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Are language models culturally biased? It is important that language models conform to the cultural aspects of the communities they serve. However, we show in this paper that language models suffer from a significant bias towards Western culture when handling and generating text in Arabic, often preferring, and producing Western-fitting content as opposed to the relevant Arab content. We quantify this bias through a likelihood scoring-based metric using naturally occurring contexts that we collect from online social media. Our experiments reveal that both Arabic monolingual and multilingual models exhibit bias towards Western culture in eight different cultural aspects: person names, food, clothing, location, literature, beverage, religion, and sports. Models also tend to exhibit more bias when prompted with Arabic sentences that are more linguistically aligned with English. These findings raise concerns about the cultural relevance of current language models. Our analyses show that providing culture-indicating tokens or culturally-relevant demonstrations to the model can help in debiasing.

Taking an evolutionary approach to the question of beauty, we discuss the expression and perception of sexual beauty across the animal kingdom. Animals experience beauty in their brains, and animal brains are tuned to features of the environment most relevant to their survival. Over evolutionary time, sexually reproducing animals have exploited that tuning to maximize their attractiveness to the opposite sex, often leading to extreme courtship traits and behaviors. These are the traits of sexual beauty. Combining modern principles of neuroscience and neuroaesthetics with established principles of evolutionary biology, we aim to understand the biological basis and evolution of beauty in all animals, including ourselves.

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Goniopholididae is a group of basal neosuchian crocodyliforms closely related to Paralligatoridae and Eusuchia that lived during the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous. Goniopholidids have the long, flat snout and secondary palate of modern crocodylians, the acquisition of which is regarded as a key feature in the early evolution of crocodylian body plan and their aquatic adaptation. Here, we report a new species,Amphicotylus milesi, with the description from the best-preserved specimen to date of Goniopholididae from Wyoming, USA. Its posterior extension of the nasopharyngeal passage (pterygoid secondary palate) and the shortening and dorsal deflection of the ceratobranchial suggest that basal neosuchians could raise their gular valve to separate oral and pharyngeal cavities as in modern crocodylians. The anatomy ofAmphicotylus milesisheds light on the acquisition of this new respiratory system in the crocodyliform evolution and their early aquatic adaptation, leading to modern crocodylians.

Goniopholididae is a group of basal neosuchian crocodyliforms closely related to Paralligatoridae and Eusuchia that lived during the Jurassic and Early Cretaceous. Goniopholidids have the long, flat snout and secondary palate of modern crocodylians, of which the acquisition is regarded as a key feature in the early evolution of crocodylian body plan and their aquatic adaptation. Here, we report a new species, Amphicotylus milesi, with the description from the best-preserved specimen to date of Goniopholididae from Wyoming, USA. Its posterior extension of the nasopharyngeal passage (pterygoid secondary palate) and the shortening and dorsal deflection of the ceratobranchial suggest that basal neosuchians could raise their gular valve to separate oral and pharyngeal cavities as in modern crocodylians. The anatomy of Amphicotylus milesi sheds light on the acquisition of this new respiratory system in the crocodyliform evolution and their early aquatic adaptation, leading to modern crocodylians.

This file includes the character list and descriptions used to code the phylogenetic analyses.

Mallon, Jordan C., Ryan, Michael J., Campbell, James A. (2015): Skull ontogeny in Arrhinoceratops brachyops (Ornithischia: Ceratopsidae) and other horned dinosaurs. Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society 175 (4): 910-929, DOI: 10.1111/zoj.12294, URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/zoj.12294

Actinomadura brunnea produces 2'-N-methyl-8-methoxychlortetracycline. A derivative of this strain has been isolated that is specifically blocked in methylation of the 2'-amino position. This isolate was detected by screening approximately 30,000 colonies of a mutagenized population of Actinomadura brunnea using a direct soft agar overlay with an Escherichia coli indicator. The antibiotic produced by the blocked mutant has been identified as 8-methoxychlortetracycline (Sch 36969) based upon its biological activity, relative mobility on TLC and HPLC, and spectroscopic data.

Axiomatic design (AD) theory is a general framework for system design process based on mapping between several domains. In the AD theory, only the functional requirements (system functions) are considered in the design process, since the mapping between requirements and design parameters in AD does not include nonfunctional requirements (system attributes). This paper introduces an extended view of the system design process based on AD theory framework to incorporate nonfunctional requirements into the mapping between the problem domain and the solution domain. A systematic way of including nonfunctional requirements in the design process is presented, and an extended design matrix is introduced, which includes the mapping between a complete set of requirements (functional and nonfunctional) and corresponding design parameters (physical domain). We also present an approach to decide between solutions that satisfy nonfunctional requirements to a varying degree through the employment of the analytical hierarchy process. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Stochasticity in assembly processes is often associated with the processing time and availability of machinery, tools and manpower, however in this paper it is determined by probability of an assembly task successful completion which here is referred to as task reliability. We present a mathematical model for optimising the expected assembly cost, and consider two scenarios: the first a situation where a failure of one assembly task requires rework of that task alone; second a situation in which a failure in the midst of the process requires resumption of previously completed tasks. In the worst case scenario the assembly process must restart from the beginning. We show that the first scenario is insensitive to sequencing unless there are set-up costs. In the second scenario the process is sensitive to tasks' sequence. We present a heuristic that argues for accomplishing more uncertain tasks (with less reliability) earlier in the process to decrease the expected cost of assembly, and show that in a mutually dependent assembly process, when tasks' reliabilities are similar, the cheaper tasks should be executed earlier in the process. Refereed/Peer-reviewed

Modularity is a natural instrument and a ubiquitous practice for the engineering of human-made systems. However, modularization remains more of an art than a science; to the extent that the notion of optimal modularity is rarely used in engineering design. We prove that optimal modularity exists (at least for construction)—and is achieved through balanced modularization as structural symmetry in the distribution of the sizes of modules. We show that system construction cost is highly sensitive to both the number of modules and the modularization structure. However, this sensitivity has an inverse relationship with process capability and is minimal for highly capable construction processes with small process uncertainties. Conclusions are reached by a Bayesian estimation technique for a relatively simple construction model originally introduced by Herbert Simon for the hypothetical production of a linear structure, taking into account errors that may occur in the work associated with the production of the links between the nodes in the structure for varied numbers of modules. © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Complexity, 2015