Social, Behavioral Scientists Eligible to Apply for NSF S-STEM Grants
Solicitations are now being sought for the National Science Foundation’s Scholarships in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics program, and in an unheralded […]
Congress cleared the final fiscal year 2018 Omnibus Appropriations Act, and the president signed the measure into law, narrowly averting another government shutdown. The House and Senate approved separate several financial services bills related to the Dodd-Frank Act. The House also approved several regulatory relief bills, and the “Right to Try” Act. The Senate also approved and cleared for the president’s signature the “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act.”
The 2020 U.S. Census is still two years away, but experts and civil rights groups are already disputing the results. Professor Emily Merchant’s research on the international history of demography demonstrates that the question of how to equitably count the population is not new, nor is it unique to the United States.
While they aren’t as unpopular as politicians or journalists, people who work with statistics come in for their share of abuse. “Figures lie and liars figure,” goes one maxim. And don’t forget, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” But some people are the good guys, doing their best to combat the flawed or dishonest use of numbers. One of those good guys is the guest of this Social Science Bites podcast, David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge and current president of the Royal Statistical Society.
The recent revelation that Cambridge Analytica was able to acquire the Facebook data led to a surge of interest and questions around what companies do with people’s data. Amidst all of this, little attention has been paid to the feelings of those whose data are used, shared, and acted upon.
How do you teach someone to be entrepreneurial? That’s the challenge presented to Heidi Neck, the Jeffry A. Timmons Professor of Entrepreneurial Studies at Babson College and director of the Babson Entrepreneur Experience Lab, every day. We asked her some questions in the wake of her new textbook on those issues won an award.
UPDATED: Many academic groups that use U.S Census data for research fear the negative effects of including a question about citizenship on the 2020 count. “Adding a new citizenship question to the 2020 Census would destroy any chance for an accurate count, discard years of careful research, and increase costs significantly,” wrote The Leadership Conference, an umbrella group.
In the latest iteration of a survey series she’s been running for four decades, Carol Tenopir aims to assess the value of access to scholarly journals by examining patterns of use and reading. Your input is sought.
Cambridge Analytica’s approach to crunching social media data represents a step change in how analytics can today be used as a tool to generate insights – and to exert influence.