While direct social ties have been intensely studied in the context of computer-mediated social networks, indirect ties (e.g., friends of friends) have seen little attention. Yet in real life, we often rely on friends of our friends for recommendations (of good doctors, good schools, or good babysitters), for introduction to a new job opportunity, and for many other occasional needs. In this wo...

This paper analyzes the determinants of successful participation of candidates on the well known television quiz show “WhoWants to Be a Millionaire?”. Our study includes a survey of 660 contestants who participated in the German version of the show between 1999 and 2007. We are particularly interested in two hypotheses. The first hypothesis refers to the assumed advantage of social capital. Con...

We address the problem of describing, recognizing, and learning generic, free-form objects in real-world scenes. We introduce a hybrid appearance-based approach, IDEAL, where objects are encoded as a loose collections of parts and the relations between them. The key features of this new approach are the structural part decomposition combining multi-scale wavelet segmentation and hierarchical bl...

Geocast mechanisms allow a sender to transmit network packets to receivers residing at a certain geographical region. Geocast forms the basis for a number of location-based services, such as announcement services, advertisement services or friend-finders. In this paper, we introduce the notion of semantic geocast, where a target area is specified by its meaning. A sender can broadcast messages ...

Jones and Rachlin (2008) found that the amount of money a person is willing to forgo in order to give $75 to another person decreased as a hyperbolic function of perceived social distance, in the same way as occurs in intertemporal choice. This study aimed to extend this finding to the domain of social networks, in which social distance is defined by degrees of separation. A total of 334 partic...

This paper presents a brief overview of the Power of Numbers project (the “Project”), an independent research initiative involving 17 scholars and coordinated by Sakiko Fukuda-Parr (The New School) and Alicia Ely Yamin (Harvard University). It arose out of a shared concern amongst the 17 participating scholars with the need to more fully understand the consequences of the Millennium Development...

Preparations of pooled Friend virus used in this laboratory were found to contain lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) virus. Interrelationships between these viruses and the effects of drug treatment i~ vivo and virus neutralization in vitro were studied. Both 6-mercaptopurine and streptonigrin administered to Friend virus-infected mice delayed the onset of the 10to 100-fold normal elev,%tion of plasma...

I am a 41 year old female who has been in a loving monogamous relationship for the past 14 years. Recently, at a party held in my office in my honor, I was holding a lollipop in my hand that I had been sucking on when my male co-worker grabbed the pop and sucked on it. I was distracted and when he placed it back in my hand, I immediately placed it in my mouth before I had realized it was just i...