Related papers: Everything's Fine
Happiness, in the U.S. Declaration of Independence, was understood quite differently from today's popular notions of personal pleasure. Happiness implies a flourishing life - one of virtue, purpose, and contribution to the common good. This…
Schizophrenia is a severe, currently incurable, relatively common mental condition. Its symptoms are complex and widespread. It structurally and functionally affects cortical and subcortical regions involved in cognitive, emotional and…
Emerging empirical and theoretical thinking about human aging places considerable value upon the role of the environment as a major factor which can promote prolonged healthy longevity. Our contemporary, information-rich environment is…
Extinction appears ubiquitously in many fields, including chemical reactions, population biology, evolution, and epidemiology. Even though extinction as a random process is a rare event, its occurrence is observed in large finite…
We analyze the household savings problem in a general setting where returns on assets, non-financial income and impatience are all state dependent and fluctuate over time. All three processes can be serially correlated and mutually…
An often-overlooked characteristic of the human mind is its propensity to wander. Despite growing interest in the science of mind-wandering, most studies operationalize mind-wandering by its task-unrelated contents, which may be orthogonal…
Situations where people have to decide between hurting themselves or another person are at the core of many individual and global conflicts. Yet little is known about how people behave when facing these situations in the lab. Here we report…
When viewed at a certain coarse grain, the brain seems a relatively small dynamical system composed by a few dozen interacting areas, performing a number of stereotypical behaviors. It is known that, even relatively small dynamical systems…
The Oregon Health Insurance Experiment (OHIE) offers a unique opportunity to examine the causal relationship between Medicaid coverage and happiness among low-income adults, using an experimental design. This study leverages data from…
In these notes we review emergent phenomena in complex systems, emphasizing ways to identify potential underlying universal mechanisms that generates complexity. The discussion is centered around the emergence of collective behavior in…
We introduce a game inspired by the challenges of disease management in livestock farming and the transmission of endemic disease through a trade network. Success in this game comes from balancing the cost of buying new stock with the risk…
Noise threads every scale of the natural world. Once dismissed as mere background hiss, it is now recognized as both a currency of information and a source of order in systems driven far from equilibrium. From nanometer-scale motor proteins…
The question of why we age is a fundamental one. It is about who we are, and it also might have critical practical aspects as we try to find ways to age slower. Or to not age at all. Different reasons point at distinct strategies for the…
It is explicitly shown that a one-family parameter model reproducing the nonlinear Newton-Schr\"odinger equation as the parameter goes to infinity is free from any causality violation problem for any finite value of it. This circumstance…
I consider the puzzles arising from four interrelated problems involving `anthropic' reasoning, and in particular the `Self-Sampling Assumption' (SSA) - that one should reason as if one were randomly chosen from the set of all observers in…
Among the main causes of absenteeism are health problems, emotional problems, and inadequate work-family policies (WFP). This paper analyses the impact of the existence and accessibility of WFP on work absenteeism, by considering the…
This paper makes a number of connections between life and various facets of genetic and evolutionary algorithms research. Specifically, it addresses the topics of adaptation, multiobjective optimization, decision making, deception, and…
Recovering and distinguishing between the strict-preference, indifference and/or indecisiveness parts of a decision maker's preferences is a challenging task but also important for testing theory and conducting welfare analysis. This paper…
People with dementia (PwD) often present verbal agitation such as cursing, screaming, and persistently complaining. Verbal agitation can impose mental distress on informal caregivers (e.g., family, friends), which may cause severe mental…
In this work, we explore the relationship between depression and manifestations of happiness in social media. While the majority of works surrounding depression focus on symptoms, psychological research shows that there is a strong link…