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 […]
The Insufferable Smugness of Working from Home
Back in the day, I attended one of those schools where male character was thought to be formed by endless afternoons of […]
Olivier Sibony on Decision-Making
In the context of human action, management professor at HEC Paris and former McKinsey senior partner Olivier Sibony defines “noise” as the unwanted variability in human judgment.
COVID-19: Blood on Whose Hands?
Lessons will be learned from this pandemic and it is right that there should be inquiries to spell them out. It will not, however, be helpful to see this as a partisan exercise in blaming individuals for acting within the limits of what was possible in systems that others had designed for very different purposes.
Should We Be Concerned that Data Journalists Are Doing Science Now?
Gone are the days when science journalism was like sports journalism, where the action was watched from the press box and simply conveyed. News outlets have stepped onto the field. They are doing the science themselves.
Robin Dunbar Explains Why His ‘Number’ Still Counts
Exactly 30 years ago, Robin Dunbar was pondering a graph of primate group sizes plotted against the size of their brains: the larger the brain, the larger the group size. I was curious to know what group size this relationship might predict for humans. The number his calculations gave was 150.
Duke Policy Professor Wins NSF Early-Career Prize
Nicholas Carnes, a Duke University social scientist and scholar of public policy, is one of two recipients this year of the National Science Foundation’s Waterman Award.
Eleanor Bernert Sheldon, 1920-2021: Pioneer in Social Indicators Movement
Eleanor Bernert Sheldon, a pioneer in the use of social indicators as an important tool of social science, died on May 8 at the age of 101.
Ronald Inglehart, 1934-2021: Founder of the World Values Survey
Ron Inglehart, a political scientist whose work on surveying values around the world set new and higher bars on what such studies could achieve, has died at age 86.
