Technology

Shiller Paper Cited As One of the Century’s Top Economic Articles

An article written by Robert J. Shiller, the Arthur M. Okun Professor of Economics, was recently named one of the “top 20” articles in the 100-year history of the American Economic Review (AER), the premier journal in the field of economics.

“Do Stock Prices Move Too Much to Be Justified by Subsequent Changes in Dividends?” was published in the June 1981 edition of the AER and became a focal point of debate and research over the question of whether changes in stock market prices are driven by rational expectations — what’s called the efficient markets hypothesis — or by other forces. (more…)

Read More

NASA Releases Images of Man-Made Crater on Comet

PASADENA, Calif. — NASA’s Stardust spacecraft returned new images of a comet showing a scar resulting from the 2005 Deep Impact mission. The images also showed the comet has a fragile and weak nucleus.

The spacecraft made its closest approach to comet Tempel 1 on Monday, Feb. 14, at 8:40 p.m. PST (11:40 p.m. EST) at a distance of approximately 178 kilometers (111 miles). Stardust took 72 high-resolution images of the comet. It also accumulated 468 kilobytes of data about the dust in its coma, the cloud that is a comet’s atmosphere. The craft is on its second mission of exploration called Stardust-NExT, having completed its prime mission collecting cometary particles and returning them to Earth in 2006. (more…)

Read More

‘Was Doing’ Versus ‘Did’: Verbs Matter When Judging Other People’s Intentions

Your English teacher wasn’t kidding: Grammar really does matter. The verb form used to describe an action can affect how the action is perceived—and these subtle variations could mean the difference between an innocent or guilty verdict in criminal law, according to a new study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.

William Hart, of the University of Alabama, was inspired to conduct the study by research on how people think about narratives. “Research was showing that when you describe somebody’s actions in terms of what they’re ‘doing,’ that action is way more vivid in [a reader’s] mind” than if the action is described in terms of what the person ‘did.’ At the same time, other researchers had found that when people imagine action vividly, they were more likely to think the person performing the action was doing it intentionally. (more…)

Read More

Astronomers Identify Thick Disc of Older Stars in Nearby Andromeda Galaxy

An international team of astronomers has identified for the first time a thick stellar disc in the Andromeda galaxy, the nearest large spiral galaxy to our own Milky Way. 

The discovery of the thick disc, a major result from a five-year investigation, will help astronomers better understand the processes involved in the formation and evolution of large spiral galaxies like ours, according to the team, which includes UCLA research astronomer Michael Rich and colleagues from Europe and Australia.  (more…)

Read More

comScore Releases January 2011 U.S. Online Video Rankings

*VEVO Captures Second Place in Video Content Ranking*

RESTON, VA, February 15, 2011 – comScore, Inc., a leader in measuring the digital world, today released data from the comScore Video Metrix service showing that 171 million U.S. Internet users watched online video content in January for an average of 14.5 hours per viewer. The total U.S. Internet audience engaged in nearly 4.9 billion viewing sessions during the course of the month.

Top 10 Video Content Properties by Unique Viewers

Google Sites, driven primarily by video viewing at YouTube.com, ranked as the top online video content property in January with 144.1 million unique viewers. VEVO captured the #2 ranking with 51.0 million viewers, followed by Yahoo! Sites with 48.7 million viewers. Viacom Digital took the fourth position with 48.1 million viewers, while AOL, Inc. drew 44.5 million viewers. Google Sites had the highest number of viewing sessions with 1.9 billion, and average time spent per viewer at 283 minutes, or 4.7 hours. (more…)

Read More

Obesity Has Doubled Since 1980, Major Global Analysis of Risk Factors Reveals

*Study shows western high-income countries have achieved impressive progress in lowering hypertension and cholesterol*

The worldwide prevalence of obesity has nearly doubled since 1980, according to a major study on how three important heart disease risk factors have changed across the world over the last three decades. The study, published on Feb. 4 in three papers in the Lancet, looked at all available global data to assess how body mass index, blood pressure and cholesterol changed between 1980 and 2008.

The study shows that in 2008, more than one in ten of the world’s adult population was obese, with women more likely to be obese than men. An estimated 205 million men and 297 million adult women were obese – a total of more than half a billion adults worldwide. (more…)

Read More