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 […]
Why It’s So Hard to Reform Peer Review
Robert J. Marks, the director of the Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence, argues that academic reformers are battling numerical laws that govern how incentives work. His counsel? Know your enemy!
Why Open Access Will Boost Publisher Profits
Shaun Khoo argues that whilst a shift to gold (pay to publish) open access would deliver wider access to research, the lack of price sensitivity amongst academics presents a risk that they will be locked into a new escalating pay to publish system that could potentially be more costly to researchers than the previous subscription model.
When They Connect with Researchers, are Practitioners Time-Sensitive?
Traditionally one of the biggest obstacles to building relationships between researchers and practitioners is different time scales — nonprofits’ “focus is urgent, immediate, and often in response to events…moving quickly and loudly” whereas “academics work to a different rhythm”.
Making Text Data Accessible for Social Science
More textual data than ever before are available to computational social scientists—be it in the form of digitized books, communication traces on social media platforms, or digital scientific articles. Researchers in academia and industry increasingly use text data to understand human behavior and to measure patterns in language.
NSF Latest U.S. Agency to Scrutinize Foreign Role in Research
The U.S. National Science Foundation has followed other research-based government agencies in trying to ring-fence American research from collaborative and acquisitive foreign actors. Could they mean China?
Impact and Assessing Public Engagement
Promoting public engagement with research has become a core mission for research funders. However, the extent to which researchers can assess the impact of this engagement is often under-analysed and limited to success stories. Drawing on the example of development aid, Marco J Haenssgen argues we need to widen the parameters for assessing public engagement and begin to develop a skills base for the external evaluation of public engagement work.
Why Does the British Labour Party Struggle with Antisemitism?
Britain’s Labour Party historically had strong ties to the idea and later the state of Israel. Now a host of factors are challenging the traditional connection to Zionism and even raising concerns of antisemitism.
No More Tradeoffs: The Era of Big Data Analysis Has Come
For centuries, being a scientist has meant learning to live with limited data. People only share so much on a survey form. But, at least in the area of text analysis (AKA content analysis, or natural language processing), the old limits are crumbling
