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This article examines whether the nanotechnology industry is engaging in the wider social debate surrounding it, through an analysis of its online communication practices. This is an important topic to study, given the nascent nature of the technology and the concerns among proponents to avoid the backlash biotech companies faced over genetically modified (GM) crops. Applying a new web crawling tool, the study captures and codes the hyperlinks of key nanotechnology companies according to their social and technical orientation, and status as producers, disseminators, and commercializers. The links are mapped and the prominence of social and technical issues is assessed. Finally, the home pages of sites are content analyzed to contextualize the presentation of the debate. The results show that although parts of the scientific community may have accepted the case for more engagement with the social aspects of nanotech, commercial developers are more reluctant to do so, at least based on their online presence.

Social network services such as Facebook provide new data for social science research into, for example, the role of individual characteristics in friendship formation and the diffusion of tastes in social networks. This article assesses the potential of social network services for social science research in two ways. First, it is argued that social scientists conduct hyperlink analysis differently to applied physicists and researchers from the library and information sciences, and face constraints (relating to theory, methods and availability of appropriate tools) that are not encountered in the other disciplinary approaches. However, the constraints regarding theory and methods are less likely to be faced by researchers of online social networks, and for this reason, the rise of Facebook and other similar services is a potential boon for empirical social scientists interested in networks. The second part of the article focuses specifically on the availability of research tools, and it is argued that social network services may eventually serve as e-Research platforms for delivering social network analysis tools.

We present theory and evidence to suggest that, in the context of analysing global poverty, the EKS approach to estimating purchasing power parities yields more appropriate international comparison of real incomes than the Geary-Khamis approach. Our analysis of the 1996 International Comparison Project data confirms that the Geary-Khamis approach leads to substantial overstatement of the relative incomes of the world's poorest nations and to misleading comparisons of poverty rates across regions. Similar bias is found in the Penn World Table which uses a modified version of the Geary-Khamis approach. Estimation of both the level of global poverty and its location is very sensitive to the choice of index. The EKS index of real income is much closer to being a true index of economic welfare and is therefore to be preferred for assessment of global poverty.

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