Fishes use the Mauthner-initiated C-start for short-latency evasion of predators. C-starts consist of a sudden turn (stage 1) and a rapid acceleration (stage 2). We analyzed high-speed ciné films of goldfish C-starts elicited by dropping a ball into the water. It was previously thought that stage 1 angle does not vary concomitantly with the angle of the threatening stimulus relative to the posi...

This laboratory experiment studies two-stage contests between political parties. In the first stage, parties run their primaries and in the second stage the winners of the primaries compete in the general election. The resource expenditures in the first stage by the winning candidates are partially or fully carried over to the second stage. Experimental results support all major theoretical pre...

This study was designed to demonstrate the need for caution in using the Rep test as an instrument for measuring the personality trait known as "cognitive complexity", given that situational factors prevailing at the time of testing can easily influence cognitive complexity scores. Forty-nine female undergraduate students were randomly assigned to either a short rating time or long rating time ...

A market-game mechanism is studied in a two-good, pure-exchange setting with potential information aggregation. The mechanism has two stages. At the first stage, agents make offers, which turn out to be provisional for all but a small and randomly selected group. After first-stage offers are announced, everyone else gets to make new offers at a second stage in which payoffs are determined via a...

To quantify the implications of common currencies for trade and income, we use data for over 200 countries and dependencies. In our two-stage approach, estimates at the first stage suggest that belonging to a currency union/board triples trade with other currency union members. Moreover, there is no evidence of trade-diversion. Our estimates at the second stage suggest that every one percent in...

In family-based data, association information can be partitioned into the between-family information and the within-family information. Based on this observation, Steen et al. (Nature Genetics. 2005, 683-691) proposed an interesting two-stage test for genome-wide association (GWA) studies under family-based designs which performs genomic screening and replication using the same data set. In the...

The origin of life on Earth may be divided into two stages separated by the first appearance of replicable molecules, most probably of RNA. The first stage depended exclusively on chemistry. The second stage likewise involved chemistry, but with the additional participation of selection, a necessary concomitant of inevitable replication accidents. Consideration of these two processes suggests t...

We study a two-stage election with two parties, each nominating a candidate in the first stage primary election to compete with the other party’s nominee in the second stage general election. This resembles the U.S. presidential election and is used in many countries in the world, but has largely escaped attention in the literature. We extend Coleman (1971) and Roemer (1997) to model such elect...

The pyrolysis behavior and kinetics of the aqueous fraction of bio-oil were studied through thermogravimetric (TG) analysis. Based on the experimental data, activation energies and kinetic parameters were calculated by the Achar differential method and the Coats-Redfern integral method, then the most probable mechanism functions and kinetics model were obtained at last. The results show that th...

BACKGROUND There are many applications for spatial cluster detection and more detection methods have been proposed in recent years. Most cluster detection methods are efficient in detecting circular (or circular-like) clusters, but the methods which can detect irregular-shaped clusters usually require a lot of computing time. METHODS We propose a new spatial detection algorithm for lattice da...