Agent-based modeling for understanding social intelligence.
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The advantages of agent-based modeling for a general theory of intelligence at the individual and social level are emphasized over other existing approaches mainly relying on rationality theories. As was pointed out during the National Academy of Sciences Sackler Colloquium session "Implications of Agent-Based Modeling for Understanding Human Rationality and Learning," held in October 2001, properties of social intelligent agents include adaptability and learning capacity, as well as the capacity to produce and employ artifacts and manipulate symbols. (+info)
Quality-of-life measurements: origin and pathogenesis.
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Despite extensive growth in recent years, the field of "quality-of-life" appraisal still evokes debate about basic perception of the concept and is accompanied by a plethora of indexes for measurement. One prime reason for the problems is that the measurements have been transferred from two separate sources - medical health status indexes and social-science population indexes - neither of which was designed for appraising the particular personal distinctions of the way people feel about their own quality of life. When regulatory and commercial incentives were offered for measuring patients' quality of life, it became appraised with the indexes available from the medical and psychosocial sources, even though neither set of indexes was specifically intended for that purpose. They are not developed from the basic principle that a person's "quality of life" is a state of mind, not a state of health, which is uniquely perceived by that person, and which will not be appropriately appraised unless the most cogent personal components are allowed suitable expressions. An approach that lets patients state their own opinions directly can offer the "face validity" or "common sense" that now seems absent from the generally applied measurements. (+info)
The doctor, the father, and the social scientist.
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Life was sorted. With membership of the college under my belt, and my paediatric training completed, I needed a new challenge. I decided to launch into the deep waters of qualitative research. Stepping out with some trepidation into semistructured interviews and grounded theory, I soon found that the water was neither as deep nor as unknown as I had feared. (+info)
Converging paradigms for environmental health theory and practice.
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Converging themes from the fields of environmental health, ecology and health, and human ecology highlight opportunities for innovation and advancement in environmental health theory and practice. In this commentary we outline the role of research and applied programs that integrate biophysical and social sciences with environmental health practice in order to address deficiencies in each field when taken on its own. New opportunities for environmental health protection and promotion are outlined based on the three converging themes: integrated approaches to research and policy, methodological acknowledgment of the synergies between the social and biophysical environments, and incorporation of core ecosystem principles into research and practice. These converging themes are discussed in relation to their implications for new types of intervention to achieve health gains across different spatial and temporal scales at the interface between biophysical and social environments. (+info)
Application of social science theories to family planning health education in the People's Republic of China.
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The transformation of the Chinese society was political and economic by revolution; it was also social and cultural through mass education. Group decisions have been used to induce social change in the Chinese society and applied extensively to the family planning program. The methods which Kurt Lewin developed to change food habits, have been perfected on a grand scale of myriad ways by the Chinese. (+info)
How can research organizations more effectively transfer research knowledge to decision makers?
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Five questions--What should be transferred to decision makers? To whom should it be transferred? By whom? How? With what effect?--provide an organizing framework for a knowledge transfer strategy. Opportunities for improving how research organizations transfer research knowledge can be found in the differences between the answers suggested by our understanding of the research literature and those provided by research-organization directors asked to describe what they do. In Canada, these opportunities include developing actionable messages for decision makers (only 30 percent of research organizations frequently or always do this), developing knowledge-uptake skills in target audiences and knowledge-transfer skills in research organizations (only 20 to 22 percent frequently or always do this), and evaluating the impact of knowledge-transfer activities (only 8 to 12 percent frequently or always conduct an evaluation). Research funders can help research organizations take advantage of these opportunities. (+info)
New ideas in asthma and allergy research: creating a multidisciplinary graduate school.
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The spring term of 2001 saw the start of a new, unique graduate research training program at the Centre for Allergy Research at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden. The program was created to bridge the gaps between basic, clinical, social, and behavioral sciences and to establish a global approach to the study of asthma and allergy. A reflection, two years on, discusses the strategies that are key to this model's success and the challenges in introducing a multidisciplinary research program. (+info)
THE IMPACT OF THE BEHAVIORAL SCIENCES ON THE COLLECTING POLICY OF MEDICAL SCHOOL LIBRARIES.
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The scope of medical science has broadened to embrace subject areas in the behavioral and social sciences. Medical school curricula have responded to this trend, and the response is inevitably making itself felt in the medical school library. One medical school library's efforts to identify significant library materials in this area are presented as an example of a technique and as an indication of an order of magnitude. A master list of appropriate journal titles is appended. (+info)