In 2008, French physicist Serge Galam wrote a review article about “Galam models,” in which he cited 71 papers, all of which were written or cowritten by him. Galam specializes in a topic known as “social physics” (or “sociophysics” for short), an area of complex systems that concerns the use of ideas and tools from physics to study collective social […]
Tag: sociology
Raven: Lunatic
In 1929, Alice Raven wrote a distinctive essay about lunatics: “Murder and Suicide as Marks of an Abnormal Mind,” Alice Raven, The Sociological Review, vol. a21, no. 4, October 1929, pp. 315–333. The article is prefaced by a warning from the editor. The author then begins by saying: “One of the most disturbing features of […]
“Finding a Mate With No Social Skills”
Computer scientists Chris Marriott of the University of Washington and Jobran Chebib of the University of Zürich recently posted a paper on the arXiv preprint server with the provocative title of “Finding a Mate With No Social Skills.” Well, that title gives many of us a lot more hope, doesn’t it? In fact, there is […]
Angry people for sociologists
Sociologists will find much data, useful or not, in the Angry people in local newspapers blog, which features photographs, culled from local newspapers, of angry people. The photo reproduced here is from the Bournemouth Echo, accompanied by the headline “Newsagent’s anger as big stores ‘kill his trade’“. Many of the other photos in the blog […]