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 […]
Beyond Plurality: Ideas for Replacing U.S. Electoral College
Political scientist Joshua Holzer identifies a number of proven electoral strategies used elsewhere that could replace the United States’ Electoral College.
Blessed are the Trusting, For They Are More Likely to Vote
Whomever they vote for, says Cary Wu, Americans who are trusting are more likely to have either cast their ballots already or will on election day than Americans who do not trust easily.
Brown Lecture: The Segregation Pandemic
A pandemic is an epidemic occurring on a scale that crosses the globe. A condition is not a pandemic merely because it […]
The Coffin Cure: Why Vaccine Regulation Matters
Robert Dingwall cites a short story from 1957 which highlights why the development of a vaccine needs to always keep an eye on its safety, no matter what the pressures are for its immediate release.
Panel: How Can Social Statistics Help Us Fight COVID-19?
This panel, “How Can Social Statistics Help Us Fight COVID-19,” organized by the Campaign for Social Science and SAGE Publishing and held on September 21, featured three speakers giving their perspectives on the role of timely, appropriately representative, and reliable social statistics in informing the COVID-19 response and recovery planning.
Should Doctors Be in Charge of Pandemic Policy?
or 30 years, social scientists have been trying to educate scientific elites in the value of taking ordinary people with them rather than dismissing skepticism about science-based actions. This work has just gone out the window, argues Robert Dingwall.
What Research Says About Voting by Mail (Spoiler: It’s Safe)
Evidence reviewed by a National Association of Public Administration working group finds that voting by mail is rarely subject to fraud, does not give an advantage to one political party over another and can in fact inspire public confidence in the voting process, if done properly.
What’s Wrong with WeChat? The Problem with Social Media Censorship
What is WeChat, and what does it do? Apart from ethnically suspect attacks on the platform itself, its ability to socially engineer discussion in China is a genuine concern.
