The matching effect is the empirical finding that romantic couples have a high correlation in physical attractiveness. It remains a debate as to whether this correlation is based purely on similarity preference the matching hypothesis or marketplace forces. We present a new marketplace model for romantic relationships. Previous models granted every person access to his/her own attractiveness. I...

Few art museums, collections or temporary exhibitions in Europe (or elsewhere) provide opportunities for their visiting publics to directly or indirectly explore for themselves, aspects of the permanent collections (whether hung, on loan or in store) in any depth; temporary exhibitions and their contexts; the work of an individual artist in the context of other work and influences; the historic...

Search engines, directories and web browsers all deal with the Internet at the level of individual web-pages. We argue that this is too low a level of resolution for many, including the non-casual surfer, who has detailed knowledge of his/her topic of interest. We present the shopping-mall metaphor that is based on identifying tightly integrated communities of web pages, where pages procure inf...

Approximately 3% of Americans declare to have had a near-death experience. These experiences classically involve the feeling that one's soul has left the body, approaches a bright light and goes to another reality, where love and bliss are all encompassing. Contrary to popular belief, research suggests that there is nothing paranormal about these experiences. Instead, near-death experiences are...

This article aims to identify key elements explaining success of social casual games in the Facebook context. We argue that game success originates from the relationship between psychological needs of users and the social situation provided by the virtual environment (Facebook). In particular, we will analyze Facebook’s ‘social casual games’ using Murray’s categories. This...

Polarized topics often spark discussion and debate on social media. Recent studies have shown that polarized debates have a specific clustered structure in the endorsement network, which indicates that users direct their endorsements mostly to ideas they already agree with. Understanding these polarized discussions and exposing social media users to content that broadens their views is of param...

R often play a positive role in the decision process by reducing the difficulty associated with choosing between options. However, in certain circumstances recommendations play a less positive and more undesirable role from the perspectives of both the recommending agent or agency and the person receiving the recommendation. Across a series of four studies, we explore consumer response when rec...

It was pointed out recently [A. Kent, Phys. Rev. Lett. 78 (1997) 2874] that the consistent histories approach allows contrary inferences to be made from the same data, corresponding to commuting orthogonal projections in different consistent sets. To many, this seems undesirable in a theory of physical inferences. It also raises a specific problem for the consistent histories formalism, since t...