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 […]
Shutdowns: The Misfire Next Time
Although a U.S. government shutdown has apparently been kicked down the road just a little bit longer, but a potential new shutdown — and its ruinous consequences for grant-funded science –always seems to be just around the corner.
How to Create Lasting Change
How interventions are designed matter as much as what they do. In that vein, Harvard researchers Erin Frey and Todd Rogers have identified four pathways through which behavior change interventions can achieve long-term impact.
How Has Retailing Evolved?
From general stores to department stores and superstores, retailing has undergone significant changes in the past two centuries. In their article “The […]
Reversing Academe’s Sometimes Perverse Incentives
Peer review is a powerful tool for sussing out the truth, but it’s not all-powerful. We also need to develop ways to reward scientists who do make their publications, data and methodology open for even greater scrutiny.
Two Social Scientists Awarded ‘Genius Grants’
Economist Heidi Williams and urban sociologist Matthew Desmond were among 24 academics and artists winning prestigious MacArthur grants today.
This Book About an Anthropologist Ought to Win the Man Booker
A corporate anthropologist is told to write a report that will “name what’s taking place right now” and is “the First and Last Word on our age.” And so we set the stage for what in turn David Rudrum argues is itself a zeitgeist-defining work.
Sense About Science On the Value of Peer Review
Peer Review Week begins today, a week to explore the role of peer review in addressing academic quality and rigor. Here, Sense About Science details why it feels it’s important to explain peer review to the wider world.
William Davies on the Happiness Industry
‘I think that happiness is better than a lot of what the ‘happiness industry’ represents it as,’ Goldsmiths sociologist Will Davies tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast.
