by Spencer Greene R e c e n t n e w s t h a t t h e University's Board of Governors will be considering South-Afr icarelated investments prompted a mixed reaction f rom Rice faculty members last week. Professors w h o spoke to the Thresher expressed a general air of caution, many describing the issue as "complex" and declining fur ther comment without detailed study of the subject. Several, how...

PITIRIM A. Sorokin has long been one of the leading figures in American sociology. This paper will describe his career briefly and discuss some of his main contributions to sociological thought. Sorokin was born in a Russian peasant village in 1889. From there he went to St. Petersburg for his secondary and higher education. In 1913, at the age of only 24, he became co-editor of New Ideas in So...

Music recommendation systems have centred on two different approaches: content based analysis and collaborative filtering. Little attention has been paid to the reasons why these techniques have been effective. Fortunately, the social sciences have asked these questions. One of the findings of this research is that social context is much more important than previously thought. This paper introd...