OBJECTIVE A discourse analysis was conducted of peer-written blogs about the chronic illness endometriosis to understand how bloggers present information sources and make cases for and against the authority of those sources. METHODS Eleven blogs that were authored by endometriosis patients and focused exclusively or primarily on the authors' experiences with endometriosis were selected. After...

We generalize standard delegation models to consider policymaking when both information and authority are dispersed among multiple actors. In our theory, the principal may delegate partial authority to a privately-informed agent while also reserving some authority for the principal’s use after observing the agent’s decision. Counterintuitively, the equilibrium amount of authority delegated to t...

BACKGROUND Primary care organisations in the United Kingdom have been given new and challenging population health responsibilities to improve health and address health inequality in local communities through partnership working with local authorities. This requires robust health and social needs assessment data for effective local planning. AIM To assess the use and value of local authority d...

Individuals with lower social status have been reported to express more anger, but this evidence comes mostly from Western cultures. Here, we used representative samples of American and Japanese adults and tested the hypothesis that the association between social status and anger expression depends on whether anger serves primarily to vent frustration, as in the United States, or to display aut...

Subject of this paper is the measurement of social influence in social networks. The theoretical point of departure is twofold. First, focus is on cognitive processing of perceived influence. Second, three distinct dimensions of social influence are considered: persuasion, authority and coercion. Combining these considerations with Item Response Theory methods, questionnaire-type measurement in...

since the beginning of human history, one of the basic dilemma that every political institution must solve is how to exercise legitimate authority—that is, how to govern with the consent.“you can’t sit on bayonets,” goes an old political expression.this is a way of saying that although a state can exercise its power through the use of police force or coercion, in the long run the use of force w...

Social media is a widely accepted medium for interaction and communication. A large amount of information about health care springs out through various social medias. WeChat is a multi-function social media as well as an information sharing platform with largest users in China right now. Many WeChat accounts concentrated on showing and spreading healthcare information. They are trying to attrac...

Spectrummanagement based on private commons is argued to be a realistic scenario for cognitive radio deployment within the current mobile market structure. A scenario is proposed where a secondary entrant operator leases spectrum from a primary incumbent operator. The secondary operator innovates incorporating cognitive radio technology, and it competes in quality of service and price against t...

Targeted social engineering attacks use personal information about an individual to create compelling behavioural hooks which draw the target to interact with a malicious payload or give out valuable information, more successfully than unsophisticated generic attacks [1]. Such attacks can hijack trust by pretending to be friends or trusted authorities [2], or can leverage a user’s personal inte...

This paper examines the news coverage of the SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome) crisis in 2003 in the US and UK newspapers via a qualitative approach, comparing the dominant news frames used across time and between the newspapers. The four newspapers frame SARS as a global health crisis which resulted from China’s incompetence and mishandling. Moreover, China’s deep-rooted political probl...