An agenda for future higher education research is proposed which incorporates four interconnected elements: changing social contexts; their implications for higher education; mechanisms of interaction between higher education and society; higher education’s impact on society. The role of comparative research in investigating these topics is discussed and a set of priorities for future research ...

This article discusses the state of social change and the disparity between India's Constitutional aims and actual practice in addressing gender inequality and the special risks of female children in India. The second part of this article summarizes Constitutional articles and laws relating to protection of women and a girl child. Before birth, a female child is at risk of fetal death. A wom...

We propose substantive universals in the relationship between social evolution and language change. Social anthropologists have categorized societies into roughly four broad types by social organization: bands, tribes, chiefdoms and states. This classification is evolutionary in the sense that the society types arose in human history in the sequence given above. We compare these society types t...

This paper explores some aspects of group divergence based on principles of design disciplines and social dissemination. Extensions to an elementary model are used to explore the fundamental relation between divergence and social influence mechanisms previously employed to explain group convergence. The possible role of a change agent is investigated supporting the notion that there is no need ...

While uncertainty has always been a part of human experience, scientific results in our current age imply that a unifying theory is out of reach, probably forever. If we are to survive the dangers of resurgent irrationality and accept that we have reached the end of ideology, than we will need to recognize a 'new rationality', a pragmatic and critical approach based on relative cenainties. The ...

Social networks play an important role in determining the dynamics and outcome of language change. Early empirical studies only examine small-scale local social networks, and focus on the relationship between the individual speakers’ linguistic behaviors and their characteristics in the network. In contrast, computer models can provide an efficient tool to consider large-scale networks with dif...

A fundamental aspect of human beings is that they learn. The process of learning and what is learned are impacted by a number of factors, both cognitive and social; that is, humans are boundedly rational. Cognitive and social limitations interact, making it difficult to reason about how to provide information to impact what humans know, believe, and do. Herein, we use a multi-agent dynamic-netw...

Countries, organizations, and individuals around the globe spend aggressively to solve social problems, but these efforts often fail to deliver. Misdirected investment is the primary reason for that failure. Most of the money earmarked for social initiatives goes to organizations that are structured to support specific groups of recipients, often with sophisticated solutions. Such organizations...