The Universitat Jaume I and its Social Council have presented the book Benicàssim. Espacio y sociedad, a collective work directed by Vicent Ortells and edited by Manuel Chust, offering a comprehensive overview of the town’s historical, social and cultural development.

The publication brings together 32 specialists from the humanities and social sciences to analyse topics such as territory, society, economy and heritage from prehistory to the present day, providing a rigorous and multidisciplinary perspective.

Service quality improvement requires a holistic approach to analyze customer reviews and identify relevant, actionable issues. Researchers from South Korea have addressed this by developing a model that integrates service-specific aspects and customer actions, which are typically analyzed separately in text mining studies. They also validated the model using online customer reviews of a metaverse platform, demonstrating its potential to help service managers identify high-priority issues and allocate resources strategically.

In the study, the researchers drew on six surveys sent out between 2012 and 2022. They analysed a total of 43,000 responses from Swedish politicians at both national and local level. The researchers were then able to see that:

Among MPs, 36 per cent of the women avoided making public statements, compared with 20 per cent of the men.

36 per cent of MPs with immigrant backgrounds stated that they avoided speaking out in public, as against 26 per cent of those without immigrant backgrounds.

Among local politicians, 18 per cent of the women stated that they avoided speaking out in public, compared with 13 per cent of the men.

18 per cent of the local politicians from immigrant backgrounds stated that they avoided speaking out in public, as against 14 per cent of those without immigrant backgrounds.

Mona Sloane’s debut book, “Predicted: How AI Is Restructuring Social Life,” examines how artificial intelligence is quietly reshaping society through what she calls the “prediction paradigm.” The University of Virginia sociologist argues that AI should be understood not as an inevitable technological force, but as social infrastructure that people can collectively govern and reshape. Published by University of California Press, the book explores AI’s influence on everyday social relations, policy, and public life.