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"An empirical analysis of the creation, use and adoption of social computing applications IPTS exploratory research on the socio-economic impact of social computing Over the last few years, the take-up of social computing applications has been impressive. These digital applications are defined as those that enable interaction, collaboration and sharing between users. They include applications for blogging, podcasting, collaborative content (e.g. Wikipedia), social networking e.g. MySpace, Facebook, multimedia sharing (e.g. Flickr, YouTube), social tagging (e.g. Deli.cio.us) and social gaming (e.g. Second Life). The importance of social computing has been acknowledged by European policy makers. It is considered to be a potentially disruptive Information Society development, in which users play an increasingly influential role in the way products and services are shaped and used. This may have important social and economic impacts on all aspects of society. There is, however, little scientific evidence on the take-up and impact of social computing applications. The objective of this report is to provide a systematic empirical assessment of the creation, use and adoption of specific social computing application areas: blogging, podcasting, collaborative content, social networking multimedia sharing, social tagging and social gaming. In addition, the report offers a definition of social computing in order to clarify what is meant, in the face of many different angles, and points to the new area of mobile social computing. The dynamics of user participation in social computing are also discussed. Finally, extensive empirical data is presented in the Annex to this report. Research into social computing presents numerous challenges. Social computing is a moving target, with rapidly evolving technologies, markets and user behaviours, all of which have emerged and developed over just a few years. The measurement issue is a crucial, in particular in the context of policy imp

Thank you for sharing; not only does this article seem very interesting but I am also always happy to find sites that offer free articles for me to read.

I think we need to know more about how to deal with qualitative data.

thank you. did you have a look at it to see where it could fit in our research?

I think we need to have some software to facilitate the data analysis process. I've heard there are tools, but I do not know what are they and how to use them. It'd be great if we can have a class on these issues.

"Here we present findings from the "Religion among Academic Scientists" study, a survey (N=1,646) and initial in-depth interviews (N=150) with natural and social scientists at twenty-one elite US research universities. We examine the attitudes academic scientists at these universities have about the perceived conflict between religion and science and their personal cultural construction of the boundaries between science and religion. Using survey data, results show that field-specific differences, being in the natural or social sciences, are not significant predictors of adopting the conflict paradigm, refuting previous research. Attention to in-depth interviews reveals three mechanisms of boundary-crossing, where boundaries between religion and science are transgressed: institutional pull, boundary pioneering, and environmental push. These results contribute key mechanisms of boundary change and boundary crossing between the specific knowledge domains of science and religion to the growing sociology of culture literature on boundaries."

Werner Heisenberg. Der Teil und das Ganze: Gespräche im Umkreis der Atomphysik. (Piper, 2001) This book is written by one of the foundator and leading scientist of quantum mechanics and physics and is a very light-speaking, anecdoting story telling about Heisenberg's life, education, personal life and development. When he mentiones his awakening interest in physicsm he talks a lot about Platon and it is very interesting to read about his attitude towards religion and the principal questions of religion. It is also him we attribute the famous sentence: The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will turn you into an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass God is waiting for you.

merci Dora, let us look at religion & science as two sources of knowledge. In my case, I would be most familiar with the Bahai Faith (www.bahai.org) and I do believe that this Faith has a new contribution in the task of transforming society.