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The author reflects on the 50th anniversary of the periodical "Nationalities Papers" in 2022. The anniversary will be celebrated by the Association for the Study of Nationalities at the Annual World Convention. He cites the commitment of the periodical to publish research related to contemporary debates and social scientific fields. He expresses his gratitude to Katrina Swartz for her contribution to the periodical as content manager and welcomes Kayla Riddleberger as her successor.

Collaboration among scientists has a major influence on scientific progress. Such collaboration often results from scientific meetings, where scientists gather to present and discuss their research and to meet potential collaborators. However, most scientific meetings have inherent biases, such as the availability of research funding or the selection bias of professional societies that make it difficult to study the effect of the meeting per se on scientific productivity. To evaluate the effects of scientific meetings on collaboration and progress independent of these biases, we conducted a study of the annual symposia held by the International Milk Genomics Consortium (IMGC) over a 12-year period. In our study, we conducted permutation testing to analyze the effectiveness of the IMGC in facilitating collaboration and productivity in a community of milk scientists who were meeting attendees relative to non-attendees. Using the number of co-authorships on published papers as a measure of collaboration, our analysis revealed that scientists who attended the symposium were associated with more collaboration than were scientists who did not attend. Furthermore, we evaluated the scientific progress of consortium attendees by analyzing publication rate and article impact. We found that IMGC attendees, in addition to being more collaborative, were also more productive and influential than were non-attendees who published in the same field. The results of our study suggest that the annual symposium encouraged interactions among disparate scientists and increased research productivity, exemplifying the positive effect of scientific meetings on both collaboration and progress. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction to articles in the issue is presented on topics including the need for systems science to overcome its fragmented condition and to deepen its scientific foundations, phenomenological foundations of systems engineering and systems science, and principles from humanities that have relevance for thinking about systems.

A conference paper about the General Anthropology Division (GAD) Distinguished Lecture delivered at the American Anthropological Association meeting held in 2014 on the production of anthropology, is presented. Topics include presentation of living cultural heritage, exhibition of material culture, and saving of endangered cultural heritage.

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including the binary code for functional systems sustainable development, the sustainable skills for work in the digital age, and the business networks.

The 2015 workshops at the International AAAI Conference on Web and Social Media were held on May 26 in Oxford, UK. The workshop program included seven workshops, including Auditing Algorithms from the Outside: Methods and Implications; Digital Placemaking: Augmenting Physical Places with Contextual Social Data; Modeling and Mining Temporal Interactions; Religion on Social Media; Standards and Practices in Large-Scale Social Media Research; the ICWSM Science Slam; and Wikipedia, a Social Pedia: Research Challenges and Opportunities. This article contains the written reports of six of the workshops. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article calls for abstracts on topics related to the history of the human, behavioral, and social sciences for the European Society for the History of the Human Sciences' Seminar for the History of Science to be held on July 12 to 14, 2017 at the University of Bari Aldo Moro, Italy. The conference will reportedly focus on several topics including the history of ESHHS, history and new trends in human sciences' historiography, and laboratory science and professionalization.

The article presents an interview with Allan Kellehear exploring the benefits and challenges of caring for a deceased person's body at home. Topics include appointed to the Chair of Palliative Care at La Trobe University and created now understood to be the public health approach to palliative care; and primarily obsessed with symptom management and health services research.

An introduction to articles published within the issue is presented in which the editor discusses topics on the future of humanistic, the role music school as a social ecological system to enhance community connectivity and resilience, and artificial intelligence.

For centuries the autopsy has been a key technology in Western culture for generating clinical/medical as well as cultural knowledge about bodies. This article hails the anato-medical autopsy as a generative trope and apparatus in reconfiguring Western humanist knowledge of bodies and bodies of knowledge and takes up the possibilities of working with the concept of autopsy in disrupting qualitative research methodology. In doing so, the article outlines and returns (to) a series of research-creation experiments assembled at an academic conference, which engaged with the challenges for social science knowledge laid out by Law's (2004) After Method book. Our research-creation experiments centred autopsy as a theoretical-methodological gaze and apparatus for de-composing qualitative research methodology by engaging with post-humanist and new material feminist thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is increasing awareness of the need to meaningfully engage society in efforts to tackle marine conservation challenges. Public perceptions research (PPR) in a marine conservation context provides tools to see the sea through the multiple lenses with which society interprets both the marine environment and marine conservation efforts. Traditionally, PPR is predominantly a social science which has considerable interdisciplinarity, owing to the variety of disciplines which contribute to its delivery and benefit from its outputs. Similarly, the subjects of a marine application of PPR are diverse, and relate to public perceptions of any marine component or activity. Evidence shows this is a growing area of science, and the paper presents a qualitative approach to addressing key questions to inform the continuing development of this field through a workshop held at the Third International Marine Conservation Congress 2014. Key findings are discussed under the themes of 1) the benefits of PPR to marine conservation; 2) priorities for PPR to support marine conservation; 3) making PPR accessible to marine practitioners and policy makers; and 4) interdisciplinary research collaboration to deliver PPR. The workshop supported the development of a framework which illustrates: the key conditions which can support PPR to take place; the types of research which PPR can be used to address; the applications of PPR findings for marine conservation; and the types of marine conservation benefits which can be delivered. As PPR gains an increasing presence in marine conservation, it is hoped that this discussion and framework will support researchers and practitioners to identify opportunities for PPR to deliver benefits, and to work together to achieve these. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents information on international serials and electronic resource management which includes library schools, continuing education and library-orientated organizations. The article also discusses the awards and grants given by EBSCO Information Services and the recommendations provided by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO).

