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 […]
Oppenheimer: Science, Culture and Politics
The new film ‘Oppenheimer’ offers several interesting views of the scientific endeavor that resonate as much in the social sciences and the humanities as in the physical sciences.
Are We Unnecessarily Using Diagnostic Frameworks Beyond Health Settings?
Diagnosis is so important to understanding our lives and those around us that it’s often applied outside of the health setting.
Do We Need the Police?
David Canter considers whether ‘all-purpose’ police forces a no longer fit for purpose.
The Trouble with Bootlaces: Treading on Artificial and General Intelligence
David Canter considers some implications of ChatGPT and what it tells us about real intelligence, general, artificial or otherwise.
A Most Unnatural Experiment: What The War Has Taught a Ukrainian-American Political Scientist
Lena Surzhko Harned is a Ukrainian American political scientist. As a specialist in Eastern Europe, she has evaluated this war over the past year from her professional perspective. Yet this war is also deeply personal.
Face Masks and COVID – A Failed Technology
A model is only as good as its underlying simplifying assumptions and data, notes Robert Dingwall, and in the case of testing the effectiveness of face masks to combat the spread of COVID those data are, he argues, at best fragile.
Why the Latest Strike Wave at UK Universities is Likely to Achieve Little
A lack of public understanding, the decline of collegiality and poor framing of the underlying issues will all make the success of planned UK university strikes unlikely, argues Daniel Nehring.
Critics of Academic Freedom Must Not See the Value It Brings
Academic freedom is simply the commonplace and understandable request of workers asking for the conditions they need to competently and effectively carry out their duties as expected, required and urgently needed by society.
