Many superstitious practices entail the belief that good or bad luck can be "washed away." Consistent with this belief, participants who recalled (Experiment 1) or experienced (Experiment 2) an episode of bad luck were more willing to take risk after having as opposed to not having washed their hands, whereas participants who recalled or experienced an episode of good luck were less willing to ...

The role of stars and starbursts in AGN has been a recurring issue for nearly as long as AGN have been recognized as hosts of interesting phenomena. The heated “starburst versus monster” controversy of the 80’s and 90’s was gradually replaced by “starburst plus monster” studies, as observational work in the past decade has firmly established that accretion onto a super-massive black-hole and st...

objective: bad news disclosure is one of the most complex tasks of physicians. recent evidences indicate that patients' and physicians' attitude toward breaking bad news has been changed since few years ago. the evidence of breaking bad news is different across cultures. the aim of this study is to evaluate the attitude of medical staff toward breaking bad news to provide a clinical guideline i...

Have you ever searched the pages of a Where’s Waldo ® book and found it difficult to find him? Your eyes jump around page scanning for his red-and-white striped shirt, but all seem are other funny characters. Maybe keep getting distracted by big green monster that does not look anything like Waldo. After finally him, realize looked right at many times without noticing him. Do worry! In this art...

Are citizens willing to tolerate violations of democratic rules and norms by competent political leaders? I examine this question employing well-powered conjoint experiments in the United States, Kingdom, Czech Republic, Mexico, South Korea. The findings yield good as well bad news for democracy. find that undemocratic behavior candidates decreases voter support, whereas candidate competence in...

Abstract In my reply to the thoughtful comments of Timmerman and Gorman, I take up, further explore, some main questions, including: Can a horribly immoral person (a moral monster) lead meaningful life? Similarly, can significantly deluded What role do judgments meaningfulness play in our normative framework? How we understand debate between those who would embrace possibility immortality rejec...

We consider a male and a female in a courtship encounter over continuous time. Both parties pay participation costs per unit time. The game ends when either one or other of the parties quits or the female accepts the male as a mate. We assume that there is a binary variable which determines whether the male is a "good" or "bad" type from the female's point of view, according to either his condi...

A strong hard X–ray luminosity from a blazar flags the presence of a very powerful jet. If the jet power is in turn related to the mass accretion rate, the most luminous hard X–ray blazars should pinpoint the largest accretion rates, and therefore the largest black hole masses. These ideas are confirmed by the Swift satellite observations of the blazar S5 0014+813, at the redshift z = 3.366. Sw...