When Popularity Meets Position

Popularity information is usually thought to have a great impact on individual’s decision making and choice. However, most of the websites are displaying products by its popularity. This could potentially result in the popularity effect being overestimated because popularity is confounded with position when they are sorted in the descending order. In this paper, we try to fill this gap in the literature by bridging together popularity effect and position effect to understand whether popularity effect overcomes position effect. By conducting a series of lab experiments, our results suggest that popularity effect is overestimated in prior studies, and its effect becomes less salient when we consider the position effect. Our results have both theoretical implication and practical implication for the website designer

Seductive Solutions, Inspiration, Easy-to-Remember Phrases, and Ambiguity: Why Is the Idea of Active Ageing so Successful?

The idea of active ageing has become one of the most influential perspectives in modern gerontology, social work, and social policy. This paper discusses factors that helped to establish active ageing as a successful theoretical concept that has significantly influenced contemporary social representations of ageing and has a practical impact on social work and policy. The perspective of the philosophy of social science is employed to explain what makes the idea of active ageing so attractive despite the remaining confusions concerning what “activity‘ and “ageing actively‘ means. The paper aims to answer the following question: What makes the concept of active ageing so successful? It draws upon the work of Murray Davis and her insight into the key aspects that make sociological theory “seductive.‘ The paper analyzes in what ways the concept of active ageing fulfills the specific features that, according to Davis, determine the success of social theories. Simultaneously, the paper critically evaluates the ways the idea of active ageing is translated into ageing policy. The case of Czech Republic is used to illustrate the problematic aspect of active ageing policies as well as the specific rhetoric that makes the idea of active ageing so attractive for a broad spectrum of disciplines as well as for social policy

Book Review: Bonnet Strings: An Amish Woman\u27s Ties to Two Worlds and Others

Excerpt: In Entering the Wild, Janzen narrates the process of crafting these hymns; and I found this chapter, titled “Three Women and the Lost Coin: How Three Women Found Me,” the memoir’s most compelling. In 1990, Janzen was asked to be on a committee to recreate a Mennonite hymnal that might “nourish . . . congregations for twenty years or more.” The committee, wanting to include several hymns honoring the feminine characteristics of God, turned to Janzen. Janzen describes encountering the work of three mystic women—Julian of Norwich, Hildegard von Bingen, and Mechtild of Magdeburg—and nding there “the possibilities of devotion and celebration that opened windows to my own imagination.

2012 Grantmakers Information Technology Survey Report

Together the Technology Affinity Group (TAG) and Grants Managers Network (GMN) conducted an information technology survey of grantmaking organizations in July 2012. This survey serves as a follow?up to similar surveys TAG has conducted in collaboration with the Council on Foundation (The Council) in April 2003, July 2005, and June 2007, and then independently in 2010