1 Global change and emerging concepts in ecology and evolution are leading to a growing interest in phenotypic plasticity (PP), the environmentally contingent trait expression observed in a given ...genotype. The need to quantify PP in a simple manner in comparative ecological studies has resulted in the prevalence of various indices instead of the classic approaches, i.e. a comparison of slopes in the norms of reactions (trait vs. environment plots). 2 The objectives of this study were: (i) to review the most common methods for quantitative estimation of PP; (ii) to apply them to a specific case study of growth and shoot-root allocation responses to irradiance in seedlings of four woody species grown at 1%, 6%, 20% and 100% full sunlight; and (iii) to propose new methods of estimating PP. 3 The 17 different plasticity indices analysed rendered disparate results, with cross-overs in species PP rankings. Statistical comparisons of PP among species were not possible with most of the indices due to the lack of confidence intervals. The non-linear responses of the traits made the use of the slope of the reaction norm to quantify PP unrealistic, and raised awareness on values derived from studies that consider just two environments. 4 We propose an alternative approach to quantify PP based on phenotypic distances among individuals of a given species exposed to different environments, which is summarized in a relative distance plasticity index (RDPI) that allows for statistical comparisons of PP between species (or populations within species). RDPI was significantly correlated with 12 out of the 17 PP indices analysed. An index including the environmental range leading to the different phenotypes (environmentally standardized plasticity index, ESPI), and thus expressing plasticity per unit of environmental change, is also proposed. 5 The new indexes can statistically segregate and unambiguously rank species according to their PP, which can foster a better understanding of plant ecology and evolution, particularly when common protocols are used by different investigators.
Receiving social support is critical for well-being, but concerns about a recipient’s reaction could make people reluctant to express such support. Our studies indicate that people’s expectations ...about how their support will be received predict their likelihood of expressing it (Study 1, N = 100 online adults), but these expectations are systematically miscalibrated. Participants who sent messages of support to others they knew (Study 2, N = 120 students) or who expressed support to a new acquaintance in person (Study 3, N = 50 adult pairs) consistently underestimated how positively their recipients would respond. A systematic perspective gap between expressers and recipients may explain miscalibrated expectations: Expressers may focus on how competent their support seems, whereas recipients may focus on the warmth it conveys (Study 4, N = 300 adults). Miscalibrated concerns about how to express support most competently may make people overly reluctant to reach out to someone in need.
Summary
Recently, there has been a great deal of attention in a class of finite‐time stable dynamical systems, called fixed‐time stable, that exhibit uniform convergence with respect to its initial ...condition, that is, there exists an upper bound for the settling‐time (UBST) function, independent of the initial condition of the system. Of particular interest is the development of stabilizing controllers where the desired UBST can be selected a priori by the user since it allows the design of controllers to satisfy real‐time constraints. Unfortunately, existing methodologies for the design of controllers for fixed‐time stability exhibit the following drawbacks: on the one hand, in methods based on autonomous systems, either the UBST is unknown or its estimate is very conservative, leading to over‐engineered solutions; on the other hand, in methods based on time‐varying gains, the gain tends to infinity, which makes these methods unrealizable in practice. To bridge these gaps, we introduce a design methodology to stabilize a perturbed chain of integrators in a fixed‐time, with the desired UBST that can be set arbitrarily tight. Our approach consists of redesigning autonomous stabilizing controllers by adding time‐varying gains. However, unlike existing methods, we provide sufficient conditions such that the time‐varying gain remains bounded, making our approach realizable in practice.
This work documents a contemporary organizational problem-a gap between selection policies and individual selection decisions-and suggests one intervention to address it. In college admissions and ...workplace hiring contexts, we find that decision-makers are more likely to favor disadvantaged applicants over applicants with objectively higher achievements when choosing between selection policies than choosing between individual applicants. We document this policy–people gap among admissions officers, working professionals, and lay people using both within-subject and between-subject designs and across a range of stimuli. We find that the gap is driven in part by shifting standards of fairness across the two types of decisions. When choosing between individuals, compared to choosing between policies, decision-makers are more likely to prioritize what is fair to individuals (a microjustice standard of fairness) over what is fair in the aggregate (a macrojustice standard of fairness). As a result, an intervention that has decision-makers prioritize the same standard of fairness across the decisions mitigates the policy–people gap. This research helps us understand why decision-makers' choices so frequently violate espoused organizational policies and suggests one way to increase the representation of disadvantaged groups in organizations.