This essay considers the boundaries between the sociology of medicine and social medicine and the reasons distinctions are maintained between the two disciplines. To investigate, the essay asks what constitutes the distinction between social sciences and social medicine, and goes on to question historical distinctions of how foundational sociology is to social medicine; how much autonomy the sociology of medicine should have; contemporary challenges to the relation between sociology and social medicine; and the status of ethics, both traditionally and contemporarily, between sociology and social medicine. In the face of increasing emphases on interdisciplinarity, this essay offers a note of caution by demonstrating how the antagonism between sociology and social medicine is important as a site that produces a necessary polemic. Ultimately, I argue that the social sciences and social medicine are linked in a productive relationship that instates and reinstates their respective functions and values in a process that validates the practice of modern medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Social Science-Environmental Health Collaborations Conference in May 2016 was a unique gathering of scholars from the social sciences and environmental health sciences, government agency professionals, community organizers and activists, and students. Conference participants described the research and practice of environmental public health as done through a transdisciplinary lens and with a community-based participatory research/community-engaged research model. NIEHS’ role in supporting such work has helped create a growing number of social and environmental health scientists who cross boundaries as they work with each other and with community-based organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents abstracts on medical topics which include education and training in behavioral medicine, e-health interventions in public health, and advanced concepts in high quality randomized clinical trials.

The scientific community faces numerous challenges in achieving gender equality among its participants. One method of highlighting the contributions made by female scientists is through their selection as featured speakers in symposia held at the conferences of professional societies. Because they are specially invited, symposia speakers obtain a prestigious platform from which to display their scientific research, which can elevate the recognition of female scientists. We investigated the number of female symposium speakers in two professional societies (the Society of Conservation Biology (SCB) from 1999 to 2015, and the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists (ASIH) from 2005 to 2015), in relation to the number of female symposium organizers. Overall, we found that 36.4% of symposia organizers and 31.7% of symposia speakers were women at the Society of Conservation Biology conferences, while 19.1% of organizers and 28% of speakers were women at the American Society of Ichthyologists and Herpetologists conferences. For each additional female organizer at the SCB and ASIH conferences, there was an average increase of 95% and 70% female speakers, respectively. As such, we found a significant positive relationship between the number of women organizing a symposium and the number of women speaking in that symposium. We did not, however, find a significant increase in the number of women speakers or organizers per symposium over time at either conference, suggesting a need for revitalized efforts to diversify our scientific societies. To further those ends, we suggest facilitating gender equality in professional societies by removing barriers to participation, including assisting with travel, making conferences child-friendly, and developing thorough, mandatory Codes of Conduct for all conferences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Participation in conferences is an important part of every scientific career. Conferences provide an opportunity for a fast dissemination of latest results, discussion and exchange of ideas, and broadening of scientists’ collaboration network. The decision to participate in a conference depends on several factors like the location, cost, popularity of keynote speakers, and the scientist’s association with the community. Here we discuss and formulate the problem of discovering how a scientist’s previous participation affects her/his future participations in the same conference series. We develop a stochastic model to examine scientists’ participation patterns in conferences and compare our model with data from six conferences across various scientific fields and communities. Our model shows that the probability for a scientist to participate in a given conference series strongly depends on the balance between the number of participations and non-participations during his/her early connections with the community. An active participation in a conference series strengthens the scientist’s association with that particular conference community and thus increases the probability of future participations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The author responds to the journal's book review symposium on his book "The Better Angels of Our Nature: A History of Violence and Humanity." Topics include his reactions to how reviewers described the book as ideological, his denial of such ideological allegations by stating that his arguments are based on empirical data, and a reference to the preface of his book wherein he mentions the diverse datasets he used to show historical declines in violence.

The article discusses the symposium The Death of the Secret: The Public and Private in Anthropology that was held at the Tivoli Palacio de Seteais in Sintra, Portugal from March 14-20, 2014. The symposium aimed to analyze the public and private life's interrelationship and features issues including secret in social settings and public institutions, secrecy and transparency, and politics of transparency.

The article offers information on the Academic Business World International Conference and International Conference on Learning and Administration in Higher Education that was held from May 24-26, 2017 in Nashville, Tennessee. Topics of the conferences include inclusiveness in research, findings in the processes involved in learning and administration in the academic environment of higher education and reference disciplines within the social sciences.

The author highlights various events and developments in the field of psychiatry in India. Topics discussed include progression of neuroscience and behavioral sciences, advancements in brain imaging, and addiction psychiatry notably addiction to electronic gadgets. A brief history of Indian Psychiatric Society (IPS) is also included.