Could Distributed Peer Review Better Decide Grant Funding?
The landscape of academic grant funding is notoriously competitive and plagued by lengthy, bureaucratic processes, exacerbated by difficulties in finding willing reviewers. Distributed […]
Divining What a ‘Digital Truth Serum’ Can Reveal to Us
The underlying conceit of economist and data scientist Seth Stephens-Davidowitz’s work, whether in his new book, on the op-ed pages of the New York Times or in the classroom, or on campus, is that people’s search activity on a search engine reveals much more about them than do surveys, polls, or other social media
Mitigation: The Best Kind of Rainy Day Savings
Mitigation enables people and communities to prevent disasters or at least reduce their impacts on the loss of life and property. And while mitigation is often presented as a mission for engineering, there is a wide scope for social and behavioral preparation explains veteran public policy researcher in a new paper on mitigating flooding catastrophes.
Ann Sloan Devlin on Timeless and Dynamic Research Design
New technology has, and is, changing a lot of the mechanics of social and behavioral science research, but how much is the underlying enterprise itself changing as a result? This is a key question Ann Sloan Devlin, author of the newly released ‘The Research Experience: Planning, Conducting, and Reporting Research,’ addresses in this interview.
Carrying the Torch For a Classic Political Science Text
An award that honors enduring contribution from a political science text this year has gone to ‘ Politics in the American States.’
Greece’s Honest Statistician Pays Price for Ethics
In a case that outrages statisticians and partisans of good government, a Greek appeals court has convicted the former president of the Hellenic Statistical Authority of violation of duty for his actions in recalculating national statistics and showing that Greece’s financial situation was much more dire than had been advertised.
House Considers Flat Budget for NSF
Advocates want $8 billion for NSF, and President Trump wants less than $7 billion. House appropriators seem to be navigating a path through the middle.
Sociologist of the Spiritual: Peter Berger, 1929-2017
Peter Berger, a sociologist of religion, unlikely culture warrior and founder of the Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs on Boston University, has died at age 88.
The Theorist of Mass Communication: Denis McQuail, 1935-2017
Denis McQuail, the British social scientist and foundational theorist in mass communication both through his scholarship and his hugely influential textbook ‘McQuail’s Mass Communication Theory,’ died at age 82.
