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 […]
Iris Berent on the Innate in Human Nature
How much of our understanding of the world comes built-in? More than you’d expect. That’s the conclusion that Iris Berent, a professor of psychology at Northeastern University and head of the Language and Mind Lab there, has come to after years of research
Megan Stevenson on Why Interventions in the Criminal Justice System Don’t Work
Megan Stevenson’s work finds little success in applying reforms derived from certain types of social science research on criminal justice.
Rob Ford on Immigration
Opinions on immigration are not set in stone, suggests Rob Ford – but they may be set in generations. Zeroing in on the experience of the United Kingdom since the end of World War II, Ford – a political scientist at the University of Manchester – explains how this generation’s ‘other’ becomes the next generation’s ‘neighbor.’
Tavneet Suri on Universal Basic Income
Economist Tavneet Suri discusses fieldwork she’s done in handing our cash directly to Kenyans in poor and rural parts of Kenya, and what the generally good news from that work may herald more broadly.
Alex Edmans on Confirmation Bias
In this Social Science Bites podcast, Edmans, a professor of finance at London Business School and author of the just-released “May Contain Lies: How Stories, Statistics, and Studies Exploit Our Biases – And What We Can Do About It,” reviews the persistence of confirmation bias even among professors of finance.
Alison Gopnik on Care
Caring makes us human. This is one of the strongest ideas one could infer from the work that developmental psychologist Alison Gopnik is discovering in her work on child development, cognitive economics and caregiving.
Tejendra Pherali on Education and Conflict
Tejendra Pherali, a professor of education, conflict and peace at University College London, researches the intersection of education and conflict around the world.
Safiya Noble on Search Engines
In an age where things like facial recognition or financial software algorithms are shown to uncannily reproduce the prejudices of their creators, this was much less obvious earlier in the century, when researchers like Safiya Umoja Noble were dissecting search engine results and revealing the sometimes appalling material they were highlighting.
