I am most honoured by your invitation to speak at this meeting of the Shanghai Institute of Bio-historiography. As many of you know, I work at the University of San Francisco de Crico, in that remote Pacific province of the Spanish Empire, Hispano-America, and I am interested mainly in the early history of plant genetic engineering, that obscure period covering the end of the 20th century (old ...

The current internet leaders (Google, Facebook, etc.) all have OSS in their DNA. Traditional corporations still rely mostly on proprietary software for their mission-critical IT systems. But, situation is changing: as tip of the iceberg, major stock exchanges of the world have announced successful migrations to OSS. Many traditional corporations can now follow the OSS path because this market h...

Faces are an important source of social information for humans. Even developing infants are drawn to faces and face-like objects. The current experiment explores the ability of 4to 9month-olds to recognize face-like features in images of non-face objects. Using a preferential looking paradigm, we presented infants with upright and inverted images of face-like objects. We hypothesized that if in...

We propose that consumer preferences are often systematically influenced by preference fluency, i.e., the subjective feeling that forming a preference is easy or difficult. In five studies, we manipulated the fluency of preference formation by presenting descriptions in an easy or difficult to read font (Studies 1 and 2) or by asking participants to think of few vs. many reasons for their choic...

Many consumers have had the experience of entering discount membership clubs to make a few purchases, only to leave with enough pasta to outlast a nuclear winter. We suggest that the presence of membership fees can lead consumers to infer a “fees savings” link, spurring them to increase their spending independent of the actual savings afforded by such clubs. Using both field data and studies in...

Background: Despite the first documented case of food allergy to cooked food in 1921 by Prausnitz and Kustner, all commercial food antigens are prepared from raw food. Furthermore, all IgE and IgG antibodies against dietary proteins offered by many clinical laboratories are measured against raw food antigens. Methods: We developed an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay for the measurement of IgE,...

The acculturation paradigm of measuring assimilation, separation, integration and marginalization confuses dimensional and categorical conceptions of its constructs, fails to produce ipsative data from mutually exclusive scales, misoperationalizes marginalization as distress, mismeasures biculturalism using double-barreled questions instead of computing it from unicultural measures, and then te...

Food color additives are vital to how we taste and perceive food, yet they generally remain mysterious to the public. This article examines food color additives from historical and regulatory perspectives. First, it uses recent examples to illustrate the importance of colors to our enjoyment of food. It then recounts the early history of food colors and the emergence of regulation to prevent th...

Creativity – whether in humans or machines – is more than a matter of simple creation. To be “creative” implies an ability to do more than invent, but an ability to recognize and appreciate the inventions of others. After all, the ability to recognize surprising value in the efforts of others is the same ability we use to guide our own creative efforts. Solipsistic creativity is rare indeed, an...

Human reasoning is accompanied by meta-cognitive experiences, most notably the ease or difficulty of recall and thought generation and the fluency with which new information can be processed. These experiences are informative in their own right. They can serve as a basis of judgment in addition to, or at the expense of, declarative information and can qualify the conclusions drawn from recalled...