We review technical and sociological issues facing the Life Sciences as they transform into more data-centric disciplines - the "Big New Biology". Three major challenges are: 1) lack of comprehensive standards; 2) lack of incentives for individual scientists to share data; 3) lack of appropriate infrastructure and support. Technological advances with standards, bandwidth, distributed computing,...

This paper is concerned with the problem of how effective social interaction arises from individual social action and mind. The need to study the individual social mind, suggests a move towards the notion of sociological agents who can model their social environment as opposed to acting socially within it. This does not constrain such social behaviour; on the contrary, we argue that it provides...

Virtual communities that produce “user driven content” are a relatively new phenomenon. In this study we present the findings of an exploratory empirical study that focus on the success factors that stimulate content production from the perspective of community members. One main finding is that methods or tools that advance the transparency of what is going on in the community platform results ...

1998, vol. 53, n° 2 0034-379X In this paper, I adopt a critical sociological approach to analyse how labour law shaped a 23-day strike at a western Canadian university in the fall of 1995. I begin with a brief discussion of the sociological alternative. Next, I provide a chronology of the strike, followed by a brief analysis of how both economic and sociological models contribute to understandi...

This article presents the first steps towards a sociological understanding of emergent social media. This article uses Twitter, the most popular social media website, as its focus. Recently, the social media site has been prominently associated with social movements in Libya, Egypt, Tunisia, and Algeria. Rather than rush to breathlessly describe its novel role in shaping contemporary social mov...

A review of the sociological research about gender and migration shows the substantial ways in which gender fundamentally organizes the social relations and structures influencing the causes and consequences of migration. Yet, although a significant sociological research has emerged on gender and migration in the last three decades, studies are not evenly distributed across the discipline. In t...

The present study is an attempt to clarify some aspects of the controversy between holism and reductionism in sociological theory. What are the theoretical and non-theoretical motives behind classical holistic and reductionistic approaches to sociological theory? Are they chiefly ontological, epistemological, normative or of a more practical nature? An analytical framework making, it possible t...

Applied sociology is usually taken to mean the application of sociological theories and findings to issues of social policy. In this paper, we present some examples of a quite different notion of applied sociology: one in which sociological insights are applied to the design of computer software. Sociology’s primary concern as a discipline can be considered to be the study of the interaction of...

Through the in-depth analysis of the features of Huabei rural industrialization, the unique factory regime in Baigou, Hebei, and the resulting special workers, this paper reveals two dilemmas the migrant workers in Baigou and larger Hubei area face: Because of the interpersonal network of labor market, personalized trade, familial labor process, and patrimonial management, the workers are unabl...

When a piece of malicious information becomes rampant in an information diffusion network, can we identify the source node that originally introduced the piece into the network and infer the time when it initiated this? Being able to do so is critical for curtailing the spread of malicious information, and reducing the potential losses incurred. This is a very challenging problem since typicall...