38,997 research outputs found
Human Sexual Cycles are Driven by Culture and Match Collective Moods
It is a long-standing question whether human sexual and reproductive cycles
are affected predominantly by biology or culture. The literature is mixed with
respect to whether biological or cultural factors best explain the reproduction
cycle phenomenon, with biological explanations dominating the argument. The
biological hypothesis proposes that human reproductive cycles are an adaptation
to the seasonal cycles caused by hemisphere positioning, while the cultural
hypothesis proposes that conception dates vary mostly due to cultural factors,
such as vacation schedule or religious holidays. However, for many countries,
common records used to investigate these hypotheses are incomplete or
unavailable, biasing existing analysis towards primarily Christian countries in
the Northern Hemisphere. Here we show that interest in sex peaks sharply online
during major cultural and religious celebrations, regardless of hemisphere
location. This online interest, when shifted by nine months, corresponds to
documented human birth cycles, even after adjusting for numerous factors such
as language, season, and amount of free time due to holidays. We further show
that mood, measured independently on Twitter, contains distinct collective
emotions associated with those cultural celebrations, and these collective
moods correlate with sex search volume outside of these holidays as well. Our
results provide converging evidence that the cyclic sexual and reproductive
behavior of human populations is mostly driven by culture and that this
interest in sex is associated with specific emotions, characteristic of, but
not limited to, major cultural and religious celebrations.Comment: Main Paper: 21 pages, 4 figures Supplementary Material: 66 pages, 15
figures, 13 table
A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien, ed. Stuart D. Lee, reviewed by Andrew Higgins
Book review of A Companion to J.R.R. Tolkien (2014), edited by Stuart D. Le
A Linguistic Specification of Aesthetic Judgments
This paper aims to delineate the class of aesthetic judgments linguistically. The main idea is that aesthetic judgments can be specified by a certain set of assertibility conditions, i.e., by norms that govern appropriate speech-acts. This idea is spelled out in detail and defended against various objections. The suggestion leads to an interesting account of aesthetic judgments that is theoretically fruitful: It provides the basis for a non-circular and satisfying characterization of the whole domain of aesthetic research and it marks an important linguistic difference between aesthetic judgments and judgments of personal taste
False News On Social Media: A Data-Driven Survey
In the past few years, the research community has dedicated growing interest
to the issue of false news circulating on social networks. The widespread
attention on detecting and characterizing false news has been motivated by
considerable backlashes of this threat against the real world. As a matter of
fact, social media platforms exhibit peculiar characteristics, with respect to
traditional news outlets, which have been particularly favorable to the
proliferation of deceptive information. They also present unique challenges for
all kind of potential interventions on the subject. As this issue becomes of
global concern, it is also gaining more attention in academia. The aim of this
survey is to offer a comprehensive study on the recent advances in terms of
detection, characterization and mitigation of false news that propagate on
social media, as well as the challenges and the open questions that await
future research on the field. We use a data-driven approach, focusing on a
classification of the features that are used in each study to characterize
false information and on the datasets used for instructing classification
methods. At the end of the survey, we highlight emerging approaches that look
most promising for addressing false news
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