Research on the perception of faces has focused on the size, shape, and configuration of inherited features or the biological phenotype, and largely ignored the effects of adornment, or the extended phenotype. Research on the evolution of signaling has shown that animals frequently alter visual features, including color cues, to attract, intimidate or protect themselves from conspecifics. Humans engage in conscious manipulation of visual signals using cultural tools in real time rather than genetic changes over evolutionary time. Here, we investigate one tool, the use of color cosmetics. In two studies, we asked viewers to rate the same female faces with or without color cosmetics, and we varied the style of makeup from minimal (natural), to moderate (professional), to dramatic (glamorous). Each look provided increasing luminance contrast between the facial features and surrounding skin. Faces were shown for 250 ms or for unlimited inspection time, and subjects rated them for attractiveness, competence, likeability and trustworthiness. At 250 ms, cosmetics had significant positive effects on all outcomes. Length of inspection time did not change the effect for competence or attractiveness. However, with longer inspection time, the effect of cosmetics on likability and trust varied by specific makeup looks, indicating that cosmetics could impact automatic and deliberative judgments differently. The results suggest that cosmetics can create supernormal facial stimuli, and that one way they may do so is by exaggerating cues to sexual dimorphism. Our results provide evidence that judgments of facial trustworthiness and attractiveness are at least partially separable, that beauty has a significant positive effect on judgment of competence, a universal dimension of social cognition, but has a more nuanced effect on the other universal dimension of social warmth, and that the extended phenotype significantly influences perception of biologically important signals at first glance and at longer inspection.

The TIPSTER Text Summarization Evaluation (SUMMAC) has established definitively that automatic text summarization is very effective in relevance assessment tasks. Summaries as short as 17% of full text length sped up decisionmaking by almost a factor of 2 with no statistically significant degradation in Fscore accuracy. SUMMAC has also introduced a new intrinsic method for automated evaluation of informative summaries.

The TIPSTER Text Summarization Evaluation (SUMMAC) has developed several new extrinsic and intrinsic methods for evaluating summaries. It has established definitively that automatic text summarization is very effective in relevance assessment tasks on news articles. Summaries as short as 17% of full text length sped up decision-making by almost a factor of 2 with no statistically significant degradation in accuracy. Analysis of feedback forms filled in after each decision indicated that the intelligibility of present-day machine-generated summaries is high. Systems that performed most accurately in the production of indicative and informative topic-related summaries used term frequency and co-occurrence statistics, and vocabulary overlap comparisons between text passages. However, in the absence of a topic, these statistical methods do not appear to provide any additional leverage: in the case of generic summaries, the systems were indistinguishable in accuracy. The paper discusses some of the tradeoffs and challenges faced by the evaluation, and also lists some of the lessons learned, impacts, and possible future directions. The evaluation methods used in the SUMMAC evaluation are of interest to both summarization evaluation as well as evaluation of other 'output-related' NLP technologies, where there may be many potentially acceptable outputs, with no automatic way to compare them.

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The Northern and Western dialects of the Mon-Khmer language Kammu use fundamental frequency to distinguish words, while the Eastern dialect relies on the contrastive voicing of initial consonants to distinguish words which display an F0 contrast in the other dialects. The production and perception of tones in the three dialects is investigated, using recordings and perception tests. As expected, Northern and Western Kammu speakers do use F0 to distinguish words, as seen both in their production and in perception tests, which show that they could distinguish small F0 differences. In contrast, Eastern Kammu speakers neither produce nor perceive F0 differences at the lexical level. Furthermore, the voiceless and voiced stops in Eastern Kammu cause smaller F0 perturbations in the following vowel than might be expected for a language undergoing tonogenesis. The significance of these results for tonogenesis is discussed, as well as their relevance for the notion of ' tone language '. 'pack' 'lizard' 'to clear' 'tooth' 'flower'

The authors have performed the synthesis and grain growth of pure calcium copper titanate (CaCu3Ti4O12 or CCTO) compound and its derivatives by substituting silicon CaCu3SixTi4−xO12 (CCSTO) to determine the effect on dielectric properties and resistivity. The authors observed significant increase in the resistivity even with small concentration of silicon. Concentration above 5% did not produce any significant advantages; they also observed a similar increase in resistivity when CCSTO is doped with nickel. In a separate experiment, the authors soaked the CCSTO before grain growth in an organic melt. Soaking also increased the resistivity by several orders of magnitude. The authors observed almost three orders of magnitude higher resistivity in CCSTO compared with CCTO material processed under identical conditions.

We have developed methods for segmentation and tracking of cells in time-lapse phase-contrast microscopy images. Our multi-object Bayesian algorithm detects and tracks large numbers of cells in presence of clutter and identifies cell division. To solve the data association problem, the assignment of current measurements to cell tracks, we tested various cost functions with both an optimal and a fast, suboptimal assignment algorithm. We also propose metrics to quantify cell migration properties, such as motility and directional persistence, and compared our findings of cell migration with the standard random walk model. We measured how cell populations respond to the physical stimuli presented in the environment, for example, the stiffness property of the substrate. Our analysis of hundreds of spatio-temporal cell trajectories revealed significant differences in the behavioral response of fibroblast cells to changes in hydrogel conditions.