, we developed monotypic tissue cultures infected by many different stable TSE strains and these agents all rapidly replicate, in contrast to their long suppression and latency in animals. We are not partisans of prions, a protein infectious agent without nucleic acid, because the reproducible evidence strongly implicates a virus with strain-determining nucleic acid. Most notably, we showed brain particles without detectable prion protein are highly infectious. Moreover, infectivity is destroyed by nuclease treatments that have no effect on prion protein. Thus TSE agents, as viruses, require genetic material to produce infection. We think that environmental nucleic acid sequences from the microbiome, such as the circular SPHINXL. MANUELIDISDNAs uncovered in our laboratory, may ultimately define the virulence of different TSE strains. They may also have a role in other neurodegenerative diseases and in neoplastic transformation. Thus one returns to the paradigm of retroviruses that can become pathogenic, or quiescently exist as avirulent symbiotic elements. A vast new territory to explore.What advice would you have to junior people entering the field?What is the question you most want to answer? Go there. Look in the corners that Isorhamnetin chemical information others are ignoring. Do theexperiments yourself, and doubt your own results until they are unassailable. That builds true confidence. Persist, but know when to try another route. Use your best talents. If your results take you to something you didn’t expect, follow it. Enjoy the challenges and don’t be afraid to change: Truth is a restlessly moving object of desire. If you are just starting out, find a person to work with who has time for you and your continuing education, who is authentic intellectually and scrupulously honest. Take time off to watch the tide coming in and going out and coming in again. Or listen to Bach and Bessie Smith. And, as Harry Greene used to say: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
Cooperation and assortativity with dynamic partner updatingJing Wanga,1, Siddharth Surib,1, and Duncan J. Wattsb,aDepartment of Information, Operations and Management Sciences, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, NY 10012; and bMicrosoft Research New York City, New York, NYEdited by Matthew O. Jackson, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and accepted by the Editorial Board July 10, 2012 (received for review December 19, 2011)The natural tendency for humans to make and break relationships is thought to facilitate the emergence of cooperation. In particular, allowing conditional cooperators to choose with whom they interact is believed to reinforce the rewards accruing to mutual cooperation while simultaneously excluding defectors. Here we report on a series of human subjects experiments in which groups of 24 participants played an iterated prisoner’s dilemma game where, critically, they were also allowed to propose and delete links to players of their own choosing at some variable rate. Over a wide variety of parameter settings and initial conditions, we found that dynamic partner updating significantly increased the level of cooperation, the average payoffs to players, and the assortativity between cooperators. Even relatively slow update rates were sufficient to produce large effects, while subsequent increases to the update rate had NS-018 site progressively smaller, but still positive, effects. For standard prisoner’s dilemma payoffs, we also found that assortativity resulted predomin., we developed monotypic tissue cultures infected by many different stable TSE strains and these agents all rapidly replicate, in contrast to their long suppression and latency in animals. We are not partisans of prions, a protein infectious agent without nucleic acid, because the reproducible evidence strongly implicates a virus with strain-determining nucleic acid. Most notably, we showed brain particles without detectable prion protein are highly infectious. Moreover, infectivity is destroyed by nuclease treatments that have no effect on prion protein. Thus TSE agents, as viruses, require genetic material to produce infection. We think that environmental nucleic acid sequences from the microbiome, such as the circular SPHINXL. MANUELIDISDNAs uncovered in our laboratory, may ultimately define the virulence of different TSE strains. They may also have a role in other neurodegenerative diseases and in neoplastic transformation. Thus one returns to the paradigm of retroviruses that can become pathogenic, or quiescently exist as avirulent symbiotic elements. A vast new territory to explore.What advice would you have to junior people entering the field?What is the question you most want to answer? Go there. Look in the corners that others are ignoring. Do theexperiments yourself, and doubt your own results until they are unassailable. That builds true confidence. Persist, but know when to try another route. Use your best talents. If your results take you to something you didn’t expect, follow it. Enjoy the challenges and don’t be afraid to change: Truth is a restlessly moving object of desire. If you are just starting out, find a person to work with who has time for you and your continuing education, who is authentic intellectually and scrupulously honest. Take time off to watch the tide coming in and going out and coming in again. Or listen to Bach and Bessie Smith. And, as Harry Greene used to say: “Don’t let the bastards get you down.”
Cooperation and assortativity with dynamic partner updatingJing Wanga,1, Siddharth Surib,1, and Duncan J. Wattsb,aDepartment of Information, Operations and Management Sciences, Leonard N. Stern School of Business, New York University, New York, NY 10012; and bMicrosoft Research New York City, New York, NYEdited by Matthew O. Jackson, Stanford University, Stanford, CA, and accepted by the Editorial Board July 10, 2012 (received for review December 19, 2011)The natural tendency for humans to make and break relationships is thought to facilitate the emergence of cooperation. In particular, allowing conditional cooperators to choose with whom they interact is believed to reinforce the rewards accruing to mutual cooperation while simultaneously excluding defectors. Here we report on a series of human subjects experiments in which groups of 24 participants played an iterated prisoner’s dilemma game where, critically, they were also allowed to propose and delete links to players of their own choosing at some variable rate. Over a wide variety of parameter settings and initial conditions, we found that dynamic partner updating significantly increased the level of cooperation, the average payoffs to players, and the assortativity between cooperators. Even relatively slow update rates were sufficient to produce large effects, while subsequent increases to the update rate had progressively smaller, but still positive, effects. For standard prisoner’s dilemma payoffs, we also found that assortativity resulted predomin.