BACKGROUND We estimated the chronic rejection of kidney transplant using an eternal Weibull regression. METHODS In this historical cohort study, we enrolled all patients with chronic renal failure who were admitted to Shahid Labbafinejad medical center (Tehran, Iran) from 1984 to 2003. Using Matlab 7.0, we considered the eternal proportion theta, as a logistic-type function of the covariates ...

Costly punishment of cheaters who contribute little or nothing to a cooperating group has been extensively studied, as an effective means to enforce cooperation. The prevailing view is that individuals use punishment to retaliate against transgressions of moral standards such as fairness or equity. However, there is much debate regarding the psychological underpinnings of costly punishment. Som...

It is a commonly held intuition that increasing punishment leads to less crime. Let's move our glance from the punishment for the crime itself to the punishment for the attempt to commit a crime, or to the punishment for the threat to carry it out. We'll argue that the greater the punishment for the attempt to rob, i.e. for the threat, “give me your money or else...”, the greater the number of ...

The trade-off between mercy and justice is a classic moral dilemma, particularly for organizational leaders and managers. In 3 complementary studies, we investigated how resolving the "punishment dilemma" influences interpersonal trust. Study 1 used controlled scenarios to show that uninvolved observers trusted leaders who administered large or medium punishment more than leaders who administer...

Explaining the evolution and maintenance of cooperation among unrelated individuals is one of the fundamental problems in biology and the social sciences. Recent findings suggest that altruistic punishment is an important mechanism maintaining cooperation among humans. We experimentally explore the boundaries of altruistic punishment to maintain cooperation by varying both the cost and the impa...

Stylistic composition is a creative musical activity, in which students as well as renowned composers write according to the style of another composer or period. We describe and evaluate two computational models of stylistic composition, called Racchman-Oct2010 and Racchmaninof-Oct2010. The former is a constrained Markov model and the latter embeds this model in an analogy-based design system. ...