EUSOC is an Interdisciplinary International School of postgraduate studies in the social sciences at Faculty of Social Studies, Masaryk University

The aim of the school is:

- to equip post-graduate students with excellent theoretical, empiric-analytical and methodological skills in advanced social science research;
- to give post-graduate students of social sciences useful feedback to their thesis from eminent European professors;
- to give post-graduate students an opportunity to compare their work with students from other European universities;
- to establish contact with the best qualified specialists from European Universities;
- to produce highly qualified specialists and analysts;
- to secure the integration of Central and Eastern European Graduate Schools into the wider networks of postgraduate studies.

EUSOC holds seminars for PhD students twice a year. Post-graduate students participated in these seminars have an opportunity:
- to presents the partial results of their thesis;
- to get feedback from eminent professors and other students;
- to judge the other students presentations and results of their research.

Participation at the EUSOC seminar enables PhD students to improve the quality of their thesis and could be a useful step in their study and research route.

The Family Tree of Science

To show how information builds up and flows among scientific disciplines, Columbia University computer scientist W. Bradford Paley, along with colleagues Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans, categorized about 800,000 scholarly papers into 776 areas of scientific study (shown as colored circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by other papers. Paley then grouped those nodes by color under 23 broader areas of scientific inquiry, from mental health to fluid mechanics.

1 Social Scientists Don’t Do Chemistry

The bigger a node is, the more papers it contains. Heavily cited papers appear in more than one node. Black lines connect any nodes that contain the same papers; the darker a link is, the more papers the connected nodes have in common. These links create the structure of the map and tend to pull similar scientific disciplines closer to one another.

2 Birds of a Feather

Paley refers to his map as a “feather boa”—the feathers being gently waving strings of key words that uniquely define each node’s particular subject matter. In tiny type, the word string “percutaneous tracheostomy, material review, autoimmune pancreatitis, and dialysis catheter,” for example, swirls off a node in the infectious disease area. Unlike the carefully calculated placement of the nodes, the team’s arrangement of the word strings on the page was left mostly to aesthetics.

3 The Road to Knowledge

The map doesn’t show the road to breakthrough discoveries, but it can be used to determine which areas of science are most closely connected to one another, as well as which are the most—and least—intellectually vital and productive. Advances in mathematics are few. Medicine, on the other hand, dominates the lower half of the map.

4 No Science Is an Island

…except maybe organic chemistry. One might assume that this bane of premed students is closely tied to medicine, but the map shows that the route from organic chemistry to health care requires more than one pit stop through fields like analytical chemistry, physical chemistry, biology, and even earth sciences. In fact, all of chemistry is a bit of an inside job. The links between the nodes of different chemistry disciplines are darker than other links because the disciplines tend to contain the same papers.

5 The Friendster Element

On the map, computer science is linked more closely to social sciences like psychology and sociology than to applied physics. “If you trust it for a minute, it does make intuitive sense,” Paley says. Social networks like Friendster depend heavily on software programs, while social scientists frequently rely on computers for statistical analysis.

Folded rock in Namib desert (Southern Africa)

When Einstein wrote his general theory of relativity in 1915, he found a new way to describe gravity. It was not a force, as Sir Isaac Newton had supposed, but a consequence of the distortion of space and time, conceived together in his theory as ’space-time’. Any object distorts the fabric of space-time and the bigger it is, the greater the effect.

Just as a bowling ball placed on a trampoline stretches the fabric and causes it to sag, so planets and stars warp space-time - a phenomenon known as the ‘geodetic effect’. A marble moving along the trampoline will be drawn inexorably towards the ball.

Thus the planets orbiting the Sun are not being pulled by the Sun; they are following the curved space-time deformation caused by the Sun. The reason the planets never fall into the Sun is because of the speed at which they are travelling. According to the theory, matter and energy distort space-time, curving it around themselves.

Can Social Scientists Win the War On Terrorism?

As the situation in Vietnam deteriorated in the the 1960s, the Pentagon jump-started a series of research efforts aimed at using the social sciences to help the military. Even the JASONS, a group of elite scientists known for providing technical advice, considered bringing in social scientists. It's a complicated history, but it's safe to say that these programs did not have a happy ending.

But now, the social sciences are back, and DARPA, among other parts of the Pentagon, is saying that it's going to take advantages of large advances made in these disciplines to help predict, for example, who might join a terrorist or insurgent group.

Speaking today at DARPATech, Sean O'Brien, DARPA's program manager for "computational social science" gave an upbeat speech. He told the audience that such research, among other things, will help predict "what are the likely outcomes from executing different options."

He says the "increasing sophistication of agent based social simulations" combined with the "explosion of new data sources" means we are on the verge of breakthroughs in computational models for the social sciences. "We may revolutionize the social sciences along the way," he adds.

Here's how it works: Basically you collect a database of what everyone in the world believes (down to tribes and social groups), then you create mathematical models to determine how those beliefs translate into actions. Sound hard? It is. In defense of such work, those involved say they are talking about rigorous testing of the models, and likely everyone would agree that having more data about social groups in Iraq would benefit the military. Critics of this work, however, say that human interactions are way too complicated to predict and relying on models is delusional.

“They are smoking something they shouldn't be," retired Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper told Science Magazine recently about such work. "Only those who don’t know how the real world works will be suckers for this stuff.”

Ouch. This is the same Gen. Van Riper, by the way, who outsmarted the blue force in a a netcentric wargame by using motorcycle messengers. All theories, it turns out, have their limits.