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 […]
Darwin of the Human Sciences: René Girard, 1923-2015
René Girard, whose academic career began in literary theory, and whose own theory of mimesis influenced people ranging from J.M. Coetzee to the founder of PayPal, died last week at his home at Stanford.
Indigenous Education’s Checkered History in the U.S.
As part of a lecture series that commemorates the historic school desegregation court case of Brown vs. The Topeka Board of Education, an expert in indigenous education reviewed the arc of education native Americans in public settings.
World Bank Unveils Its Own ‘Nudge Unit’
The Global Insights Initiative, with its intriguing acronym of GINI, will bring experimentation to the World Bank’s poverty-fighting efforts by incorporating behavioral and social science into its project design and evaluation.
Xavier’s Social Science College Loses Social Science in Name
Xavier University, a venerable Jesuit university in Cincinnati, Ohio serving more than 6,500 students, has renamed its existing College of Social Sciences, […]
Bridge-building Economist Angus Deaton Wins Nobel
The Nobel committee has awarded Princeton’s Angus Deaton ‘for his analysis of consumption, poverty, and welfare.’ But in fact, he was awarded for building bridges – between disciplines, between theory and reality, between people.
Bill That Seeks ‘National Interest’ Justifications for NSF Grants Advances
A bill that would require the National Science Foundation to justify, in writing, that every grant it makes is in the national interest and “worthy of federal funding” passed the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives this morning.
How Adolescents See Adults Seeing Adolescents’ Texting
The new volume of Sociological Studies of Children and Youth, entitled “Technology and Youth: Growing Up in a Digital World,” explores the […]
Facing Ugly Truths: A Sense About Science Lecture
Sense About Science’s Tracey Browne last week delivered ‘The Ugly Truth’ – an examination of “the need to encourage accountability and support scrutiny over research” to an audience of academics, researchers, policymakers and learned societies.
