Suchergebnisse

Canadian universities have not been as enterprising as their American neighbours in seeking out new ways of serving the community; but they have deviated far enough from the straight and narrow path of academic scholarship to develop a sense of guilt for which atonement may be offered by devoting a part of their resources to the promotion of graduate studies.In the United States we find a desperate effort being made to save the M.A. degree from the fate which has befallen the B.A. degree, by applying truly heroic remedies, such as insistence on serious qualifications for admission to candidacy, on "graduate standards of attainment," on "proper use of spoken and written English," on "a reading knowledge of at least one foreign language … as indispensable background and not merely as a tool for research." A candidate should have obtained "an average grade which places him in at least the first third of his class" and "due attention should be paid to those qualities known as personality and, in particular, to moral character."A sense of guilt may be a very potent force, but it requires rationalization. Various reasons have been assigned for promoting graduate studies in Canada. Professor Brebner contends that an increased output of scholars, retained in Canada, could be employed in "the creation of Canadian culture." In so doing they would solve what Professor Brebner considers ought to be "the most urgent problem for Canadian post-war planners," namely "how to make Canada so cordial and attractive a place" that Canadians "who excel in any field" will be content to live and work there. It is nearly fifty years since American universities set about the task of meeting "needs for the satisfaction of which approximately 300 out of a total of some 500 advanced students at the time considered it necessary to go abroad." Canadians have continued to pursue graduate studies in other countries, but it is possible to argue that young Canadians cannot rely as much as in the past on the opportunities offered for advanced work at British and American universities.

Conte, R. et al. ; The increasing integration of technology into our lives has created unprecedented volumes of data on society's everyday behaviour. Such data opens up exciting new opportunities to work towards a quantitative understanding of our complex social systems, within the realms of a new discipline known as Computational Social Science. Against a background of financial crises, riots and international epidemics, the urgent need for a greater comprehension of the complexity of our interconnected global society and an ability to apply such insights in policy decisions is clear. This manifesto outlines the objectives of this new scientific direction, considering the challenges involved in it, and the extensive impact on science, technology and society that the success of this endeavour is likely to bring about. © The Author(s) 2012. ; The publication of this work was partially supported by the European Union's Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007–2013) under grant agreement No. 284709, a Coordination and Support Action in the Information and Communication Technologies activity area ('FuturICT' FET Flagship Pilot Project). ; Peer Reviewed

The article highlights several areas that pose challenges for social science today. One of the challenges is the study of culture. The evolution of interest in culture in the social sciences is traced through an appeal to the role of culture in eco­nomics, which was an ideal type of ignoring culture for the most part of the 20th century. A paradigmatic shift towards interest in the study of culture at the turn of the 20th and the 21st centuries temporarily expelled society from the main forces that determine human behavior. This approach is no less reductionist than the previous expulsion of culture. The growing attention to the role of culture somewhat obscures the discussion of the problems caused by the spread of global capitalism and the development of digital technologies. Several other challenges stem from the changes in the internal and external contexts of social knowledge production. In our opinion, the idea of human rights is becoming a new significant context both for discussing the challenges of digitalization, and external challenges to science. The author maintains the right to one's own knowledge and public expression of judgment, to some extent reduces the grow­ing restrictions in other areas of the human rights exercise.