Digital media have today an enormous diffusion, and their influence on the behavior of a vast part of the human population can hardly be underestimated. In this review I propose that cultural evolution theory, including both a sophisticated view of human behavior and a methodological attitude to modeling and quantitative analysis, provides a useful framework to study the effects and the develop...

Information spread in social media depends on a number of factors, including how the site displays information, how users navigate it to find items of interest, users’ tastes, and the ‘virality’ of information, i.e., its propensity to be adopted, or retweeted, upon exposure. Probabilistic models can learn users’ tastes from the history of their item adoptions and recommend new items to users. H...

We investigate the market for news under two assumptions: that readers hold beliefs that they like to see confirmed, and that newspapers can slant stories toward these beliefs. We show that, on the topics where readers share common beliefs, one should not expect accuracy even from competitive media: competition results in lower prices, but common slanting toward reader biases. However, on topic...

In development of sustainable transportation and green city, policymakers encourage people to commute by cycling and walking instead of motor vehicles in cities. One the one hand, cycling and walking enables decrease in air pollution emissions. On the other hand, cycling and walking offer health benefits by increasing people’s physical activity. Earlier studies on investigating spatial patterns...

Uses and gratifications theory has often been used in (sport) communication studies to examine social media usage. Yet, criticisms of uses (e.g., it overstates purposefulness) competing research suggesting use is more habitual unconscious nature have overlooked. Thus, through semistructured interviews, this explored how used, identifying five themes: passively, distinctly, periodically, habitua...

Numerous researchers have highlighted the social determinants of athletes' attitude toward pain, yet little is known about the role of cognitive processes and emotions that are related to pain in sport endeavors. There is evidence, in a dot probe paradigm, that individuals with chronic pain selectively orient their attention toward pain-related stimuli, but no studies have differentiated betwee...

The history of sport referees, judges, and officials, began with the first Olympic Games in the Antiquity. The Hellanodikai, the judges of the Greeks, had many roles including; selecting the athletes, supervising their training, coordinating the drawing lots, refereeing the competitions and judging and deciding on sanctions if it was required (Bagnall, Brodersen, Champion, Erskine, & Huebner, 2...