MedWorm provides a medical RSS filtering service. Over 6000 RSS medical sources are combined and output via different filters. This feed contains the latest medical blog items that have been tagged with 'game theory'. Sat, 03 Sep 2011 02:20:37 +0100 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=3294755&cid=t_119583_133_f&fid=35129&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwhitterer-autism.blogspot.com%2F2010%2F02%2Fcheck-mate-fire-breathing-dragons.html I lean over him to help with the tricky zipper on his back pack, “so are you ready to play Draughts now that you’ve finished your homework and packed lunch?”“Ugh!”“What’s up?” He shoves past me to dive to the sink, faucet on full flow, “jus a second coz I need water before I die from the smell.” He glugs several gallons before he’s ready to come up for air.“What smell?” I ask as he wipes his mouth on his sleeve.“Ugh! I can’t breathe!”“Are you alright!”“I fink I’m gonna faint.”“Faint? Do you know what that word means?”“Yes, it’s like dying but only temporary.”“!”“Aghhh!”“Give me a minute, I need to close the seal on the snack bag before we start, don’t want it to go soft.”“It is being your snack?”“Yes.”“What is it b... Whitterer on Autism blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=3294755 Mon, 22 Feb 2010 07:46:00 +0100 3294755 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2804178&cid=t_119583_136_f&fid=36070&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnetwork.nature.com%2Fpeople%2Fbasanta%2Fblog%2F2009%2F09%2F17%2Fthe-role-of-positive-interactions-in-enabling-cooperation Evolution of coperation is one of my main interests and I think it is a topic that could be very relevant to cancer researchers as I discussed a while ago. Rand DG, Dreber A, Ellingsen T, Fudenberg D, & Nowak MA (2009). Positive interactions promote public cooperation. Science (New York, N.Y.), 325 (5945), 1272-5 PMID: 19729661 Cooperation in nature occurs mostly between individuals that are closely related from a genetic point of view. In most other instances cooperation happens when all the interacting individuals benefit to some extent from their cooperation. Still, in some situations altruism happens if the benefactor expects to get rewarded at some point in the future, potentially by another individual. This is problematic as it was thought that a mechanism of punishment would be... Cancerevo: Evolution and cancer blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2804178 Thu, 17 Sep 2009 15:49:33 +0100 2804178 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2349534&cid=t_119583_136_f&fid=36070&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnetwork.nature.com%2Fpeople%2Fbasanta%2Fblog%2F2009%2F04%2F14%2Fgame-theory-and-iran Although I use this blog mostly to discuss cancer and evolution (thus the name of the blog) and the role of mathematical tools to study those, some times other topics manage to squeeze in. More often than not , for a reason. This time is not coffee but game theory. The tool that some researchers use to study evolution (and more recently cancer!) started as a mathematical tool to study the politics of the cold war. Von Neumann himself was, for a while, an employee of the DoD affiliated RAND corporation. Back to those roots, NYU’s Bruce Bueno de Mesquita delivered this TED talk in which he explains GT and how it could be used to understand the future of Iran’s nuclear policy. For those of you who don’t know TED, these are a series of conferences on the topics of Technology,... Cancerevo: Evolution and cancer blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2349534 Tue, 14 Apr 2009 17:19:54 +0100 2349534 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2323410&cid=t_119583_131_f&fid=34994&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gnxp.com%2Fblog%2F2009%2F04%2Ffrequency-dependence-cooperation.php Snowdrift game dynamics and facultative cheating in yeast:The origin of cooperation is a central challenge to our understanding of evolution...The fact that microbial interactions can be manipulated in ways that animal interactions cannot has led to a growing interest in microbial models of cooperation...and competition...For the budding yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae to grow on sucrose, the disaccharide must first be hydrolysed by the enzyme invertase...This hydrolysis reaction is performed outside the cytoplasm in the periplasmic space between the plasma membrane and the cell wall. Here we demonstrate that the vast majority (99 per cent) of the monosaccharides created by sucrose hydrolysis diffuse away before they can be imported into the cell, serving to make invertase production and se... Gene Expression blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2323410 Wed, 08 Apr 2009 08:56:00 +0100 2323410 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=2210582&cid=t_119583_136_f&fid=36070&url=http%3A%2F%2Fnetwork.nature.com%2Fpeople%2Fbasanta%2Fblog%2F2009%2F02%2F23%2Fusing-game-theory-to-explain-invasive-phenotypes I do not normally talk about reports on my work on other journals. The reason I am making an exception today is that finally, there’s a report on work I am