This study aimed to examine differences in influence between online news (e.g., New York Times) and social networking sites (e.g., Facebook and Twitter) on attitudes in political campaigns. In a web-based experiment, campaign, polls and election between two fictitious candidates were simulated. Participants’ explicit and implicit attitudes as well as voting behavior were assessed using self-rep...

Once again a recent article in The New York Times(1) has caused angst in the medical physics community because of what appeared to have been incorrect delivery of radiation. Following reporting of the incident, many email messages appeared on list servers written by medical physicists responding to this incident. One of the most vocal of these individuals has been Howard I. Amols, PhD, Chief, C...

This paper is concerned with the difficulty of crossword puzzles. A model is proposed that quantifies the difficulty of a puzzle P with respect to its clues. Given a clue-answer pair (c,a), we model the difficulty of guessing a based on c using the conditional probability P(a | c); easier mappings should enjoy a higher conditional probability. The model is tested by two experiments, each of whi...

The recent earthquake in Haiti thrust the debate over intercountry adoption into the mainstream media. The Associated Press reported that before the earthquake devastated Haiti on January 12, 2010, there were 380,000 parentless Haitian children. Estimates reported in the New York Times suggest that the earthquake orphaned hundreds of thousands of additional Haitian children who are now in need ...

We examine the role of scandals in the politics of Supreme Court nominations, 1877-1994. We argue that when a nominee’s opponents control the process, they often delay it in the hope of uncovering a scandal. If they succeed in finding a scandal, they further delay the process in order to exploit the scandal and damage the nominee’s prospects of confirmation. Evidence from a Markov model of the ...

Critics in market contexts are engaged in a constant struggle for legitimacy—a legitimacy which is dependent, in part, on the establishment of a rationalized and defensible system of standards for evaluating products. By appealing to such standards, critics legitimate the transfer of knowledge embodied in their evaluations and establish their contribution as intermediaries to the market at larg...

This research examined the content of articles about Brazil in The New York Times and El País and the correlation between news coverage and students’ knowledge and opinion levels on current events in Brazil. Content analysis revealed that American news coverage of Brazil in The New York Times had more depth and breadth than Spanish coverage in El País. Questionnaires distributed to University o...

care costs, and they have failed to fill the gaping voids in coverage. Yet politicians continue on a path to increase the involvement of these failed models of ‘reform’ by expanding their participation in our public programs. . . It is long past time for our nation to open up the dialogue on replacing these antiquated health plans. . . . ” The New York Times Letter to the Editor December 26, 20...

Herd behavior, i.e. everyone is doing what everyone else is doing (Banerjee 1992), portrays various social and economic situations where individuals are markedly influenced by the decisions of others, such as in financial investment, technology adoption, firms’ strategic decisions, political voting, and dining and fashion trends. When there are two restaurants next to each other, customers ofte...

The then-modern panopticon, in its subtle and unseen exercise of voyeurism and power, was to be sure an improvement over the crowded, stale prisons that preceded it. Which already incarcerated individual would not give up some personal freedom for such improved conditions? The same line of reasoning is used in modern surveillance systems. Just last week, in a New York Times article on Chicago’s...