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 […]
Common Rule Revision – The Ethics Police Fight Back
Revisions to the U.S. government’s regulations on ethical treatment of human research subjects that would exempt some experiments from direct oversight by institutional review boards are facing pushback from paternalistic guardians, says our Robert Dingwall, who don’t seem to believe subjects are competent to make decisions on their own.
Finding Right With Wrong: Improving STEM Performance in US Schools
Remember the admonition to ‘show your work’ in math class? Focusing on where you went wrong – instead of hurrying to what is right – may be a great way to actually learn something, so it’s a shame more teachers don’t do that.
Showing Institutions Matter: Douglass North, 1920-2015
Douglass C. North’s contributions to economic theory have had an enormous influence on how scholars understand institutions and the process of economic change.
Will the UK Government Listen to Nurse Review?
Scientists in the UK are facing great uncertainty ahead of the Conservative government’s comprehensive spending review on November 25. Not only is funding for UK research under threat, the government is believed to be planning on culling many of the agencies that fund research in an effort to make savings.
Darwin of the Human Sciences: René Girard, 1923-2015
René Girard, whose academic career began in literary theory, and whose own theory of mimesis influenced people ranging from J.M. Coetzee to the founder of PayPal, died last week at his home at Stanford.
Social Science in the News
Social-science papers cite more references than physical-science papers Concord Monitor Here the web comic Ph.D. shows the surprising result that social science […]
Deregulating Social Science Research Ethics – Clipping the Wings of IRBs?
The Federal Register is surely not everybody’s bedtime reading. It is where the US Government formally publishes certain official documents, including advance […]
Contested Spaces: Infrastructural Citizenship in the City
Politicizing infrastructure — literally making inert materials into arenas in which they could claim and assert political power– creates a shared set of actions that constitute an expression of what Kyle Shelton calls ‘infrastructural citizenship,’ which he argues has been a key component in how modern cities have developed.
