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"The recent trends of digitalization of society is transforming the all the sectors of activity, namely, healthcare, education, tourism, Information technology, and others. Social media analytics are tools that can be used to measure the innovations and the relation with the companies with the citizens. This book focuses on state-of-the-art of social media analytics, and advanced innovation policies in the digitalization of the society. Nowadays, the number of applications that can be used to create and analyze social media analytics generates large amounts of data often called big data, including measures of the use of the technologies to develop or to use new services to improve the quality of life of the citizens"--

1. Introduction : ordinary talk about extraordinary policy -- 2. Understanding support for European integration -- 3. Social interactions and attitude formation : the mechanisms of influence -- 4. Empirical findings on individual support for EU membership in the Polish context -- 5. A look at the process of influence : influence: leaders, conversations, and the diffusion of unpopular views in larger communities -- 6. Informal talks and the change of attitudes on the EU -- 7. Conclusion : let's give them something to talk about.

With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today's emerging networked information environment.In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing—and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained—or lost—by the decisions we make today

"This monograph offers a unique analysis of social protest in popular music. It presents theoretical descriptions, methodological tools, and an approach that encompasses various fields of musicology, cultural studies, semiotics, discourse analysis, media studies, and political and social sciences. The author argues that protest songs should be taken as a musical genre on their own. He points out that the general approach, when discussing these songs, has been so far that of either analyzing the lyrics or the social context. For some reason, the music itself has been often overlooked. This book attempts to fill this gap. Its central thesis is that a complete overview of these repertoires demands a thorough interaction among contextual, lyrical, and musical elements together. To accomplish this, the author develops a novel model that systemizes and investigates musical repertoires. The model is then applied to four case studies, those, too, chosen among topics that are little (or not at all) frequented by scholars" - Page 4 of cover

When asked to compare the practice of medicine today to that of a hundred years ago, most people will respond with a story of therapeutic revolution: back then we had few effective remedies, now we have more (and more powerful) tools to fight disease, from antibiotics to psychotropics to steroids to anticancer agents. This collection challenges the historical accuracy of this revolutionary narrative and offers instead a more nuanced account of the process of therapeutic innovation and the relationships between the development of medicines and social change. These assembled histories and ethnographies span three continents and use the lived experiences of physicians and patients, consumers and providers, and marketers and regulators to reveal the tensions between universal claims of therapeutic knowledge and the actual ways they have been used and understood in specific sites, from postwar West Germany pharmacies to twenty-first century Nigerian street markets. By asking us to rethink a story we thought we knew, "Therapeutic Revolutions" offers invaluable insights to historians, anthropologists, and social scientists of medicine.

The concept of electoral deformation is conventional and its content is dependent on the given definition of representative democracy. Representative democracy's aim to achieve social volition is not fully achievable. The category of 'majority' is strictly an instrument of forming public authority and it cannot be equated with an expression of a given volition of the society's majority. All election systems deform, and the differences between them lie in the scale of that deformation. Electoral deformations are not only a consequence of the majority system, whether proportional or mixed. The author points in this regard to the deformations that stem from the legal ground-rules of election law in the form of a general, equal, secret, direct and free ballot. Further, he points to the relations between the size of an electorate and the size of the organs being elected, the stability of the election law, voter turnout rates, the role of public media and the power of public opinion polls. Election result research methods, such as voter behaviour gauges as well as gauges of the impact of an election system on a party system (indices of proportionality and disproportionality, effective numbers of parties, fragmentation and fractionalization of the party system, party aggregation and government relevance) should be applied in relation to a particular electoral system. Although these methods constitute very powerful research instruments, they do not set any methodological trends. This is because trends are derived from axiological and doctrinal priorities present in a singular electoral system.

The subject of this paper is the gender aspect of the disaster risk reduction concept. A natural phenomenon in itself is not a disaster, but it becomes when it strikes a vulnerable community, a group or individuals without proper defence who have no ability to resist or to repair its negative effects. lt causes material damage and human losses, possible interruption of the economic and social functioning of the community. The threat of disasters is a matter of overall human security and implies bringing into question the safety of life, housing and economy, food, water, energy, health, and environmental safety. The aim of the paper is to point out that disasters are not a 'natural' inevitability, since they are the result of natural risk factors and human vulnerability, in which gender-based inequalities are a constitutive component. Consequently, disaster risk reduction processes that include prevention, mitigation and preparedness for response in all phases should have a necessary gender perspective, with the aim of increasing disaster resilience. Such an approach is based on the knowledge of the risk management, capacity building and the use of information and communications technology, as well as the analysis of existing gender relations and the need to change unsafe discriminatory practices in the field. Namely, the opportunities available to women and men in fact are not the same even in 'normal' circumstances, not to mention the emergencies. There is a gender division of jobs, unequal access to material and non-material resources, lesser participation of women in decision- making at political and private levels, women's exposure to gender-based violence and various forms of discrimination. The conclusion is that building resistance to disasters, empowering women and community development necessarily represent elements of unique, but not separate, efforts.