What was once broadly viewed as an impossibility—learning from experimental data in economics—has now become commonplace. Governmental bodies, think tanks, and corporations around the world employ ...teams of experimental researchers to answer their most pressing questions. For their part, in the past two decades academics have begun to more actively partner with organizations to generate data via field experimentation. Although this revolution in evidence-based approaches has served to deepen the economic science, recently a credibility crisis has caused even the most ardent experimental proponents to pause. This study takes a step back from the burgeoning experimental literature and introduces 12 actions that might help to alleviate this credibility crisis and raise experimental economics to an even higher level. In this way, we view our "12 action wish list" as discussion points to enrich the field.
Although honesty is typically conceptualized as a virtue, it often conflicts with other equally important moral values, such as avoiding interpersonal harm. In the present research, we explore when ...and why honesty enables helpful versus harmful behavior. Across 5 incentive-compatible experiments in the context of advice-giving and economic games, we document four central results. First, honesty enables selfish harm: people are more likely to engage in and justify selfish behavior when selfishness is associated with honesty than when it is not. Second, people are selectively honest: people are more likely to be honest when honesty is associated with selfishness than when honesty is associated with altruism. Third, these effects are more consistent with genuine, rather than motivated, preferences for honesty. Fourth, even when individuals have no selfish incentive to be honest, honesty can lead to interpersonal harm because people avoid information about how their honest behavior affects others. This research unearths new insights on the mechanisms underlying moral choice, and consequently, the contexts in which moral principles are a force of good versus a force of evil. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).
Contaminants derived from consumables, reagents, and sample handling often negatively affect LC‐MS data acquisition. In proteomics experiments, they can markedly reduce identification performance, ...reproducibility, and quantitative robustness. Here, we introduce a data analysis workflow combining MS1 feature extraction in Skyline with HowDirty, an R‐markdown‐based tool, that automatically generates an interactive report on the molecular contaminant level in LC‐MS data sets. To facilitate the interpretation of the results, the HTML report is self‐contained and self‐explanatory, including plots that can be easily interpreted. The R package HowDirty is available from https://github.com/DavidGZ1/HowDirty. To demonstrate a showcase scenario for the application of HowDirty, we assessed the impact of ultrafiltration units from different providers on sample purity after filter‐assisted sample preparation (FASP) digestion. This allowed us to select the filter units with the lowest contamination risk. Notably, the filter units with the lowest contaminant levels showed higher reproducibility regarding the number of peptides and proteins identified. Overall, HowDirty enables the efficient evaluation of sample quality covering a wide range of common contaminant groups that typically impair LC‐MS analyses, facilitating corrective or preventive actions to minimize instrument downtime.
In the last decades, the search for natural products with biological applications as alternative treatments for several inflammatory diseases has increased. In this respect, terpenes are a family of ...organic compounds obtained mainly from plants and trees, such as tea, cannabis, thyme, and citrus fruits like lemon or mandarin. These molecules present attractive biological properties such as analgesic and anticonvulsant activities. Furthermore, several studies have demonstrated that certain terpenes could reduce inflammation symptoms by decreasing the release of pro-inflammatory cytokines for example, the nuclear transcription factor-kappa B, interleukin 1, and the tumor necrosis factor-alpha. Thus, due to various anti-inflammatory drugs provoking side effects, the search and analysis of novel therapeutics treatments are attractive. In this review, the analysis of terpenes' chemical structure and their mechanisms in anti-inflammatory functions are addressed. Additionally, we present a general analysis of recent investigations about their applications as an alternative treatment for inflammatory diseases. Furthermore, we focus on terpenes-based nanoformulations and employed dosages to offer a global perspective of the state-of-the-art.
Summary
In this paper, we provide a new nonconservative upper bound for the settling time of a class of fixed‐time stable systems. To expose the value and the applicability of this result, we present ...four main contributions. First, we revisit the well‐known class of fixed‐time stable systems, to show the conservatism of the classical upper estimate of its settling time. Second, we provide the smallest constant that the uniformly upper bounds the settling time of any trajectory of the system under consideration. Third, introducing a slight modification of the previous class of fixed‐time systems, we propose a new predefined‐time convergent algorithm where the least upper bound of the settling time is set a priori as a parameter of the system. At last, we design a class of predefined‐time controllers for first‐ and second‐order systems based on the exposed stability analysis. Simulation results highlight the performance of the proposed scheme regarding settling time estimation compared to existing methods.
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