Acoustic communication is highly influential in the expression of social behavior by anuran amphibians, transmitting information about the individual's physical condition and motivation. We studied the phonotactic (approach movements) responses of wild and captive male golden mantella frogs to conspecific wild and captive playback calls to determine the impact of captivity on social behaviour m...

The shared decline in cognitive abilities, sensory functions (e.g., vision and hearing), and physical health with increasing age is well documented with some research attributing this shared age-related decline to a single common cause (e.g., aging brain). We evaluate the extent to which the common cause hypothesis predicts associations between vision and physical health with social cognition a...

The extent to which a place feels like a home is related in part to the physical condition of the property and its surrounding environment. Tenants and local authorities have been provided with extensive legal powers to force landlords to remedy defects since the late 19th century. Yet housing conditions within rented property remain poor. Problems relating to the boundaries of legal remedies w...

The original Jaynes-Cummings model is described by a Hamiltonian which is exactly solvable. Here we extend this model by several types of interactions leading to a nonhermitian operator which doesn’t satisfy the physical condition of space-time reflection symmetry (PT symmetry). However the new Hamiltonians are either exactly solvable admitting an entirely real spectrum or quasi exactly solvabl...

BACKGROUND Social and lifestyle activities may serve as potential moderators of the association between negative life events (NLEs) and depressive symptoms among older adults. In this study, we examined whether social and lifestyle activities moderate the association between NLEs and depressive symptoms among older adults, and which activities are significant moderators. METHODS The data came...

A method is proposed to transform the red and near infrared data into a soil index in order to map soil features. The index maximises soil variation and helps improve soil feature mapping while it suppresses spectral response from vegetation cover. Geo-statistical analysis of fi eld data, on the other hand, helps understand spatial dependency pattern and map it, which may not be directly visibl...

The three main Olympic horse riding disciplines are dressage, jumping, and three-day eventing (including dressage, cross country and jumping). In the jumping discipline (obstacle race), the 'team' (horse rider) is judged under the different conditions that might take place in a varied run. The horse is expected to show power and ability; the rider must show riding skill and good physical condit...

The recent controversy surrounding the choice, by a deaf lesbian couple, to have children who were themselves deaf, has focused attention on the ethics of choosing (apparent) disabilities for children. Deaf activists argue that deafness is not a disability, but instead the constitutive condition of access to a rich culture. Being deaf carries disadvantages with it, but these are a product of di...

An issue that needs to be addressed is how to harvest and process peppers in order to obtain the highest capsaicin extraction for use in non-food applications. This study was undertaken to investigate this issue using jalapeño peppers as the test material. The objective of this study was to investigate the effects of cultivar, fruit color, harvest sequence, and drying parameters (pod physical c...

More than half of today's world population lives in cities and that fraction is steadily growing. Models that accurately capture all segments of the population are necessary in order to design effective policies and new technologies to ensure efficient and stable operations of cities. The current sociology literature has a rich foundation in characterizing the demographics of static population ...