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 […]
Britain and Europe: Tragedy or Farce?
The result of the second UK referendum on membership of the European Union appeared immediately as a tragedy, says Robert Dingwall. It has rapidly degenerated into a farce, which may yet have tragic consequences.
Response to Nehring: What’s the Point of British Sociology?
Rebutting Daniel Nehring’s recent post asking if sociology still matters in Britain, Robert Dingwall responds that sociology does have a good story to tell about itself, even in the age of austerity.
Zika – What Are the Real Lessons from Ebola?
Another disease in the tropics has the World Health Organisation in a lather, and again biomedicine’s response will not be all that useful in the short term. Social science can help now to address the underlying problems that help the Zika virus to spread — if policymakers will listen.
Common Rule Revision – The Ethics Police Fight Back
Revisions to the U.S. government’s regulations on ethical treatment of human research subjects that would exempt some experiments from direct oversight by institutional review boards are facing pushback from paternalistic guardians, says our Robert Dingwall, who don’t seem to believe subjects are competent to make decisions on their own.
Deregulating Social Science Research Ethics – Clipping the Wings of IRBs?
The Federal Register is surely not everybody’s bedtime reading. It is where the US Government formally publishes certain official documents, including advance […]
Suffragette – More than a Feminist Movie
With most works of art looking at the past, the real focus is the present. The new movie ‘Suffragette,’ writes Robert Dingwall, invites us to think about the consequences of political systems that are supposedly democratic but systematically exclude many voices.
Malaria Vaccine – Great Science But What’s the Point?
Bully for the researchers who have developed a vaccine can build resistance against some instances of malaria, says Robert Dingwall. But before the WHO recommends for its adoption, he suggests a harder look at user-centered design and cost-benefit analysis may be in order.
Ebola: WHO and the Consequences of Ignoring Social Science
A new report from the World Health Organization on the response to the African Ebola outbreak backs up what our Robert Dingwall has been writing all along — by downplaying social science lives have been lost. The question now is whether a new WHO can improve.
