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 […]
November 12, 2019
Analysis: Indonesia Needs Quality Research to Inform Policy-Making
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Samantha Power on the Nexus Between Academe and Policy
Just after Samantha Power’s American Academy of Political and Social Science Daniel Patrick Moynihan Prize lecture earlier this month, Social Science Space flagged her down to get some advice on navigating these abutting realms.
Research on Research
With the advent of the new Research on Research Institute, our Robert Dingwall notes that while research on research fills a gap in the world of knowledge. However, it is important not to confuse it with the research enterprise itself or to assume that this will benefit from being made so planned, rational and evidence-based that the result is to squeeze innovation out of the system.
Shona Minson on Children of Imprisoned Mothers
When a mother with minor children is imprisoned, she is far from the only one facing consequences. Their children can end up […]
NSF Changing How It Positions Many Social Science Programs
The National Science Foundation, the largest government funder of basic social and behavioral research in the United States, is changing how it “positions” some of its research programs in those fields. While the changes are meant to better highlight the value of social science, not everyone is pleased by the changes.
AI May Usurp the Market in Guiding Public Policy Decisions
Most institutions see the market as the only legitimate form of organization, but different visions towards public policy, some involving artificial intelligence, have been the subject of consideration from academics and politicians alike. Under what circumstances, and to what extent, could artificial intelligence replace the market as the end-all guiding force in crafting reasonable public policy? Brexit may play a leading role in the transition.
ESRC’s Effort to Develop Leadership in the Social Sciences: A Hunt for Unicorns?
Surely preparing Britain’s social science community to take the lead in a future of global and interdisciplinary team research isn’t a quest for a mythical beast? Matt Flinders, who heads an ESRC project trying to nurture that leadership, doesn’t think so – but he understands why someone might think it is.
Kayleigh Garthwaite on Foodbanks
“I think the debate about why people use the foodbanks has become really politicized to the point where apparently individual faults and failings are the reason why people are using them,” Kayleigh Garthwaite tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. To find out, she volunteered to work at a Trussell Trust foodbank in northern England’s city of Stockton, deploying ethnographic methods to learn from the workers and the food recipients.
Archived Webinar: A Scientific Approach to Social Science Communication
As part of a project sponsored by the National Academy of Sciences and the Rita Allen Foundation, four science communications experts tackled surrounding the effective and ethical communication of science to relevant policymakers. in this webinar, we talk to the four experts about their findings and the processes they recommend.
