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 […]
Will Social Science Research Cuts Affect the Human Rights Situation in the U.S.?
On social science, the sequester, and the need for a Human Rights Culture.
Toxic, Poisonous and Stupid: Iraq War Decision-Making Ten Years On
Even within its own narrow terms the Iraq war was appallingly costly. A bad decision to invade was compounded by shambolic and ineffective leadership of the warfighting itself. Why? The answer seems to lie in the ways in which contemporary large organizations behave
Risk Management Approach Could Motivate Climate Change Action
Is it possible that modern society’s bitter political divisions over belief in anthropogenic climate change is distracting decision-makers from the far more practical matter of confronting the risk that it presents, directly or indirectly, to businesses and the economy?
Making Sense of Crime Trends
Much of the current confusion about crime trends is born of the tendency to bunch together a whole range of different harms and actions under the abstract category of ‘crime’. This blinds us to where the significant problems are.
Undercover Pressures
Some criminal investigations resonate over the years. Even if you’ve only had peripheral involvement with them, as in my case, they still […]
Why Study Social Science
We study social science because social phenomena affect people’s lives in profound ways. If you want to start with Cantor’s focus—physical illness and death—then social phenomena are tremendously important.
Social Science’s Dangerously Low Profile, and How to Fix It
“We are now in a situation where science, technology, engineering and maths – the STEM subjects – were about 15 to 20 years ago….there was a lack of public understanding of what they contributed to society and its development”
The Vocation of Sociology – Exposing Slow Violence
Much destruction of human potential takes the form of a “slow violence” that extends over time. It is insidious, undramatic and relatively invisible.
