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 […]
September 15, 2016
Canadian Science Minister Funds More than 1,000 SSH Projects
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Diversity of Viewpoints is Essential for the Pursuit of Knowledge
Pushing for a lecture to be cancelled, or disrupted so that it is either postponed on health and safety grounds, or goes ahead but speakers are unable to be heard, is censorship, argues Jo Williams, and it is to the detriment of all within universities and wider society alike.
The Stern Review of the REF – An Economist Against Markets!
In an effort to prevent ‘gaming’ the REF, new recommendation from Lord Stern cuts down on the freedom of academics to move from institution as they see fit. Is the cure worse than the disease?
Report: Tracing Prejudice’s Descent into Discrimination
In the wake of the government’s ‘Action Against Hate’ paper, new reports from Britain’s Equality and Human Rights Commission look at the causes of prejudice and unlawful behavior and at the causes and motivations of hate crime.
Watch Gary King: Do We Need a Big Data Treaty?
Political scientists Gary King has called on the policymakers and government officials in the audience to consider enacting a ‘treaty’ on the collection, retention, access and sharing of big data that could serve the needs of the academic world, the commercial world and government while protecting the interests of the public.
Brexit: Well-Behaved Liberals Seldom Change History
As Ian McBride has commented in The Guardian, one of the strange features of Britain’s EU referendum is the resignation with which […]
We Need a New Science of Safety
Safety is often seen as a challenge for engineers. While that remains a component, the ability to judge risk is perhaps many times more important in keeping people safe, and that suggests it’s time for a new social science of safety, argues Philip Thomas.
Visualizing Social Media Analysis
Two of the authors of case study on using Twitter for research describe the ethical challenges of working in a rapidly changing landscape, why it’s important to be able to visualize what your analysis is finding, and why it’s important not to let your analysis be derived from some sort of ‘black box’ that you as the researcher don’t fully understand.
A Post-Mortem: Social Sciences and Brexit
The UK’s referendum on remaining in the European Union or leaving it generated an avalanche of campaign information, including hundreds of interventions by social scientists. David Walker casts a sceptical eye over the experience, asking whether the wafer-thin majority for Leave signals a failure of social scientists input.
