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 […]
A Century Ago, Congress Dismissed a U.S. Census
Census 2020 is far from the first census to set off bitter political fights. One hundred years ago, results from Census 1920 initiated a decadelong struggle about how to allocate a state’s seats in Congress. The political arguments were so bitter that Congress eventually decided they would not use Census 1920 results.
Research and the Census: Exploring the Labor Force
The concept of the labor force describes a person’s employment status, and like all U.S. Census Bureau definitions, the terminology is quite specific. The labor force consists of all people 16 years of age or older who are working (employed), are not working but are actively seeking work (unemployed)…
Richard Layard on Happiness Economics
Richard Layard remembers being a history student sitting in Oxford’s Bodleian Library on a misty morning, reading philosopher Jeremy Bentham (he of the famed “It is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong”). As he recounts to interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, he thought, “Oh yes, this is what it’s all about.”
The Polygraph as Propaganda
David Canter comments on the propaganda value of the British Government proposal to use ‘lie detectors’ with convicted terrorists.
Making Sense of Data in the 2019 General Election
Statistics are not the final objective answer to things. They can be interpreted in lots of different ways, even when none of those ways is wrong per se. That opens up a space for public debate, which is good news, but it also opens up a space where statistics can either be lauded as the truth (when they are not), or dismissed out of hand as ‘biased’.
What is Census Data?
When most Americans think of the census, they think of the 10-year or decennial census that is used to gather basic data about the total population. The decennial census is an actual count of people and housing units, and it serves as the baseline for measuring and generating other census data-sets…
Analysis: A 10th of Climate Change Research Funding Goes to Social Science
A new analysis published in the journal Energy Research & Social Science finds that funding for social science climate-change research is not only unhealthy but downright anemic at roughly 10 percent of the total spend. Meanwhile, total spending on climate-change research in total, regardless of discipline, comes to just 5 percent of all competitive research grants funded between 1950 and 2018.
Lying With Maps and Census Data
Geographer Frank Donnelly notes that census geography and maps are not automatically reliable – they can be used to intentionally skew research findings.
