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 […]
Storify is Dead. Responsible Data Stewardship Must Live
Storify is dead The service, which let you take social media content like Twitter and Facebook posts and aggregate them together into stories, announced that they’ll be shutting down and deleting all content as of March 16th, 2018. It’s not as bad as some platform shutdowns – there is notice and at least you can export your own content (one story at a time) – but it’s still a reminder of how vulnerable user-generated content can be online.
The Anthropological Roots of Ursula Le Guin
A connection can be made in between Ursula Le Guin’s fiction and her father’s groundbreaking work in anthropology. His ideas – which had a profound influence on his daughter’s writing – stemmed from an important development in the discipline of anthropology, one that viewed human culture as something that wasn’t ingrained, and had to be taught and learned.
Interrogating Ethnography – and Coming Up with the Wrong Answers?
A recent critique of Alice Goffman’s influential 2014 book, “On the Run,” has, in effect, put ethnography conducted in the United states on trial. Here, our Robert Dingwall argues a case for the defense.
Cry from Publons: Let’s End Reviewer Fraud
Peer review has become a major editorial challenge for publishers worldwide, but options do exist to help tackle fraudulent peer reviewers. In this post from the Publons blog, some options for what publishers can do are examined.
Washington and Social Science: Census and the Citizenship Question
The Trump administration has requested that the upcoming decennial census include a “citizenship” question that asks respondents to identify whether or not they are U.S. citizens. Organizations like the Census Project have argued that asking questions about citizenship and immigration could — by deterring many immigrants (legal or illegal) from responding — hurt the response rate (and thus, accuracy) of the 2020 Census and this America’s ability to know our true population numbers.
Melinda Mills on Sociogenomics
Combining sociology and genetics, Melinda Mills and her collaborators abandon the nature v. nurture controversy for empirical research on family formation, inequality, child-rearing and other real-life concerns. In this Social Science Bites podcast, she discusses this new field of ‘sociogenomics.’
Senate Keeps Eye on Progress of Competitiveness Act
The focus was more on ‘competition’ than on ‘innovation’ Tuesday as the Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation convened a hearing looking at the American Innovation and Competitiveness Act a year after its passage.
Archived Webinar: Tom Chatfield and Mark Kingwell Discuss Critical Thinking
Tom Chatfield, author of the new SAGE Publishing book Critical Thinking, and Mark Kingwell, the University of Toronto, held a lively conversation on the import of technology on how we think and act ‘critically.’ Chatfield, described as a ‘tech philosopher,’ and Kingwell, a more traditional professor of philosophy, traded perspectives, insights into the digital, and purportedly post-truth, era in this one-hour webinar.
