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Over a century ago, William James proposed that people search through memory much as they rummage through a house looking for lost keys. Like other animal species search space, we scour our environments for territory, food, mates, and other goals, including information. We search for items in visual scenes, for historical facts and shopping deals on internet sites, for new friends to add to our social networks, and for solutions to novel problems. In all these spaces, what we find is governed by how we search and by the structure of the environment. This book explores how we search for resources in our minds and in the world. The authors examine the evolution and adaptive functions of search; the neural underpinnings of goal-searching mechanisms across species; psychological models of search in memory, decision making, and visual scenes; and applications of search behavior in highly complex environments such as the internet. As the range of information, social contacts, and goods continues to expand, how well we are able to search and successfully find what we seek becomes increasingly important. At the same time, search offers cross-disciplinary insights to the scientific study of human cognition and its evolution. Combining perspectives from researchers across numerous domains, this book furthers our understanding of the relationship between search and the human mind.

Before Fukushima, the most notorious large-scale nuclear accident the world had seen was Chernobyl in 1986. The fallout from Chernobyl covered vast areas in the Northern Hemisphere, especially in Europe. Belarus, at the time a Soviet republic, suffered heavily: nearly a quarter of its territory was covered with long-lasting radionuclides. Yet the damage from the massive fallout was largely imperceptible; contaminated communities looked exactly like non-contaminated ones. It could only be known through constructed representations of it. The book explores how we know what we know about Chernobyl, describing how the consequences of a nuclear accident were made invisible. The analysis sheds valuable light on how we deal with other modern hazards—toxins or global warming—that are largely imperceptible to the human senses. The book describes the production of invisibility of Chernobyl’s consequences in Belarus—practices that limit public attention to radiation and make its health effects impossible to observe. Just as mitigating radiological contamination requires infrastructural solutions, the production of invisibility also involves infrastructural efforts, from categorical work of redefining the scope and nature of the accident’s consequences to reshaping infrastructures for research and radiation protection. The book finds historical fluctuations in recognition, tracing varyingly successful efforts to conceal or reveal Chernobyl’s consequences at different levels—among affected populations, scientists, government, media, and international organizations. The production of invisibility, the book argues, is a function of power relations.

Since Malthus, the great contrast between Europe (England) and Asia (China) in marriage patterns and mechanisms, and household formation and family systems has been underlined by demographers and anthropologists. In Europe, late marriages, high celibacy rates, preventive checks, individualism – in Asia, early marriages, universal marriage, positive checks, parental authority (e.g. Malthus, Hajnal, Wrigley/Schofield, Macfarlane, Wolf, Skinner). This book challenges the rhetoric of an East-West dichotomy in marriage patterns and mechanisms, because it implies a picture that is too simplistic, based mainly on studies of social norms and aggregate statistics. This book argues for the EAP approach to the study of pre-industrial marriage: comparison of local populations in Asia (China, Japan) and Europe (Belgium, Italy, Sweden) for which individual-level longitudinal data are available, using the same framework, models and methods of analysis (event history analysis). In relation to the East-West binary, the EAP findings confirm the previous picture of general differences in marriage pattern and family system. However, when studied at the individual-level, great similarity in human behavior across study populations was found. For some variables effects were universal (sex, age, duration of widowhood), while for others effects indicated similarity given the differences in family systems. Little support was found for the existence of a Malthusian preventive check exclusive for Europe: there was no marriage response to fluctuation in food prices in the lower socioeconomic status groups in the European locations, and individuals from more prosperous families married earlier in all study populations.

