Knowtex

We all intuitively think of ourselves as independent creatures with strong free will. However, many disturbing experiments about fashion, conformity, obedience, environment, choice and opinions have been troubling this idea we make of ourselves. These ought to be lessons of humility for all of us.

This essay offers six provocations that we hope can spark conversations about the issues of Big Data. Given the rise of Big Data as both a phenomenon and a methodological persuasion, we believe that it is time to start critically interrogating this phenomenon, its assumptions, and its biases.

Magic tricks can draw on dexterity, science, technique or even psychology. Here, we offer you the chance to travel back in time, to the beginning of the 20th century, and to reveal to you a few tricks of the period.

Today, Google and specialized search engines are based on established algorithms. But are these algorithms sufficiently in line with users’ needs? What if the web needed a human brain to select and put forward the information and not just the information based on “popularity” and lexical operations?

Its goal is to motivate the French astronomical community to think and discuss about what should be the training of PhDs, and what should be its objective. A worrying results from the poll is that the majority of the participants would not encourage a young student to start a thesis in astronomy.

Because the world is so complex, social sciences have always had a hard time quantifying social interactions. But more and more people are playing computer games and, in their digital world, you know all the parameters of their life and their interactions with others...

There are strong cultural differences in the way we keep up with the news. A recent report by the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism reveals insights about digital news consumption across five countries: the UK, the US, Germany, France and Denmark.

The use of social networks by researchers in their professional activities is a phenomenon on the rise. The precise landscape may differ between France and the United States, for example, but common trends emerge regarding their use in science and academia.

Two recent studies cast doubt on the claim that affirmative action policies leads to the selection of lower quality candidates and showing that the mere possibility of affirmative action may attract higher quality women to the competition, improving the outcome, without compromising fairness.

To speak of participation today raises a series of questions on how the presence and use of new media affect modes of social participation. From a variety of theoretical, empirical and methodological perspectives, the contributions in this volume explore participation in different social realms[...]