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 […]
Economic Inequality and Political Power (Part 1 of 3)
If policy influence becomes so unequal that the wishes of most citizens are ignored most of the time, a country’s claim to be a democracy is cast in doubt. And that is exactly what I found in my analyses of the link between public preferences and government policy in the U.S.
Hate Rock 101
A sociologist explains why Sikh temple shooter Wade M. Page’s white-power music scene is dying out, just as we’re all discovering it.
“The author has asked not to be identified in case this further affects his career prospects.”
Many PhD graduates are forced into the troubled world of unemployment while, at the same time, being denied a public voice. How is it that extremely narrow standards of professional legitimacy are used to judge young scholars who simply cannot meet them?
Writing the North Atlantic Bubble: Part 1
Sociology is arguably a global project. Significant approaches to the study of society have been developed in many parts of the world. Yet, students in the North Atlantic world do not learn about these approaches, as textbooks interpret the world in terms of scholars of the region.
Robert Shiller on Behavioral Economics
In the past twenty years there has been a revolution in economics with the study not of how people would behave if they were perfectly rational, but of how they actually behave. At the vanguard of this movement is Robert Shiller of Yale University. He sits down with Nigel Warburton in this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast
Academic Blogging
Technology has the potential to share knowledge both further and faster. The 2012 THE Knowledge Exchange / Transfer Initiative of the Year was recently won by LSE for a series of academic blogs, and the managing editors share their thoughts with us about the state, impact, and future of academic blogging
People are not Only Biological Machines
You can hardly open a newspaper or listen to a factual broadcast without some reference to neuroscience or evolutionary explanations of things that people do, feel or think.
After Aurora, Expect PTSD to Spread Far Beyond Theater
Two studies of Virginia Tech students provide information on the likelihood and treatment of stress-related psychological symptoms following a mass shooting.
