Humans acquire far more of their behaviour from conspecifics via culture than any other species. Our culture is larger because it accumulates, where other species’ seem to stay approximately the same size (Tomasello, 1999). This chapter attempts to clarify the problem of cultural accumulation by distinguishing between the size of a culture that can be transmitted from one generation, and the ex...

The hypothesis is presented that bacteriophage DNA packaging motors have a cycle comprised of bind/release thermal ratcheting with release-associated DNA pushing via ATP-dependent protein folding. The proposed protein folding occurs in crystallographically observed peptide segments that project into an axial channel of a protein 12-mer (connector) that serves, together with a coaxial ATPase mul...

Abstract Polymers in general, and adhesives particular, can exhibit nonlinear viscoelastic–viscoplastic response. Prior work has shown that this complex behavior be described using analytical models, which provided good agreement with measured creep recovery Under cyclic loading, however, some a temporal response different from what would expected their behavior. Ratcheting describes the accumu...

The destruction of quantum coherence can pump energy into a system. For our examples this is paradoxical because the destroyed correlations are ordinarily considered negligible. Mathematically the explanation is straightforward and physically one can identify the degrees of freedom supplying this energy. Nevertheless, the energy input can be calculated without specific reference to those degree...

Abstract To mitigate state exposure threats to long-lived instant messaging sessions, ratcheting was introduced, which is used in practice protocols like Signal. However, existing generally come with a high cost. Recently, Caforio et al. proposed pragmatic constructions, compose weakly secure ‘light’ protocol and strongly ‘heavy’ protocol, order achieve so-called on-demand. The light they has s...

purpose: to evaluate the effect of childhood corneal opacity on the anteroposterior length of the globe in adulthood. methods: twenty-three patients with significant unilateral corneal opacity which had developed before the age of 6 years and the normal fellow eyes (controls) were evaluated. a comprehensive ocular examination including measurement of anterioposterior length and anterior chamber...

We propose a difference-in-differences (DiD) approach to estimate the impact of incentives on cost reduction. We show theoretically, and estimate empirically, that German electricity distribution system operators (DSOs) incur higher costs when subject to a loweredpowered regulation mechanism. The difference is particularly significant (about 7%) for firms in the upper quartile of the efficiency...