Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
Risks of Institutional Capture in University Decolonization, And How to Create Meaningful Change
As conversations around decolonization in universities are being afforded greater urgency, some key risks of this institutional capture or inertia to wider decolonization efforts are described by Rima Saini.
Beyond Illness: COVID-19 is Hurting Women In Academia
Women are facing additional constraints as a result of COVID-19. These range from the added burdens and responsibilities of working from home, through to the fact that fewer women scientists are being quoted as experts on COVID-19, all the way to far fewer women being part of the cohort producing new knowledge on the pandemic.
Digital Overload and the Nostalgic Joys of Analog
As a global pandemic leaves many drowning in the digital, the pleasures of our analog past are ripe for re-discovery. This post from Kip Jones recounts his feelings about the joys of physical media.
Has Over-Diagnosis Eroded What’s Considered Normal?
Fabian Fabiano and Nick Haslam researched whether the standard manual of psychiatry was creating runaway diagnostic inflation. Here they explain what they found.
Social Science ‘Spinouts,’ An Underappreciated Pathway to Impact?
One means of fixing and making ideas tangible, often scorned and neglected in the social sciences, but widely used in STEM, are spinouts. For universities, a spinout is a company formed on the basis of intellectual property from a university or research institute.
Minerva Initiative Seems Likely to Avoid Untimely Death
In early February, the proposed U.S. government budget for the 2021 fiscal year featured sizable funding cuts to many federally funded social […]
Might Commercializing Social Science Be a Road to Impact?
As the world emerges from the COVID-19 lockdown many opportunities have arisen to rethink how and for whom our societies operate. In this post, Julia Black argues that social sciences can play a unique role in the post-COVID-19 recovery by forging new relationships with business and commerce and outlines how initiatives, such as the Aspect network, are seeking to bridge the divide between the social sciences and business.
Academic Freedom Includes the Responsibility to Act Ethically
Academic freedom is only one wing by which the academy flies, says Jimi Adesina. The other is the duty of scholars to act ethically and responsibly.