This book considers the question of how the direct involvement of social scientists in the practices they study can lead to the production of interesting sociological knowledge. It draws together two activities that are often seen as belonging to different realms: intervening in practices and furthering sociological understanding of them. The common separation of these domains partly stems from disciplinary self-understandings within sociology as either ‘detached’ or ‘engaged’. Situated Intervention proposes that this debate is unproductive for discussing the role of social sciences in relation to their fields. Philosophers of science such as Ian Hacking have argued that natural sciences benefited tremendously from broadening their scholarly mode from theorizing about the world to intervening through experiments Adhering to an objectivist and theorizing image of scholarship within sociology thereby risks loosing a mode of knowledge production that has proven highly productive in the natural sciences. Furthermore, experimental interventions prove relevant for discussions about the normativity of sociological research. These matters are explored by analyzing organizational change projects in healthcare: the development of a hemophilia care center, pathways for hematology and oncology at an outpatient clinic, redesigning oncology care and elective surgery in sixteen hospitals, and evaluating a quality improvement collaborative in long-term care. These experiments invariably lead to the surprising production of sociological knowledge as well as producing novel normativities. The analysis thereby shows that, through situated intervention, sociology not only has more to offer to the practices it studies, but also has more to learn from it.

Digital technology is changing everything about modern sports. Athletes and coaches rely on digital data to monitor and enhance performance. Officials use tracking systems to augment their judgment in what is an increasingly superhuman field of play. Spectators tune in to live sports through social media, or even through virtual reality. Audiences now act as citizen journalists whose collective shared data expands the places in which we consume sports news. Sport 2.0 examines the convergence of sports and digital cultures, examining not only how it affects our participation in sport but also how it changes our experience of life online. This convergence redefines how we think of about our bodies, the social function of sports, and it transforms the populations of people who are playing. Sport 2.0 describes a world in which the rise of competitive computer game playing—e-sports—challenges and invigorates the social mandate of both sports and digital culture. It also examines media change at the Olympic Games, as an exemplar of digital innovation in sports. Furthermore, the book offers a detailed look at the social media footprint of the 2012 London Games, discussing how organizers, sponsors, media, and activists responded to the world’s largest media event.

This book provides an account of community through the lens of the politics of technology. That is, how do the artifacts, infrastructures, sociotechnical systems and techniques that constitute everyday life influence the answer to “who gets what community, when and how?” This book responds with a conceptualization of community as a multidimensional phenomenon, which aids in the illustration of how different techniques, artifacts, organizational technologies and infrastructures encourage or constrain the enactment of the various dimensions of communality. Later chapters build upon this analysis, asking “How might everyday technologies better support a thicker practice of community life?” In order to describe how more community-supportive technological societies might be possible, the various social barriers to thick communitarian technologies are explored. In other words, what policies, subsidies, institutional arrangements and patterns of thought would need to change in order to enable more citizens to strive toward thicker local communities? The book ends with a proposal for an “intelligent trial-and-error” approach to governing innovation so that any risks posed to thick community are reduced. Intelligent trial-and-error, however, is not merely a means for ensuring that technical innovations are properly assessed prior to adoption according to their effects on community life but also constitutes a set of strategies that can help assure the success of communitarian technologies. This book, as a result, contributes to the “reconstructivist” school of science and technology studies and extends the political philosophy of technology toward the good of community.

This book views technology in Africa from an African perspective. Technology does not always originate in the laboratory in a Western-style building but also in the society in the forest, in the crop field, and in other places where knowledge is made and turned into practical outcomes. African creativities are found in African mobilities. The book shows the movement of people as not merely conveyances across space but transient workspaces. Taking indigenous hunting in Zimbabwe as one example, it explores African philosophies of mobilities as spiritually guided and of the forest as a sacred space. Viewing the hunt as guided mobility, the book considers interesting questions of what constitutes technology under regimes of spirituality. It describes how African hunters extended their knowledge traditions to domesticate the gun, how European colonizers, with no remedy of their own, turned to indigenous hunters for help in combating the deadly tsetse fly, and examines how wildlife conservation regimes have criminalized African hunting rather than enlisting hunters (and their knowledge) as allies in wildlife sustainability. The hunt, the book states, is one of many criminalized knowledges and practices to which African people turn in times of economic or political crisis. It argues that these practices need to be decriminalized and examined as technologies of everyday innovation with a view toward constructive engagement, innovating with Africans rather than for them.