The diverse roles of plant proteases in defence responses that are triggered by pathogens or pests are becoming clearer. Some proteases, such as papain in latex, execute the attack on the invading organism. Other proteases seem to be part of a signalling cascade, as indicated by protease inhibitor studies. Such a role has also been suggested for the recently discovered metacaspases and CDR1. So...

Human speech conveys emotions not only by words, but also by nonverbal acoustic cues. The hypothesis was tested that anger and joy can be conveyed in speech by displaying effort to sound larger or smaller, just as expressing dominance and submission in animal communication. Human listeners perceived vowels synthesized with a statically lengthened vocal tract and lowered pitch as from a large pe...

OBJECTIVE To determine the effects of an adversary's behavior on the defender's accurate and timely detection of network threats. BACKGROUND Cyber attacks cause major work disruption. It is important to understand how a defender's behavior (experience and tolerance to threats), as well as adversarial behavior (attack strategy), might impact the detection of threats. In this article, we use co...

The relation between energy consumption and its environmental impact is weak or even almost inexistent in the Brazilian scenario due to sociocultural reasons. This work takes advantage of an experimental smart grid deployment scenario to propose the concept of Social Eco-feedback Technology. It aims at establishing this relation by promoting a new social affordance (behavior pattern), favoring ...

Risk behavior contributes to substantial morbidity and mortality during adolescence. This study examined neurocognitive predictors of proposed subtypes of adolescent risk behavior: planned (premeditated) versus unplanned (spontaneous). Adolescents (N 1⁄4 69, 49% male, M 1⁄4 15.1 [1.0] years) completed neurocognitive tasks (Iowa Gambling Task [IGT], and Game of Dice Task [GDT]) and a selfreport ...

This study presents synthetic embodied conversational agents, and how they can be used to explore the persuasive potential of real embodied conversational agents. Utilizing a novel Wizard-of-Oz style approach and a direct measure of behavior change we explore whether ‘ideal’ embodied conversational agents have a similar persuasive impact as real people, and demonstrate the importance of visuall...