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 […]
The Science Media Centre at 20
The UK’s Science Media Centre (SMC) is an internationally admired, and occasionally emulated, model for facilitating interactions between the science community and […]
Not Rewriting the History of the Pandemic
As we pass two years from the beginnings of the pandemic, many commentators are scrambling to distance themselves from their initial responses, […]
Lockdown is Another Triumph of Populism Over Science – Most People Have Behaved Rationally So Far
By popular request, I am posting this as a free-access version of one of the first commentary pieces that I wrote for […]
(Belated) New Year Thoughts on the Barriers to Ending the Pandemic
A year ago, we in the UK were approaching Christmas and New Year with quiet optimism as the first COVID vaccines rolled […]
COVID-19, Face Masks and Research Integrity
Robert Dingwall asks if claims about the effectiveness of face masks in stopping COVID consistent with current standards of research integrity.
Has UK Sociology Marginalized Itself on Some of the Great Issues of Our Time?
Anything may be justified in the name of biosecurity, suggests an alarmed Robert Dingwall. This emotional manipulation spills into the wider worlds of politics, science and, indeed, sociology.
Bioethicists are Supposed to Stand Up for Bodily Autonomy in the Pandemic. Why Aren’t They?
“A leading association of bioethicists has come squarely behind the idea of mandated vaccination. A statement issued by the Association of Bioethics […]
COVID-19, Masks and Magical Thinking
The state of the face mask debate is rather as if Galileo had published his account of the heliocentric universe and then included a paragraph at the end telling the reader to ignore all the evidence because the Church had declared that everything revolved around the Earth.
