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 […]
Ebola – What’s the Point of the World Health Organisation?
WHO is supposed to be a global health organization, not a global biomedical organization. The Ebola crisis, argues Robert Dingwall, reveals the extent to which it has lost sight of this mission.
Ivor Crewe on Psephology
In this episode of the Social Science Bites podcast series, political scientist Ivor Crewe, the current president of Britain’s Academy of Social sciences and the master of Oxford’s University College, discusses the modern art, and sometime science, of election polling.
Congressional Elections Have Consequences for Social Science
Opposition to the social, behavioral and economic sciences isn’t new. Here, Howard J. Silver recounts an attempt after the 1994 ‘Republican Revolution’ to demolish the National Science Foundation’s SBE directorate.
How Nudge Can Help Us Cope With Ebola
Affective judgments lead us to focus on individual tragedies while blinding us to large-scale tragedy. How can knowing this help us craft the best responses?
Stanford’s Eberhardt Receives MacArthur Fellowship
A social psychologist whose work examines how racial bias–unconscious but still present–impacts Americans’ perceptions and reactions to crime is one of 21 new recipients of the MacArthur ‘genius award.’
Maybe We Should Just Pay Peer Reviewers
An experiment on economists looked at offering small stipends for reviewers, as well as tighter deadlines and dollop of public shaming. Which worked, and could this have implications beyond this field and this journal? Max Nathan discusses.
Start Making Sense: Sense About Science Coming to US
The British-based nonprofit that helps the public understand the barrage of research data encountered routinely is starting a similar effort in the United States.
Myers-Briggs at Work? Might Be a Terrible Idea (MBTI)
Academics already tend to have a bone to pick with the Myers Briggs Type Indicator as anything other than a parlor game. Nonetheless, while the personality test has a hold on the popular imagination it shouldn’t enter the workplace.
