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 […]
House Appropriations Panel Aims to Increase NSF Budget
This week the Appropriations Committee of the U.S. House of Representatives approved the budget bill that includes funding for the National Science Foundation. The Commerce, Justice, Science Appropriations Act (CJS) proposes increasing funding for the NSF — which is the largest source of research funding for university social and behavioral science in the United States – by $270 million above the current year’s appropriation.
Collective Leadership for Everyone in the Organization?
Joe Raelin argues that democratic organization can exist and be developed without hierarchical control. There is ample evidence across civilization and time that humans can self-organize without hierarchical structure.
Social Isolation Amid COVID: An Excerpt from ‘Together Apart’
They had been sentenced, for an unknown crime, to an indeterminate period of punishment. (Camus, 1947) As Albert Camus observed in The […]
Social Science ‘Spinouts,’ An Underappreciated Pathway to Impact?
One means of fixing and making ideas tangible, often scorned and neglected in the social sciences, but widely used in STEM, are spinouts. For universities, a spinout is a company formed on the basis of intellectual property from a university or research institute.
Minerva Initiative Seems Likely to Avoid Untimely Death
In early February, the proposed U.S. government budget for the 2021 fiscal year featured sizable funding cuts to many federally funded social […]
Risk Perception Amid COVID: An Excerpt from ‘Together Apart’
Patient A1.1, who was then still experiencing mild respiratory symptoms, attended a birthday party with nine other people. They hugged and shared […]
Group Threat and COVID: An Excerpt from ‘Together Apart’
The biggest threat to the Territory is clear. It is not us, it’s them. Western Australian Premier Mark McGowan We live in a dangerous […]
Why the h-index is a Bogus Measure of Academic Impact
Although experts in bibliometry have pointed out the dubious nature of the h-index, most researchers do not always seem to understand that its properties make it a far-from-valid index to seriously and ethically assess the quality or scientific impact of publications.
