Culture

Optimization algorithms, which try to find the minimum values of mathematical functions, are everywhere in engineering. Among other things, they're used to evaluate design tradeoffs, to assess control systems, and to find patterns in data.

One way to solve a difficult optimization problem is to first reduce it to a related but much simpler problem, then gradually add complexity back in, solving each new problem in turn and using its solution as a guide to solving the next one. This approach seems to work well in practice, but it's never been characterized theoretically.

Though American president Barack Obama talked about how he made fossil fuels cheaper and Wall Street executives richer in his State of the Union address, the lingering recession pushed an additional three million children into poverty, the highest rate in 50 years.

Human papillomavirus is a virus that is responsible for almost all cases of cervical cancer but a new study by University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston researchers indicates that only about half of the girls receive the vaccine at the recommended age to best protect themselves.

Every January, hundreds of wealthy elites gather for an annual meeting in the exclusive Swiss ski resort of Davos to "improve the state of the world." Yet, the World Economic Forum's influence on society and consumption is surprisingly little understood. A new paper tries to sort out what they really do.

To find out, the authors undertook the first ethnographic analysis of the World Economic Forum. For eight years, they conducted in-depth interviews with Davos delegates about their activities, their beliefs, and their self-understanding.

Racial disparities in tip size can't be explained by discriminatory service. Shutterstock

In response to deeply unpopular drone strikes, a public rally in Karachi demands the blocking of NATO supplies from Pakistan to neighbouring Afghanistan. The banner reads, in Urdu 'Rulers! Come out of the US war'. EPA/Rehan Khan

A little bit of sensitivity training can help people form better first impressions of those with facial paralysis, reducing prejudices against people with a visible but often unrecognizable disability, new research from Oregon State University indicates.

There is a natural tendency to base first impressions on a person's face, but those impressions can be inaccurate and often negative when the person has facial paralysis, said Kathleen Bogart, an assistant professor of psychology in the College of Liberal Arts at Oregon State University.

In a survey of 348 workers at a large psychiatric hospital, 99% of the staff reported verbal conflict with patients, and 70% reported being assaulted during the previous 12 months. Verbal conflict with other staff was also high, at 92%.

The findings, which are published in the Journal of Advanced Nursing, indicate that efforts are needed to identify the factors that contribute to conflict in psychiatric hospitals and to determine how staff should respond to conflicts and assaults.

Current government-mandated nutrition labeling is ineffective in improving nutrition, but there is a better system available, according to a study by McGill University researchers published in the December issue of the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

Commonly accepted domestication hypotheses suggest: "Dogs have become tolerant and attentive as a result of humans actively selecting for these skills during the domestication process in order to make dogs cooperative partners."

p>Poorer parents are just as involved in education, leisure, and sports activities with their children as better-off parents, a new study has found.

Dr Esther Dermott and Marco Pomati analysed survey data on 1,665 UK households and found that poorer parents were as likely to have helped with homework, attended parents' evenings, and played sports or games with their children in the previous week.

Dr Dermott, of the University of Bristol, and Mr Pomati, Cardiff University, say they found no evidence of a group of poor parents who failed their children.

One in eight children born in 2002 or 2003 and living in remote Fitzroy Valley communities in Western Australia have Fetal Alcohol Syndrome, finds the The Lililwan study published today in the Journal of Paediatrics and Child Health.

People are more successful in taking up healthy habits if their partner makes positive changes too, according to research* published in JAMA Internal Medicine today (Monday).

Scientists at UCL funded by Cancer Research UK, the British Heart Foundation, and the National Institute on Aging looked at how likely people were to quit smoking, start being active, or lose weight in relation to what their partner did.**

They found that people were more successful in swapping bad habits for good ones if their partner made a change as well.

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Evidence from some wrongful-conviction cases suggests that suspects can be questioned in ways that lead them to falsely believe in and confess to committing crimes they didn't actually commit. New research provides lab-based evidence for this phenomenon, showing that innocent adult participants can be convinced, over the course of a few hours, that they had perpetrated crimes as serious as assault with a weapon in their teenage years.