By setting up a coarse-grained model of polymer nanocomposites, we monitored the change in the elastic modulus as a function of the strain, derived from the stress-strain behavior by determining uniaxial tension and simple shear of two typical spatial distribution states (aggregation and dispersion) of nanoparticles (NPs). In both these cases, we observed that the elastic modulus decreases non-...

Coordination has always been a difficult phenomenon, with regard to linguistic analysis, manual annotation, and automatic analysis. There is a considerable body of work on detecting coordination and on improving parsing for this phenomenon. However, most approaches were restricted to certain types of coordination, such as NP coordination or symmetrical coordination. We present the first approac...

Fundamental aspects of human behavior operate outside of conscious awareness. Yet, theories of conditioned responses in humans, such as placebo and nocebo effects on pain, have a strong emphasis on conscious recognition of contextual cues that trigger the response. Here, we investigated the neural pathways involved in nonconscious activation of conditioned pain responses, using functional magne...

Common practice during local anesthetic injection is to warn the patient using words such as: "You will feel a big bee sting; this is the worst part." Our hypothesis was that using gentler words for administration of the local anesthetic improves pain perception and patient comfort. One hundred forty healthy women at term gestation requesting neuraxial analgesia were randomized to either a "pla...

OBJECTIVE The Internet has expanded the scope for creating health scares and increased the risk of nocebo responding in individuals exposed to misinformation about threats to personal health posed by aspects of modern life, such as exposure to new technologies. It was the aim of this experiment to investigate whether the delivery of positive expectations might reduce or reverse symptoms trigger...

A literal interpretation of neo-classical consumer theory suggests that the solves a very complex problem. In presence indivisible goods, problem is NP-Hard, and it appears unlikely can be optimally solved by human. Two implications this observation are (i) households may imitate each other’s choices; (ii) adopt heuristics give rise to phenomenon mental accounting.