Disturbing effects of aircraft noise depend on the time of day at which the sound sources emerge. The reason can be seen in different human activities which vary qualitatively throughout the day. Especially in the evening and during the night people are more sensitive against noise induced disturbances which is a result of several field studies. Additionally there exists empirical evidence that...

in this study, long-term trends and abrupt changes of hydro-climatic variables was investigated in the observed period 1971-2000 for aidoghmoush basin using mann-kendall nonparametric test and cumulative curve of climatic variables-runoff, respectively. results show decrease trends for rainfall and runoff and increase trend for temperature by the mann-kendall test with a confidence level of 99%...

Do non-human animals have rights? The answer to this question depends on whether animals have morally relevant mental properties. Mindreading is the human activity of ascribing mental states to other organisms. Current knowledge about the evolution and cognitive structure of mindreading indicates that human ascriptions of mental states to non-human animals are very inaccurate. The accuracy of h...

“The mutual constitution of culture and mind is a topic of central importance across all of areas of psychology.” With this mission statement, Frontiers in Cultural Psychology declares mutual constitution— the process by which mind and culture “live together, require each other, and dynamically, dialectically, and jointly make each other up” (Shweder, 1990; p.1)—as the unifying theme of its oth...

Online petitions are an important avenue for direct political action, yet the dynamics that determine when a petition will be successful are not well understood. Here we analyze the temporal characteristics of online-petition signing behavior in order to identify systematic differences between popular petitions, which receive a high volume of signatures, and unpopular ones. We find that, in lin...

Antarctica is widely regarded as one of the planet's last true wildernesses, insulated from threat by its remoteness and declaration as a natural reserve dedicated to peace and science. However, rapidly growing human activity is accelerating threats to biodiversity. We determined how well the existing protected-area system represents terrestrial biodiversity and assessed the risk to protected a...

Trying to anticipate the future of tourism may be a particularly fraught task. However, this does not mean that trying to predict the future of tourism is not without value. From a business perspective, examining the future enables firms to anticipate new business conditions and develop new strategies. From a destination perspective, reflections on the future enable consideration of how to main...

Self-exciting point processes describe the manner in which every event facilitates the occurrence of succeeding events, as in the case of epidemics or human activity. By increasing excitability, the event occurrences start to exhibit bursts even in the absence of external stimuli. We revealed that the transition is uniquely determined by the average number of events added by a single event, 1-1...

We study the impact of human activity patterns on information diffusion. To this end we ran a viral email experiment involving 31,183 individuals in which we were able to track a specific piece of information through the social network. We found that, contrary to traditional models, information travels at an unexpectedly slow pace. By using a branching model which accurately describes the exper...

We study the susceptible-infected model with power-law waiting time distributions P(τ)~τ^{-α}, as a model of spreading dynamics under heterogeneous human activity patterns. We found that the average number of new infections n(t) at time t decays as a power law in the long-time limit, n(t)~t^{-β}, leading to extremely slow prevalence decay. We also found that the exponent in the spreading dynami...