O ver the years I have gotten into trouble more than a few times for things I have written or said in public, but I suppose the chief cause of my notoriety is a speech I gave to the freshmen of Yale College suggesting that they would be wise to make the study of Western civilization the center of their pursuit of a liberal education. In that speech I focused on our needs as Americans. I pointed...

Four studies examined the impact that thinking about mood can have on people’s choices. In Study 1, participants who were asked to suppose they were in good, bad, or neutral moods were more likely to choose a silly comedic movie over an otherwise more attractive drama, compared to others who had not thought about mood. Similar patterns were observed when people introspected about how they felt ...

1 Social scientists are often asked to determine whether or not one thing causes another. The answer to this question of causality may have important implications for public policy. However, it is generally difficult to establish that " A causes B " beyond a shadow of a doubt, and researchers often arrive at conflicting conclusions depending on their data sources and methods. This conundrum is ...

We live in an information age that requires us, more than ever, to represent, access, and use information. Over the last several decades, we have developed a modern science and technology for information retrieval, relentlessly pursuing the vision of a “memex” that Vannevar Bush proposed in his seminal article, “As We May Think.” Faceted search plays a key role in this program. Faceted search a...

This article – written in honour of Jürgen Ehlers – consists of two different, though interlocking parts: Section 1 describes my 54 years of perpetual experiences and exchanges with him, both science and episodes, whilst section 2 describes the history of astrophysical black holes, which evolved during the same epoque though largely independently, with its activity centers in other places of th...

We study a hard geometric problem. Given n points in the plane and a positive integer k, the Rectilinear k-Bends Traveling Salesman Problem asks if there is a piecewise linear tour through the n points with at most k bends where every line-segment in the path is either horizontal or vertical. The problem has applications in VLSI design. We prove that this problem belongs to the class FPT (fixed...

Contemporary research on racial categorization is mostly encompassed by two research traditions—social constructionism and the cognitive-cum-evolutionary approach. Although both literatures have some plausible empirical evidence and some theoretical insights to contribute to a full understanding of racial categorization, there has been little contact between their proponents. In order to foster...

The bicentenary of the publication of William Withering's Foxglove has been well and largely perceptively celebrated the world over, but the most permanent tribute comes in the form ofthis book by J. K. Aronson. Aronson is very well qualified for the job he has set himself. He is an eminent authority on the pharmacology and clinical practice involved, and he now shows himself to be a fine and m...