Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
ESRC Launches 2017 Celebrating Impact Prize
For a fifth year, Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council is bestowing its Celebrating Impact Prize, six awards which recognize ESRC-affiliated researchers and other ESRC associates who have had outstanding economic or societal impact.
Prone to Pressure: How Stakeholders Endanger the Independence of Evaluations and What We Can Do Against it
It’s self-evident that the independence of any evaluation, and the integrity of its findings, is paramount. Yet there’s a a clear threat to the integrity of many evaluations: pressure from the stakeholders who hired the evaluator.
Black History and the Myth of Mary Seacole
In what he describes as the obverse of the Rhodes Must Fall campaign, Robert Dingwall argues that the secular sainthood conferred on Mary Seacole steps on historical scholarship and ignores more genuine exemplars.
Disparate Measures – Improving the Assessments of Perfectionism
A special issue of the Journal of Psychoeducational Assessment takes a comprehensive look at the history of measuring perfectionism and the strides being made in developing better ways to assess striving for excellence and its pernicious cousin, striving for perfection..
Inaugural Nine Dots Prize Seeks Answers to Wicked Problems
‘Are digital technologies making politics impossible?’ The inaugural Nine Dots Prize offers $100,000 for the best response as judged by leading international thinkers including Diane Coyle, Simon Goldhill, David Runciman and Saskia Sassen
In This Indebted World, Austerity May Be Forever
Political economist Mark Blyth argues that in a highly indebted world, austerity – introduced as an ‘emergency’ measure to save the economy, to right the fiscal ship – has becomes a permanent state of affairs.
Intellectual Autonomy, Intellectual Property and the New Enclosures
If the public institution is committed to public interest, then privatization of research and teaching cannot be allowed. Work done should be seen, heard and critiqued. Innovation in knowledge can come when people take away ideas from us, just as we did. Research should be made public, accountable and responsible. The data commons in public interest cannot be sacrificed at the altar of intellectual autonomy.
A Pioneer of Cognitive Science: Whitman Richards, 1932-2016
One of the first four graduates of MIT’s Department of Psychology and a pioneer for data-intensive studies of vision and cognition, Whitman Richards died on Sept. 16 at his home. He was 84.