directly involved in a journal. Last week, the Journal of the National Cancer Institute published this article by Mike Martin in which (despite the slightly misleading title implying that we study invasive metablism) together with former colleagues in Dresden we use game theory to study the emergence of invasive types. The results have been reported in a couple of papers here and here. The idea is that game theory, a mathematical tool whose first use was to study sociological problems, can be used to study the evolutionary dynamics of populations made of individuals with different behaviours (phenotypes biologically or strategies ... Cancerevo: Evolution and cancer blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=2210582 Mon, 23 Feb 2009 23:45:29 +0100 2210582 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1723772&cid=t_119583_109_f&fid=36089&url=http%3A%2F%2Fthesituationist.wordpress.com%2F2008%2F08%2F22%2Fthe-situation-of-neuroeconomics-and-situationist-economics%2F In July, The Economist had a nice article on the burgeoning field of neuroeconomics, titled “Do Economists Need Brains.” We’ve excerpted a few chunks from that article below. * * * In the late 1990s a generation of academic economists had their eyes opened by Mr LeDoux’s and other accounts of how studies of the brain using recently developed techniques such as magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) showed that different bits of the old grey matter are associated with different sorts of emotional and decision-making activity. The amygdalas are an example. Neuroscientists have shown that these almond-shaped clusters of neurons deep inside the medial temporal lobes play a key role in the formation of emotional responses such as fear. These new neuroeconomists saw that it might ... The Situationist blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1723772 Fri, 22 Aug 2008 04:48:33 +0100 1723772 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1508241&cid=t_119583_117_f&fid=34612&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.thedoctorweighsin.com%2Fjournal%2F2008%2F6%2F11%2Flife-is-not-fair.html This study provided the anatomical locations where decision-making takes place. But what about function? What makes these neurological circuits come to life and contribute to decision-making? Knowing how things happen is in a way even more important than knowing where they happen. We know, for instance, that neurons communicate with each other through chemicals called neurotransmitters. So it would be nice to identify the neurotransmitters involved in decision-making. Once we understand how things work, or which chemicals are involved, it allows us to intervene, to modulate and modify the process. This remained unknown until a publication in Science magazine this month shed light on the mystery. In a paper titled “Serotonin Modulates Behavioral Reactions to Unfairness” scientis... The Doctor Weighs In blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1508241 Wed, 11 Jun 2008 03:56:49 +0100 1508241 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=1485054&cid=t_119583_109_f&fid=36089&url=http%3A%2F%2Fthesituationist.wordpress.com%2F2008%2F06%2F01%2Fteam-interested-decision-making%2F From Science Daily, here’s a brief research summary regarding how, even in individualistic cultures, team goals often trump individual goals. * * * People act in their own best interests, according to traditional views of how and why we make the decisions that we do. However, psychologists at the Universities of Leicester and Exeter have recently found evidence that this assumption is not necessarily true. In fact the research, funded by the Economic and Social Research Council, shows that most of us will act in the best interest of our team — often at our own expense. Psychologists carried out the first systematic tests of team reasoning theories by assessing two well known views of how people behave. Orthodox or classical game predicts that people will act for selfish reasons... The Situationist blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=1485054 Mon, 02 Jun 2008 02:12:35 +0100 1485054 http://www.medworm.com/index.php?rid=693221&cid=t_119583_122_f&fid=34755&url=http%3A%2F%2Fneuropsychological.blogspot.com%2F2007%2F06%2Fgame-theory.html From the Scientific American website:May 20, 2007 The Traveler's Dilemma When playing this simple game, people consistently reject the rational choice. In fact, by acting illogically, they end up reaping a larger reward--an outcome that demands a new kind of for­mal reasoning By Kaushik Basu Lucy and Pete, returning from a remote Pacific island, find that the airline has damaged the identical antiques that each had purchased. An airline manager says that he is happy to compensate them but is handicapped by being clueless about the value of these strange objects. Simply asking the travelers for the price is hopeless, he figures, for they will inflate it. Instead he devises a more complicated scheme. He asks each of them to write down the price of the antique as any dollar integer betw... BrainBlog blogs http://www.medworm.com/rss/comments.php?id=693221 Sun, 24 Jun 2007 18:46:00 +0100 693221