Guatemala was among the world’s leaders in deforestation during the 1990s at a rate of 2% per annum. Much of Guatemala’s recent forest loss has occurred in the emerging agricultural frontiers of the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), the heart of the largest contiguous tropical forest in Central America—La Selva Maya. This paper presents data from 241 heads of households and 219 partners of househol...

The Classic Maya (AD 250-850) represented emotion via the human body in stylized ways that reflected their categories of 'affect', the subjective states attributed by one person to another through empathy. Such displays, although rare, served as negative contrasts to a more ordered, restrained and controlled state that operated as an ideal for elite comportment. Control equated to morally appro...

MOTIVATION Accurate prediction of protein stability is important for understanding the molecular underpinnings of diseases and for the design of new proteins. We introduce a novel approach for the prediction of changes in protein stability that arise from a single-site amino acid substitution; the approach uses available data on mutations occurring in the same position and in other positions. O...

Octopus maya is a major socio-economic resource from the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. In this study we report for the first time the chemical composition of the saliva of O. maya and its effect on natural prey, i.e. the blue crab (Callinectes sapidus), the crown conch snail (Melongena corona bispinosa), as well as conspecifics. Salivary posterior glands were collected from octopus caught by loc...

The access to water and the engineered landscapes accommodating its collection and allocation are pivotal issues for assessing sustainability. Recent mapping, sediment coring, and formal excavation at Tikal, Guatemala, have markedly expanded our understanding of ancient Maya water and land use. Among the landscape and engineering feats identified are the largest ancient dam identified in the Ma...

The nonpropositional pictorial reasoning of eternal victory is exemplified by the nonnarrative, figural concentricity of a clothed, standing ruler and an unclothed, aerially-suspended captive, on two Classic Maya reliefs at Tikal. This concentricity performs a fractal iteration–or, mise-en-abyme–of corporate dynastic eternality–a Maya-specific, transformational ’fold-ing’ of mortal, historical ...

CD++ is a modeling and simulation tool that was created to study complex systems by using a discreteevent cell-based approach. It was successfully employed to define a variety of models for complex applications using a cell-based approach. In order to improve model validation and analysis, we introduced a 3D visualization engine, which is based on the Maya 3D visualization tool and its scriptin...

As text-messaging chatbots become increasingly “human”, it will be important to understand the personal interactions that users are seeking with a chatbot. What chatbot personalities are most compelling to young, urban users in India? To explore this question, we first conducted exploratory Wizard-of-Oz (WoZ) studies with 14 users that simulated interactions with a hypothetical chatbot. We eval...

Maya hieroglyphic analysis requires epigraphers to spend a significant amount of time browsing existing catalogs to identify individual glyphs. Automatic Maya glyph analysis provides an efficient way to assist scholars’ daily work. We introduce the Histogram of Orientation Shape Context (HOOSC) shape descriptor to the Digital Humanities community. We discuss key issues for practitioners and stu...

We examined changes in the histology, physiology and enzymatic activity of the digestive gland — as well as changes in morphology and feeding behavior — of Octopus maya during rearing, to define the phases characterizing post-hatching development. Morphometric changes showed that juvenile O. maya exhibited a non-growth phase during the first 10 d post-hatching (DPH). Histological analysis revea...