A natural and established way to restrict the constraint satisfaction problem is to fix the relations that can be used to pose constraints; such a family of relations is called a constraint language. In this article, we study arc consistency, a heavily investigated inference method, and three extensions thereof from the perspective of constraint languages. We conduct a comparison of the studied...

When banks and firms are connected through interpersonal linkages – such as their respective management having attended college or previously worked together – interest rates are markedly reduced, comparable with single shifts in credit ratings. These rate concessions do not appear to reflect sweetheart deals. Subsequent firm performance, such as future credit ratings or stock returns, improves...

We examined associations between adolescents' and their friends' healthy eating behaviors, specifically breakfast, fruit, vegetable, whole-grain, and dairy food intake as reported by both adolescents and their friends. Data for this study were drawn from EAT-2010 (Eating and Activity among Teens), a population-based study examining multilevel factors of eating, physical activity, and weight-rel...

We assessed the forgetting of friends and its effects on measuring personal and social network characteristics and properties. All 217 residents of a university residence hall first recalled as many of their friends in the hall as they could. Then, on a complete list of hall residents, residents indicated other friends they forgot to recall. On average, residents forgot 20% of their friends. Re...

We demonstrate that personal connections amongst U.S. politicians have a significant impact on Senate voting behavior. Networks based on alumni connections between politicians are consistent predictors of voting behavior. We estimate sharp measures that control for common characteristics of the network, as well as heterogeneous impacts of a common network characteristic across votes. We find th...

The richness of the (Semantic) Web lies in its ability to link related resources as well as data across the Web. However, while relations within particular datasets are often well defined, links between disparate datasets and corpora of Web resources are rare. The increasingly widespread use of cross-domain reference datasets, such as Freebase and DBpedia for annotating and enriching datasets a...

Whether animals, especially companion animals, count as friends depends on the conception of friendship as well as on the conception of animals. Some accounts of friendship can include (other than human) animals more easily than others. I present an argument in favour of characterising some animal-human connections as friendships, and address some of the standard objections to this characterisa...