Research News

Sports fandom can be divided into three categories: partisans who are loyal fans of a particular team, purists who are fans that don’t have team preference and simply enjoy the game, and fair-weather fans who only care for the team that is doing well now. The fair-weather fans are usually viewed with dismissal and (sometimes) derision. Writing in the Journal of the Philosophy of Sport, philosophy professor Kyle Fruh and colleagues show that fair-weather fans have important advantages over partisans and purists, and as such are in a better position to navigate some of the moral complexities inherent in modern sports.

Writing in the International Journal of Digital Humanities, art historian and visual studies scholar Jung Choi provides a more extensive and sustainable approach to practicing digital humanities by incorporating arts that bring imaginative and creative experiential encounters and, further, suggest a mode of deep reading. More specifically, the study shows how augmented reality can be used as an alternative research interface in digital humanities, providing phenomenological and embodied experiences for users by encouraging them to physically experience heritage sites equipped with historically and critically informed virtual information.

Individuals deeply care about their relative position compared to others and often signal their status through the consumption of visible “luxury” goods. While most of the previous literature assumes that people compare themselves to everyone else in the group they belong to, an article in the European Economic Review by behavioral economist Gergely Horvath and colleagues consider the role of social networks in the competition for status. In this setting, individuals compare themselves to their neighbors in the network and the structure of connections determines who spends how much on luxury goods. The results from a laboratory experiment show that more central individuals in the network will consume more luxury goods, consistently with game-theoretical predictions assuming fully rational individuals. The article also explains how boundedly rational experimental participants are able to learn the rational actions when they make decisions repeatedly.

Warming water and receding sea ice in the Western Antarctic Peninsula is changing the plankton community there with potential consequences for climate change, according to research led by Yajuan Lin, assistant professor of biochemistry. Published in Nature Communications, the study found water temperature and sea-ice cover to be the dominant factors affecting the makeup of microscopic sea life in the region, which had declined in species richness and evenness, with those changes leading to less ocean absorption of carbon dioxide, the gas associated with global warming. Read more