically related issues. Important types of judgment aggregation methods are those of scoring and distance-based methods, many of which can be seen as generalisations of voting rules. An important question to investigate for judgment aggregation methods is how hard it is ...

The scope of this paper is a qualitative description of terrain features that can be characterized using the silhouette of a terrain. The silhouette is a profile of a landform seen from a particular observer’s perspective. We develop a terrain language as a formal framework to capture terrain features. The horizon of a terrain silhouette is represented as a string. The alphabet of the terrain l...

Tranylcypromine, given intraperitoneally at doses greater than or equal to 10 mg/kg, enhanced platelet aggregation in the arterioles on the cerebral surface in mice. Tranylcypromine inhibits prostacyclin synthesis in vitro. Iproniazid, which inhibits monoamine oxidase but not prostacyclin synthesis, failed to enhance platelet aggregation. The failure of iproniazid to enhance aggregation in this...

Petri nets are useful for modelling complex concurrent systems. While modelling using Petri nets focusses on local states and actions, the analysis methods are concerned with global states and their transitions. Unfortunately generation of the complete state space suffers from the well-known state space explosion problem. This paper presents a method to overcome the state-space explosion proble...

Reconciling requirements for (1) the efficient integration of independently developed and evolving components and (2) the evolution of systems built from such components requires novel architectural styles, standards and idioms. Traditional object-oriented approaches have proven inadequate. Two important new mechanisms supporting integration and evolution are dynamic interface negotiation and a...