It is proposed that studying individual tasks in isolation is a solution to Fodor’s problem: how can we break down the empirical project in psychology into tractable units? The taskoriented approach is in this sense an alternative to the modular view of the mind. I propose a definition of a task as a researcher-defined unit of study that corresponds to a reconfiguration of resources in an anima...

In this paper, we describe EPFL privacy protection tool submitted to the MediaEval 2013 Visual Privacy task. The goal of the task is to obscure faces and other personal items of people in the provided surveillance clips to preserve their personal privacy. In the privacy protection tool, we used a combination of reversible privacy protection filter based on geometric warping transformation, rand...

The research project on which this volume reports was conceived with two main aims in mind. The first and most immediate aim was to extend our knowledge of the social stratification of cultural consumption, and to do so in a cross-national perspective. In this regard, we obviously looked to build on previous research in this area, which has in fact been steadily growing in volume over recent de...

Information Technology, IT, may play an important part in any community as a supporting tool in the democratic process. The conditions for that to happen are primarily a genuine wish of the community members to take democratic action, having access to the technology and the skills to use it. The purpose of this paper is to establish the “Democratic Functions of IT” in what we call “The Swedish ...

This article addresses the question of the relation between disciplines and transdisciplinary practices and concepts through a discussion of the relationship between philosophy and the emblematically transdisciplinary practice of feminist theory, via a discussion of interdisciplinarity and related terms in gender studies. It argues that the tendency of philosophy to reject feminist theory, as a...

Owing to the lack of human bandwidth online, feedback systems have been introduced as a means of providing information on quality. Existing studies on the effects of ratings systems have had conflicting results. With this in mind, this study investigates the relative contribution of information according to search cost. It focuses on Groupon, based on its unique provision of daily deals, most o...

This paper contributes to the growing literature on social capital and firm performance by distinguishing between " bridging " and " bonding " social capital and by investigating the moderating effect of several variables. Drawing on meta-analytic data from 50 empirical studies, we show that social capital positively influences firm performance and that bridging and bonding social capital are t...

The article discusses the possibility of applying Kuhn's concept of paradigm to collective health. The concept and its use in epidemiology, planning and the social sciences are reviewed briefly. The study stresses the multi-paradigmatic character of collective health, resulting from the convergence of multiple epistemologies and the involvement of diverse fields such as the biological sciences,...

Sophisticated/Well-Educated Person from Avicenna’s Perspective*   A. Sohbatloo** M.R. Aahanchiyaan, Ph.D.*** B. Sha’bani Varaki, Ph.D.**** A.R. Saadeghzaadeh Ghamsari, Ph.D.*****   A basic question asked by many philosophers has been about the criteria by which a person’s sophistication is measured and the characteristics by which a sophisticated/well educated person is identified. Given...

“INTELLECTUALS . . . SEEK NEITHER TO understand the world nor to change it, but to denounce it,” so wrote Raymond Aron (1983, p. 158) in a damning critique of those who were very much his intellectual kindred. Such a sentiment may at first seem surprising since Aron was, after all, a Marxist scholar and lifelong socialist who felt comfortable with the social welfare states prevalent in postwar ...