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 […]
Include Me In: Social Sciences and the Innovation Deficit
With a little more wiggle room in the U.S. budget this year, proponents of strong federal support for R&D and higher education are trying to get their message out about America’s lagging innovation. Social science and the STEM fields are making common cause in the campaign.
AERA Appoints Inaugural Editors for New Open-Access Journal
The American Educational Research Association, the nation’s largest professional organization devoted to the scientific study of education, has named three professors from […]
The Personal Consequences of the Academic Jobs Crisis
The story of a young German academic who followed the agreed-upon career path only to find the roadsigns don’t always lead to where they indicate.
Golden Goose Awards: Honk If You Support Basic Research
It can be fun to poke at oddball research, but a U.S. award rewards researchers whose peculiar efforts pay off for society.
Pluralism’s Ringmaster: Robert Dahl, 1915-2014
Robert Dahl, one of the founders of American political science and the theorist of pluralism, has died at age 98.
The Ongoing Evolution of Universities into Newsrooms
Social media and alternative ways of measuring academic impact are helping turn universities into giant newsrooms, argues Maxine Newlands. That’s not necessarily bad, and it may be inevitable.
A Perceptive Outsider Always Looking In: Stuart Hall, 1932-2014
The permanent outsider who helped pry open Britain’s eyes to the field of cultural studies has died at age 82.
Floods, Politics and Science: The Case of the Somerset Levels
Feel-good interventions that don’t provide a practical good, or at least one not supported by evidence, generate questions that hinge specifically on future responses to climate change and more broadly on government decision-making in general.
