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 […]
Why Social Science? Because It’s Proliferating
The president of the Social Science Research Council argues that that proliferation of data, data sharing and collaboration across private, government, and academic sectors requires a stewardship that social science can, at least in part, provide.
Replication in Humanities Just as Desirable as in Sciences
Some scholars claim that replication, in the humanities, is not possible. The reasoning is that the humanities search for cultural meaning that can yield multiple valid answers since research objects are people and interactive entities. This may be true but it does not automatically follow that replication is not possible. Its a desirable feature for studies in the humanities to be replicable.
Citizen Social Scientists Edit Day’s News with New Tool
Sociologist Nick Adams’ TagWorks methodology is being used to rate — and in turn improve — the most shared news stories of the day via a new tool called PublicEditor.
#MeToo: Tackling Harassment in Academic Publishing
The #MeToo movement has slowly spread across to other sectors as people begin to come forward with their own stories of sexual harassment and bullying. In academic publishing, this conversation was in part started in February by Alison’s Mudditt’s powerful post on The Scholarly Kitchen. Muddit chaired a recent panel looking at sexual harassment, and ways to combat it, at the annual ALPSP conference.
Economics Nobel Recognizes Nature and Knowledge
Two academics who have integrated what might have once seemed like non-economic externalities into economic models have been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in economics. The winners are William D. Nordhaus of Yale University, cited for integrating climate change into macroeconomic analysis, and Paul M. Romer of New York University’s Stern School of Business, cited doing the same with technological innovations.
Five with Social Science Credentials Win MacArthur Grants
Five people with backgrounds in social, behavioral or data science were among 25 named in the 2018 class of MacArthur Foundation fellows. The fellowship and grant program, sometimes referred to as the “genius grant,” awards exceptionally creative people with $625,000 – no strings attached — in expectation that based on their track record they will achieve something important in the future.
The Dean of ‘Ism’ Studies: Walter Laqueur, 1921-2018
Walter Laquer, who fled the Holocaust, experienced the birth of Israel, founded the ‘Journal of Contemporary History,’ and was an unflinching sentinel against terrorism and an authoritarian Russia, died on September 30. He was 97.
Washington and Social Science: Rare Accord Seen in Appropriations
For the first time in more than 20 years, Congress enacted into law the annual Labor-Health and Human Services-Education Act prior to the end of the fiscal year and for the first time in more than 10 years it did the same for the Defense Appropriations Act. What it didn’t do is approve the bill that funds the National Science Foundation.
