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 […]
Why is Inequality Bad?
Here’s a clear, scientific reason drawn from the field of complexity economics to combat rising inequality: good business models that serve many people are becoming less profitable. Solid entrepreneurial ideas that would benefit everyone get passed over when there are easier opportunities to make money by catering to a few individuals with a whole lot of dollars to spend.
Impact Requires Breadth and Ideas, Not Tick Boxes
As part of their impact agenda, universities increasingly promote and train academics to carry out research collaborations across disciplines and with non-academic partners. While this can be impactful, Helen B. Woods argues that attempts to direct research in this way can produce inauthentic collaboration, and suggests an ideas-led approach.
Social Precognition and Sociology: The Case of Resistentialism and ANT
In the last 20 years or so there has been much excitement, particularly in science and technology studies, about Actor-Network Theory. One of its most distinctive features is the way in which it ascribes agency to material objects. Perhaps we should not be crediting Bruno Latour or Michel Callon with the original insight – but an English humourist, Paul Jennings.
Britain’s Mental Health Crisis, Mindfulness and the Sociological Imagination
The popularization of mindfulness, write Daniel Nehring and Ashley Frawley, cannot just be understood as a recent response to public perceptions of a mental health crisis. Rather, it is the result of developments in academic psychology, in its clinical uses in psychotherapy, and in its growing commercial exploitation from the 1980s onwards.
A Tool that Detects the Strength of Hate Speech on Twitter
A new machine learning tool can detect and classify different strengths of Islamophobic hate speech on Twitter. Bertie Vidgen and Taha Yasseri explain their processes in creating a new tool that detects Islamophobic hate speech on Twitter.
Meet The Social Scientist, a New Networking Initiative for STEM
Danielle Tomasello describes The Social Scientist, a non-profit networking and outreach community of STEM professionals. Our volunteers answer questions that will benefit scientists’ interests, including a view of their work, environment and what it took for them to get there.
Learning Through Citizen Science: Enhancing Opportunities by Design
The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine established a committee of experts to conduct a study on how citizen science projects can be better designed to support science learning. The committee was tasked with identifying and describing existing citizen science, to develop a set of evidence-based principles to guide the design of citizen science projects.
Training Social Scientists for the Future
Calling all social scientists. How were you trained? How are you keeping up (or not) with new developments in this rapidly changing digital world? How are you training your students? This was the subject of an event sponsored by SAGE Ocean as part of the ESRC’s 2018 Festival of Social Science. Comment on the post
