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 […]
Close Encounters with Behavioral Economics: Four Essential Reads for 2017
The year 2017 turned out to be the start for mainstream behavioral economics after a leading practitioner in the field won a Nobel prize for his work. Throughout 2017, The Conversation asked experts in economics, psychology and other areas to address the power of this burgeoning field, as well as its potential for misuse. Here are some articles for your consideration.
How Do We Head Off the Collateral Damage of Big Data?
Hamish Robertson and Joanne Travaglia argue that big data quantification is now not only a mechanism for extracting information but has become an idea with social and political power in its own right. The lack of critique of quantitative methods and their application contributes to the existing and potentially coercive power of digital information systems and their attendant methods, and enhances the potential for collateral damage.
Sexual Harassment and Universities
Developing an effective response to sexual harassment in the academic industry — by no means a new phenomenon, notes Robert Dingwall — requires us to consider questions about institutional memory, occupational cultures, and organizational silos, rather than badly behaved individuals.
Holiday Gift Idea: Hauser Fund Supports Bringing Evidence to Policy
The Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, or DBASSE, of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine has an idea for giving social science a little extra oomph on the policy front — giving a gift to the Hauser Policy Impact Fund.
The Social Science of Holiday Marketing, er, Shopping
By drawing on a plethora of psychological and sociological research, marketers subtly give us permission to buy and not to think too much, or too deeply, about why we’re buying. Not thinking all the time is a very efficient way for us to get by. It conserves energy, and allows us to live relatively easily by responding to our psychological predispositions, social norms, and general cognitive imperfections.
Report Offers Guidelines for Ethics of Technology Design
The big questions posed by our digital future sit at the intersection of technology and ethics. This is complex territory that requires input from experts in many different fields, including the social sciences, if we are to navigate it successfully. A new report makes an effort to give a first draft of that necessary input.
Putting Big Data to Big Use
The applications of big data provide a very mixed picture about its uses and abuses, in government, academe and private industry. And while where you stand on the net impact depends, as the cliche goes, on where you sit, a panel at the recent ESRC Festival of Social Science came out qualitatively optimistic about the future.
Tinkering With Symptoms: Why Britain’s Debate About Vice Chancellors’ Salaries Is Misguided
The last few weeks have seen a growing public debate about the pay packages of Britain’s academic CEOs. The vice chancellors at a number of universities, including Birmingham, Bath, Bath Spa and others, have come under heavy pressure to justify salaries that far exceed £100,000, Oddly, all the arguments for and against this start with the assumption that universities are just like any other business.
