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 […]
Reform of English laws on free speech
The British government has confirmed that it will introduce a Defamation Bill in the spring, to change the law on libel and […]
Unequal America: Causes and consequences of the wide—and growing—gap between rich and poor
This is an extract from a post originally published in Harvard Magazine. When Majid Ezzati thinks about declining life expectancy, he says, […]
The value of history to public policy
Statements such as ‘knowing about history helps us to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past’ are commonplace. There is no doubt […]
It wasn’t social science that caused the economic crisis!
I know the season for frivolous quiz games has passed but do you know who is buried in Westminster Abbey? More generally, […]
Research Ethics and James Bond
It is not often, as a middle aged academic, that I get to feel like James Bond – but there is something about […]
Review of ‘Four Lions’
An edited version of this article originally appeared in the Islamic Studies magazine ‘Perspectives’ (November 2010). Chris Morris’s feature-length satire about five […]
Toasting Government’s Good Ideas from 2010
Extract from an article by Emily Badger in the current issue of Miller-McCune magazine. Despite the past year’s bitter politics, the US […]
Making the Case for the Social Sciences no.2: Ageing
As ‘STEM’ started to become shorthand for ‘the only sort of research work that is of importance to our economy’, and the […]
