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 […]
Timeline of US Government and Social/Behavioral Science
Vannevar Bush’s post-war review of American science priorities set the tone for the federal funding of social and behavioral science ever since.
In the Rush to Metrics, Don’t Ignore Human Intuition
Sociologist Eric Giannella argues the uncertainty of science makes intuition and judgement essential, and yet the effect of metrics is to reduce the role of judgment.
Common Rule Revision – The Ethics Police Fight Back
Revisions to the U.S. government’s regulations on ethical treatment of human research subjects that would exempt some experiments from direct oversight by institutional review boards are facing pushback from paternalistic guardians, says our Robert Dingwall, who don’t seem to believe subjects are competent to make decisions on their own.
Why Is It Again that the US Doesn’t Study Gun Violence?
The dean of Boston University’s School of Public Health argues that the relatively limited data the United States’ has available about firearms and firearm violence prevents any serious policy prescriptions from arising. A law that prevents the CDC from funding research that might support gun control has scared all federal funders from touching the issue.
Witherspoon: We Must Show How We Create a Public Good
In the third annual Campaign for Social Science/SAGE lecture, Sharon Witherspoon said we must show the ways ‘social science can give rise to public benefit’
Don’t Sideline Social Science in Mad Dash for Innovation
As Australia’s government focuses on innovation and commercializing research in its academic agenda, it should not forget about the humanities, arts and social sciences.
From Agora to Shopping Mall: Tone-of-Voice Policies, Marketing and the Re-making of British Universities
Tone-of-voice policies raise serious questions about the future of academic freedom in Britain and the extent to which academic labour may come to be subject to the financial and political objectives of the corporate managers that form universities’ leadership.
SBE Draws Three Flags in Football-Themed Waste Report
Picking up where Tom Coburn left off, the new U.S. senator from Oklahoma has released a punny compendium of what he sees as wasteful federal spending , including the inevitable shots at social and behavioral science grants.
