According to classical GR, Anti-de Sitter (AdS) bubbles in the multiverse terminate in big crunch singularities. It has been conjectured, however, that the fundamental theory may resolve these singularities and replace them by nonsingular bounces. This may have important implications for the beginning of the multiverse. Geodesics in cosmological spacetimes are known to be past-incomplete, as lo...

We study the impact of social influence on the performance of ads on social networks. Using data for several ads on Facebook for two different firms, we measure the impact of past connections on the click rate and endorsement rate of ads. We find that increase in the connections does not lead to an increase in the click performance and may even decrease the click performance. We also find that ...

Many researchers in the field of international business have argued that cultural proximity can positively influence bilateral trade. These researchers have attempted to develop proxy measures for cultural proximity, such as language, ethnicity, religion, and trade of cultural goods. However, the conventional measures failed to capture the time-variant characteristics of cultural affinity or di...

This study examined emotional reactions to a televised public service ad regarding racial prejudice. The ad induces viewers to draw a seemingly prejudicial inference about an African American man. Emotional reactions to the ad varied as a function of automatically activated racial attitudes and the two factors of the Motivation to Control Prejudiced Reactions Scale, all of which were assessed 3...

With the development of information resources, there are more and more CD-ROM resources. The traditional disc management, storage and search methods can not meet the current requirements of the fast-paced CD-ROM management infomationization and standardization. Based on the demand, we studied a distributed intelligence disc management system with random access, fuzzy search and automatic pop-up...

Intelligent assistants are handling increasingly critical tasks, but until now, end users have had no way to systematically assess where their assistants make mistakes. For some intelligent assistants, this is a serious problem: if the assistant is doing work that is important, such as assisting with qualitative research or monitoring an elderly parent’s safety, the user may pay a high cost for...

This paper focuses on access control approaches usable for information sharing through large screens where several individuals are present at the same time. Access control in this setting is quite different from traditional systems where a user logs on to the system. The paper outlines a number of possible approaches to access control, and evaluates them based on criteria derived from risk anal...