I’m one of the moderators for Science on Google+. I curate the social science stream. Our community is co-hosting a discussion on autism research live on air, in around an hour’s time (2pm Australian time or 10pm USA EST or 3am UTC/GMT). Our co-host partner is Autism Brainstorm, a research-led community of practice that puts families in touch with experts and resources of support.
M. Laura Moazedi has written a great summary about a study on diversity and creativity. Laura writes: According to research findings, heterogeneous teams perform more creatively than homogeneous teams. This seems to be particularly true when they engage in perspective taking. … Continue reading Creative Diversity
Social science helps to improve people’s lives by addressing health, education, business and other fields. In particular, it provides tools to measure social dynamics. That is, it provides insight about how societies and social relationships work. Social science integrates nature and the environment as well as individual will, the mind, and community relationships.
Continue reading “What is Social Science?”
Social science offers sophisticated methods for governments to better understand social media. The London School of Economics & Political Science argues that social scientists are using their research techniques to improve meaningful collection of social data.
Continue reading “How Can Social Science Help Governments Manage Social Media?”
We’re constantly told to act according to common sense. Common sense is supposed to stop us from making foolish mistakes, and in many ways it does. This notion describes all of our social learning in a nutshell. It’s the collection of the sum total of our personal experiences as well as those of the people around us. It helps us walk into a situation with a certain level of familiarity. The problem with common sense is that it can be misleading.
Continue reading “Social Science of Common Sense”Here is a good article on the historical and social influences on technology adoption. Science Professor Bernard Carlson, (University of Virginia, USA) tells engineering students: “they are going to produce sociotechnical systems,“ meaning they need to understand how people “interact with technology.”
Continue reading “Sociology of technology”
At Scientific American’s request, the chief scientist at bitly (www.bitly.com) [Hilary Mason], which shortens URLs for Web users, examined 600 science Web page addresses sent to the company’s servers on August 23 and 24. Then she tracked 6,000 pages people visited next and mapped the connections (below). The results revealed which subjects were strongly and weakly associated. Chemistry was linked to almost no other science. Biology was linked to almost all of them. Health was tied more to business than to food. But why did fashion connect strongly to physics? And why was astronomy linked to genetics? Check out the … Continue reading Link Analysis of Science on Bitly
Social Science Insights 