The concepts of objectivity, truth, and the authority of empirical standards have comeunder serious challenge by some critics of the social sciences in the past several decades. Feminist critics charge that the concepts and methods of the social sciences reflect an essentialpatriarchalism that discredits the objectivity of social science knowledge. Marxist criticssometimes contend t...

The first half of this paper replies to three postmodernist challenges to belief in objective intrinsic value. One lies in the claim that the language of objective value presupposes a flawed, dualistic distinction between subjects and objects. The second lies in the claim that there are no objective values which do not arise within and/or depend upon particular cultures or valuational framework...

To evaluate the sensitivity and specificity of Community Health Survey (CHS), we analyzed data from 11,217 participants aged ≥ 19 yr, in 13 cities and counties in 2008. Three healthcare utilization indices (admission, outpatient visits, dental visits) as comparative variables and the insurance benefit claim data of the Health Insurance Review & Assessment Service as the gold-standard were used....

The problem of subjectivity within psychological research has long been recognized. The practices of scientific psychology, however, continue to assume that objectivity is desirable, even if not completely possible, and that subjectivity is a source of bias that must be minimized or eliminated. Such a dispassionate stance has offered and continues to offer a range of benefits, not least a tight...

The techniques of microscopic histochemistry, successfully applied to problems in histopathology, necessarily result in increased objectivity. Combined with procedures for quantification the increase may be such as to remove subjective judgment altogether. Extended to the ultrastructural level the quality of the information derived is greatly enhanced in terms of localization but there is usual...

Nowadays, the emerging popularity of Social Web raises new application areas for recommender systems. The aim of a social user recommendation is to suggest new friends having similar interests. In order to identify such interests, current recommender algorithms exploit social network information or the similarity of user-generated content. The rationale of this work is that users may share simi...

The increasing popularity of social networks has encouraged a large number of significant research works on community detection and user recommendation. The idea behind this work is that taking into account users’ attitudes toward their own interests can bring benefits in performing such tasks. In this paper we describe (i) a novel method to infer sentiment-based communities without the require...

English A deep philosophical divide exists between ‘strictly objective’ scientists, who believe that engaging in civic debates undermines objectivity, and ‘citizen scientists’, who believe scientists can – and at times should – help decision makers incorporate sound scientific knowledge. Here we suggest that the threat posed to scientific objectivity by the escalating politicisation of science ...

The Effect of Sanctions on the Job Finding Rate: Evidence from Denmark This paper investigates the effect of sanctions of unemployment insurance benefits on the exit rate from unemployment for a sample of Danish unemployed. According to the findings are that even moderate sanctions have rather large effects. For both males and females the exit rate increases by more than 50% following impositio...