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 […]
As far back as we have records, humans have tried to predict the future. Some societies turned to prayer, divination or oracles. Others to tarot cards or crystal balls. In the modern world, much of that function is fulfilled by mathematical models. Is this new technology of forecasting really an upgrade?
In an age where issues of ethnicity and identity matter, as well, as in the United States, political representation, the import and impact of censuses, along with how they are structured, carried out and analyzed, matters greatly. And with the U.S. Census being conducted this year – today, April 1, is Census Day, although coronavirus-marred collection of data will continue until August 14 – this is an apt time to talk with author Andrew Whitby about censuses past, present and future.
There are three groups that have consistently posed problems to the U.S. census throughout history and continue to spark debate to this day: military members, Mormon missionaries and prisoners.
COVID-19 is a threat to the health and safety of us all, but as the congressional debate of the federal stimulus package revealed, it may also present an opportunity to rethink how to best protect workers, the economy, and indeed all the members of our society.
Counties with large universities depend heavily on student responses to the decennial census, because the census counts determine the levels of federal funding communities receive. And if those students are counted as being there …?
Social science, argues Michael Taster of the LSE Impact blog, has an important role to play, by directly contributing to policy surrounding COVID-19 and its impacts, but also by acting as a critical friend, which raises the urgent question: how can this wealth of knowledge and expertise best be communicated?
The same technologies that people once blamed for tearing society apart might be our best chance of staying together during the COVID-19 outbreak, says Stanford’s Jamil Zaki.
The ways in which epidemics interact with human society suggest that much can be learned from previous epidemics. Drawing on the historical response to the AIDS epidemic of the 1980s, Donald Nicolson describes four parallels between the responses to these outbreaks and suggests what lessons can be learned by public health authorities responding to COVID-19.