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 […]
Will the UK Government Listen to Nurse Review?
Scientists in the UK are facing great uncertainty ahead of the Conservative government’s comprehensive spending review on November 25. Not only is funding for UK research under threat, the government is believed to be planning on culling many of the agencies that fund research in an effort to make savings.
Deregulating Social Science Research Ethics – Clipping the Wings of IRBs?
The Federal Register is surely not everybody’s bedtime reading. It is where the US Government formally publishes certain official documents, including advance […]
The National Interest and the NSF
Current legislation calls for federally funded science to be in the ‘national interest.’ What does that even mean, and why do scientists fear this Republican-led effort?
Diplomacy or Destroyers: Uncle Sam’s Freedom of Navigation Choice
Amitai Etzioni argues that the U.S. shouldn’t automatically resort to the big stick when engaging in its self-imposed job as the world’s enforcer of freedom of navigation.
Suffragette – More than a Feminist Movie
With most works of art looking at the past, the real focus is the present. The new movie ‘Suffragette,’ writes Robert Dingwall, invites us to think about the consequences of political systems that are supposedly democratic but systematically exclude many voices.
How Do Europeans Really Feel About Migrants?
Given the angry images cascading off TV screens, it’s pretty clear that migrants aren’t welcome in Europe. Or are they? Three papers in a themed edition of the ‘International Journal of Comparative Sociology’ suggest a more nuanced answer.
World Bank Unveils Its Own ‘Nudge Unit’
The Global Insights Initiative, with its intriguing acronym of GINI, will bring experimentation to the World Bank’s poverty-fighting efforts by incorporating behavioral and social science into its project design and evaluation.
Bill That Seeks ‘National Interest’ Justifications for NSF Grants Advances
A bill that would require the National Science Foundation to justify, in writing, that every grant it makes is in the national interest and “worthy of federal funding” passed the science committee of the U.S. House of Representatives this morning.
