The use of real decision-making incentives remains under debate after decades of economic experiments. In time preferences experiments involving future payments, real incentives are particularly problematic due to between-options differences in transaction costs, among other issues. What if hypothetical payments provide accurate data which, moreover, avoid transaction cost problems? In this paper, we test whether the use of hypothetical or one-out-of-ten-participants probabilistic—versus real—payments affects the elicitation of short-term and long-term discounting in a standard multiple...

Enhancing energy storing capability with the aid of unique nanostructured morphologies is beneficial for the development of the energy-storing capability of supercapacitors. However, the developing earth-abundant and low-cost transition metal selenides (TMSs) with enhanced charge transfer capabilities and good stability is still a challenge. Herein, state-of-the-art iron selenide with a nanoflake surface architecture, synthesized with the aid of a simple, industry-scalable and ionic layer controlled chemical approach, namely the successive ionic layer adsorption and reaction...

Information flow during catastrophic events is a critical aspect of disaster management. Modern communication platforms, in particular online social networks, provide an opportunity to study such flow and derive early-warning sensors, thus improving emergency preparedness and response. Performance of the social networks sensor method, based on topological and behavioral properties derived from the “friendship paradox”, is studied here for over 50 million Twitter messages posted before, during, and after Hurricane Sandy. We find that differences...

An orb-weaving spider's likelihood of survival is influenced by its ability to retain prey with minimum damage to its web and at the lowest manufacturing cost. This set of requirements has forced the spider silk to evolve towards extreme strength and ductility to a degree that is rare among materials. Previous studies reveal that the performance of the web upon impact may not be based on the mechanical properties of silk alone, aerodynamic drag could...

The steady streaming motion that appears around a pair of circular cylinders placed in a small-amplitude oscillatory flow is considered. Attention is focused on the case where the Stokes layer thickness at the surface of the cylinders is much smaller than the cylinder radius, and the streaming Reynolds number is of order unity or larger. In that case, the steady streaming velocity that persists at the edge of the Stokes layer can be imposed as...

A spider's web is a multifunctional structure that captures prey and provides an information platform that transmits vibrational information. Many physical factors interact to influence web vibration and information content, from vibration source properties and input location, to web physical properties and geometry. The aim of the study was to test whether orb web vibration contains information about the location of the source of vibration. We used finite-element analysis model webs to control and vary...

Fifth-generation (5G) systems aim to increase the capacity of existing mobile networks by a factor of 1000, supporting an extremely high user density, as well as numerous device- to-device and machine communications. Ultra Reliable Low Latency Communication (URLLC) constitutes one of the critical operating regimes in 5G, since it will enable low-cost and power-efficient anywhere and anytime signalling services Generalized low-density parity-check (GLDPC) codes, where single parity-check constraints on the code bits are replaced with...