People who attach personal importance to an attitude are especially knowledgeable about the attitude object. This article tests an explanation for this relation: that importance causes the accumulation of knowledge by inspiring selective exposure to and selective elaboration of relevant information. Nine studies showed that (a) after watching televised debates between presidential candidates, v...

This study examines global patterns of stability and change within six longitudinal samples of English-language weblogs (or “blogs”) during the 2004 U.S. Presidential election campaign. Using distance-based methods of graph comparison, we explore the evolution of the blog-blog citation networks for each sample during the period. In addition to describing the qualitative dynamics of the blog net...

When analysing social media conversations, in search of the public opinion about an unfolding event that is being discussed in real-time (e.g., presidential debates, major speeches, etc.), it is important to distinguish between two groups of participants: opinion-makers and opinion-holders. To address this problem, we propose a supervised machinelearning approach, which uses inexpensively acqui...

This paper tailors general theories of distributive politics to guide an empirical analysis of the distribution of intergovernmental grants among the Brazilian states. It shows that grants are distributed in accordance with the political interests of the president, who seeks to maintain a stable, low-cost legislative coalition. States with greater legislative representation per capita receive l...

This article uses data from Thomson Reuters Web of Science to map and analyse the scientific landscape for synthetic biology. The article draws on recent advances in data visualisation and analytics with the aim of informing upcoming international policy debates on the governance of synthetic biology by the Subsidiary Body on Scientific, Technical and Technological Advice (SBSTTA) of the United...

Exposure and adoption of opinions in social networks are important questions in education, business, and government. We describe a novel application of ubiquitous computing based on using mobile phone sensors to measure and model the face-to-face interactions and subsequent opinion changes of undergraduates during the US presidential election campaign. We find that self-reported political discu...

During broadcast events such as the Superbowl, the U.S. Presidential and Primary debates, etc., Twitter has become the de facto platform for crowds to share perspectives and commentaries about them. Given an event and an associated large-scale collection of tweets, there are two fundamental research problems that have been receiving increasing attention in recent years. One is to extract the to...

Speech is an acoustic signal with inherent amplitude modulations in the 1-9 Hz range. Recent models of speech perception propose that this rhythmic nature of speech is central to speech recognition. Moreover, rhythmic amplitude modulations have been shown to have beneficial effects on language processing and the subjective impression listeners have of the speaker. This study investigated the ro...

Political scientists, economists, and legal scholars have been debating corporate social responsibility for decades.1 To that end, the financial crisis, fraud relating to Enron and Worldcom, Occupy Wall Street, and even the 2016 presidential primary debates all raise attention and concern about what corporate social responsibility is and should be in the United States. The traditional view, the...

television viewing (tv) is associated with an in-creased risk of type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular dis-eases, and all-cause mortality (1). in particular, ex-cessive tv viewing was found to be more preva-lent among older adults aged over 55 years than among younger age groups (2). moreover, it has been emphasized the importance of identifying at-risk populations with excessive tv viewing time and ...