Like all plants, trees constantly monitor endogenous and environmental cues, and use this information to make adjustments in resource allocation, both to maximize resource acquisition and to minimize exposure to deleterious phenomena. To accomplish this, trees possess mechanisms that integrate and interpret the information provided by internal and environmental signals. Ultimately, these phenom...

Stakes affect aggregate performance in a wide variety of settings. At the individual level, we define the critical ability as an agent’s ability to adapt performance to the importance of the situation. We identify individual critical abilities of professional tennis players, relying on point-level data from twelve years of the US Open tournament. We establish persistent heterogeneity in critica...

After 18 years as a senior clinical psychiatrist at a New England inner-city mental health clinic, Dr Lawrence Climo was understandably surprised and saddened when he was given 2 weeks’ notice that his services were no longer needed. Financial constraints meant the clinic was replacing him with a nurse. Although his wife told him it was an opportunity, he remembers thinking that health care ref...

Fairytale Child (Pohádkové dítě) is a simple chatbot trying to simulate a curious child. It asks the user to tell a fairy tale, often interrupting to ask for details and clarifications. However, it remembers what it was told and tries to show it if possible. The chatbot can communicate in Czech and in English. It analyzes the morphology of each sentence produced by the user with natural languag...