Scientific consensus is widely deferred to in public debates as a social indicator of the existence of knowledge. However, it is far from clear that such deference to consensus is always justified. The existence of agreement in a community of researchers is a contingent fact, and researchers may reach a consensus for all kinds of reasons, such as fighting a common foe or sharing a common bias. ...

BACKGROUND Social media are increasingly used in health professions education. How can innovations and research that incorporate social media applications be adjudicated as scholarship? OBJECTIVE To define the criteria for social media-based scholarship in health professions education. METHOD In 2014 the International Conference on Residency Education hosted a consensus conference of health...

The uncontrolled usage of hashtags in social media makes them vary a lot in the quality of semantics and the frequency of usage. Such variations pose a challenge to the current approaches which capitalize on either the lexical semantics of a hashtag by using metadata or the contextual semantics of a hashtag by using the texts associated with a hashtag. This thesis presents a hybrid approach to ...

We study the dynamics of the Naming Game [Baronchelli et al., (2006) J. Stat. Mech.: Theory Exp. P06014] in empirical social networks. This stylized agentbased model captures essential features of agreement dynamics in a network of autonomous agents, corresponding to the development of shared classification schemes in a network of artificial agents or opinion spreading and social dynamics in so...