In these times, when our social and political inadequacies in dealing with the advances wrought by nuclear fission are so apparent, it is encouraging to find that forward-looking men in medicine and the social sciences are working together to bridge that gap between their respective fields of interest. Although the authors point out that the practice of medicine at large or in the hospital in p...

Social influence in groups was a major focus of the emerging field of social psychology at the turn of the 20th century. This focus was evident in early interest in such phenomena as sympathy, imitation, suggestion, the crowd, and the group mind. It also was reflected in the first experimental problem in social psychology: “What change in an individual’s normal solitary performance occurs when ...

This work seeks to enhance a user’s experience in a digital library using group-based social navigation. Ensemble is a portal focusing on computing education as part of the US National Science Digital Library providing access to a large amount of learning materials and resources for education in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics. With so many resources and so many contributing gr...

Issue advocacy groups play a central role in today’s political system, but their media and communication use has seldom been examined to date. Grounded in the uses and gratifications approach and the niche theory, this study surveyed media and communication technology usage of 209 issue advocacy groups in the United State. The findings suggest that a variety of media are used for citizen mobili...

The birth and decline of disciplines are critical to science and society. How do scientific disciplines emerge? No quantitative model to date allows us to validate competing theories on the different roles of endogenous processes, such as social collaborations, and exogenous events, such as scientific discoveries. Here we propose an agent-based model in which the evolution of disciplines is gui...

Stephen Turner proposes to provide a philosophical analysis of a family of concepts falling under the general heading of " social practice " : the notion of a tacit set of rules, norms, or presuppositions that inform behavior in a given cultural milieu and that are socially authoritative and causally influential. Examples include: skills of the carpenter, passed on from master to apprentice; kn...