The reactive diffracting trees are known efficient distributed data structures for supporting synchronization. They not only distribute a set of processes to smaller groups accessing different parts of the memory in a global coordinated manner, but also adjust their size in order to attain efficient performance across different levels of contention. However, the existing reactive adjustment pol...

Humans flexibly weight incoming evidence when updating beliefs and adjusting behavior. In the current issue of Neuron, McGuire et al. (2014) show how distinct neuronal correlates of main factors underlying this weighting converge on a common mechanism driving belief updates.

BACKGROUND Recreational drug use is associated with high-risk sexual behavior and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). We assessed the prevalence of drug use during sex and the associations between such use and STI (chlamydia, gonorrhea, or syphilis). METHODS During 3 periods in 2008 and 2009, attendees of an STI clinic in Amsterdam were interviewed about sexual behavior and drug use durin...

We study the impact of trade exposure on job biographies 2.4 million manufacturing workers in Germany. Rising export opportunities lead to two equally important sources earnings gains: and employer switches within same industry. Highly skilled benefit most. Import shocks mostly hurt low-skilled workers, especially when they possess lots industry-specific human capital. They also destroy workers...

From 3 February to 8 February 2008, the Dagstuhl Seminar 08061 Types, Logics and Semantics for State was held in the International Conference and Research Center (IBFI), Schloss Dagstuhl. During the seminar, several participants presented their current research, and ongoing work and open problems were discussed. Abstracts of the presentations given during the seminar as well as abstracts of sem...

An object retrieval protocol that enforces mutually exclusive access to a shared object is an important primitive employed by many distributed applications including distributed directories, distributed resource sharing systems and ordered multicast protocols, to name a few. Most existing implementations of this object retrieval primitive use a tree as the underlying communication structure due...

We present a variant of the Q-learning algorithm with automatic control of the exploration rate by a competition scheme. The theoretical approach is accompanied by systematic simulations of a chaos control task. Finally, we give interpretations of the algorithm in the context of computational ecology and neural networks.