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 Sociologist of Informal Labour: Sharit Bhowmik, 1948-2016
Sociologist Sharit Kumar Bhowmik, best known for his work on informal labor and most specifically on street vendors in India, has died.
Viewing the Evolution of Social Impact Through US Political Science
What role should social scientists play in society? Louisa Hotson here explores the evolution of the social sciences through four periods in the history of political science in the United States, each with different implications for how social science makes a difference.
Seeking a Better Way to Evaluate Teachers
Teacher observations are both costly and time intensive, but perhaps it’s time to invest in better teacher evaluation to get better student results. So argues Robert Pianta, who has personally helped develop some measures that might achieve such high hopes, in a an article in the journal PIBBS..
Is It Genre – or Valence and Depth – You Like About a Tune?
Sorting music by genre often says more about the sorter than it does about the tune. A new system developed by an interdisciplinary team has come up with a three-dimension test for determining what someone will like apart from the label.
The Stern Review of the REF – An Economist Against Markets!
In an effort to prevent ‘gaming’ the REF, new recommendation from Lord Stern cuts down on the freedom of academics to move from institution as they see fit. Is the cure worse than the disease?
Use Qualitative Methods In Mining the Data Gold Rush
Mylynn Felt, author of a popular paper on social media and the social sciences, hopes to see a growing blend of established qualitative techniques with newly emerging big data research methods in future social science work.
Intrepid Explorers Leader Takes Top ESRC Impact Award
A Ph.D. geography student from King’s College London whose efforts to share with the public stories of social science work and research in the field were both effective and inspiring has been named the 2016 Impact Champion by Britain’s Economic and Social Research Council.
Academics on Brexit: Phony War is Over
A collection of academic articles from three journals published by SAGE examine the questions whirling around the Brexit vote. As Angus Armstrong and Jonathan Portes say, ‘The phony war is over!’
