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 […]
Junior Scientists are Often Underused as Peer Reviewers
Their paper about the evolution of malaria was in review for what seemed like an eternity. Every month, Susan Perkins and her then-graduate student Spencer Galen would check in with the editors. The problem seemed to be a lack of peer reviewers …
NAS Takes Detailed Look at Reproducibility and Replicability
This Tuesday at 9 a.m., the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine will be hosting a national symposium in response to the 200-page report: Reproducibility and Replicability in Science. The symposium will feature discussions on actions taken or contemplated in response to the report’s findings. Learn more or find out how to watch live.
The Civic Responsibility of Ethnographers
What duty do social scientists have to report illegal activity that they witness as part of their fieldwork? If you answered quickly, you may not have thought about the issue all that deeply.
Replication in Humanities Just as Desirable as in Sciences
Some scholars claim that replication, in the humanities, is not possible. The reasoning is that the humanities search for cultural meaning that can yield multiple valid answers since research objects are people and interactive entities. This may be true but it does not automatically follow that replication is not possible. Its a desirable feature for studies in the humanities to be replicable.
Collaboration Imbues SSRC’s ‘To Secure Knowledge’ Report
In launching its first-ever task force report on Monday, the 95-year-old Social Science Research Council made clear it gets by with a little help from its friends. Collaboration, said sociologist Alondra Nelson Nelson, the president of the SSRC, is the byword of the report, To Secure Knowledge: Social Science Partnerships for the Common Good.
Sir Cliff Richard, the BBC and the Ethics of Interviewing
The recent brouhaha involving the BBC and the singer points out something the journalists and qualitative researchers share: the need to develop a common approach to the ethics of interviewing.
Research Value Needs the Help of Social Sciences
Rachel and Lisa explore how humanities, arts and social sciences expertise is applied to problems typically corralled into the science and technology space.
Behavioral Science Can Be Used to Win War with Fake News
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg recently acknowledged his company’s responsibility in helping create the enormous amount of fake news that plagued the 2016 election – after earlier denials. Yet he offered no concrete details on what Facebook could do about it. Fortunately, there’s a way to fight fake news that already exists and has behavioral science on its side: the Pro-Truth Pledge project.
