Policy

EviAtlas example

Technology Can Collect and Analyze Evidence for Policy

Creators and participants in the Evidence Synthesis Hackathon ask what’s the solution to coping with the increasing volume of evidence needed to build effective, solid policy? They argue that technology is the key. With accessible software tools and workflows, machines can be left to do the laborious work so that people can focus on planning, thinking and doing.

4 years ago
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Code Napoleon_mauzaisse-

Negotiating Brexit – A Clash of Legal Cultures?

Membership in the European Union was a contract, and the differing legal approaches between situational British common law and the more codified French approach helps explain some of the rancor as Brexit comes to be applied.

6 years ago
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Sociology’s (Selective) Diversity

Our Robert Dingwall reflects on Tinder’s in-house sociologist and on the just-announced New Year’s Honours list to question just how diverse are current understandings of diversity.

6 years ago
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Pied Piper

Six Reasons Why Academics Won’t Change Policy

As social scientists are pressured to be part of the policy-making process, that’s easier said than done, explains James Lloyd. He gives six reasons why sometimes research won’t (and perhaps shouldn’t) impact change.

7 years ago
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Zika virus poster from CDC

Zika – What Are the Real Lessons from Ebola?

Another disease in the tropics has the World Health Organisation in a lather, and again biomedicine’s response will not be all that useful in the short term. Social science can help now to address the underlying problems that help the Zika virus to spread — if policymakers will listen.

7 years ago
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claude_shannon.mouse

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.

7 years ago
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Amoxin pills

Antibiotic Resistance – Missing the Point?

There is no point in improving the innovation pipeline for antibiotics, argues Robert Dingwall, if the drugs that come out at the end all fall into the same chaotic patterns of use as today.

8 years ago
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