Why are some people (and countries) more protectionist than others?

Human feelings: why are some more aware than others?

A recent article reports that human perception of heartbeat timing is mediated by right (non-dominant) anterior insular cortex, and that the activity and the size of this region is directly correlated with individuals' subjective awareness of inner body feelings and emotionality. These results support the somatic-marker hypothesis of consciousness (a modern successor to the James-Lange theory o...

Why are some STEM fields more gender balanced than others?

Women obtain more than half of U.S. undergraduate degrees in biology, chemistry, and mathematics, yet they earn less than 20% of computer science, engineering, and physics undergraduate degrees (National Science Foundation, 2014a). Gender differences in interest in computer science, engineering, and physics appear even before college. Why are women represented in some science, technology, engin...

Why Are Some Plant Genera More Invasive Than Others?

Determining how biological traits are related to the ability of groups of organisms to become economically damaging when established outside of their native ranges is a major goal of population biology, and important in the management of invasive species. Little is known about why some taxonomic groups are more likely to become pests than others among plants. We investigated traits that discrim...

When some are more equal than others.

Some Terms are more Interchangeable than Others

This paper describes the work done by the Information Retrieval Research Group at Océ Technologies B.V., for the Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) 2001. We have participated in the Dutch Monolingual task and submitted three runs. In this paper we introduce a new method for relevance computation using two new query operators. This method is meant to be applied to Multilingual Retrieval in t...