User-generated reviews are a key driving force behind some of the leading websites, such as Amazon, TripAdvisor, and Yelp. Yet, the proliferation of user reviews in such sites also poses an information overload challenge: many items, especially popular ones, have a large number of reviews, which cannot all be read by the user. In this work, we propose to extract short practical tips from user r...

Mary recently moved to Washington, D.C. and is looking to rent an apartment near where she is to attend college. As a first step, she consults a local classifieds web application to explore housing listings within her budget. Upon selecting the first listing in her search results she reads the description. What luck! Not only is the posted apartment near her college, but it is also close to a n...

Tamborine Mountain is a 25 square kilometre plateau located within the urban-rural fringe of the Gold Coast, Queensland, Australia. Renowned for its superb climate, spectacular views, lush farmland and subtropical rainforest, Tamborine Mountain offers a wide variety of nature-based tourism activities such as bushwalking, rainforest appreciation and wine tasting. This phenomenon requires the har...

for an Invited Paper for the MAR11 Meeting of The American Physical Society Directed self-assembly of small colloidal clusters1 VINOTHAN MANOHARAN, Harvard University We study the formation and structure of equilibrium colloidal clusters at small particle number (N ∼ 10) using optical microscopy. Our experimental system consists of isolated groups of colloidal microspheres with short-ranged att...

This study evaluates the effectiveness of decentralizing tourists by promoting alternative local-guided tours. Results from a discrete choice experiment among young travellers indicate that while culinary tours are preferred over central attractions, overall, visitors demonstrated strong tendency to visit main attractions. Furthermore, labelled as sustainable were perceived less attractive. The...

We explore the depletion attractions that arise between hard colloidal spheres immersed in a nonadsorbing polymer solution of DNA. We spatially confine two 1.25 μm silica spheres in a scanning optical tweezer and quantitatively examine their interaction potential in double-stranded DNA solutions of different concentrations. The potentials obtained display variations in depth and range that are ...

Highly wedge-shaped integral membrane proteins, or membrane-adsorbed proteins can induce long-ranged deformations. The strain in the surrounding bilayer creates relatively long-ranged forces that contribute to interactions with nearby proteins. In contrast, to direct short-ranged interactions such as van der Waal's, hydrophobic, or electrostatic interactions, both local membrane Gaussian curvat...