When Angus Deaton crafted the term ‘randomista’ to denigrate the rampant use of randomized controlled trials in development economics, Angus Leigh saw an opportunity to make lemonade out of lemons. In this Social Science Bites podcasts he explains how he turned randomista into a compliment and promotes the use of trials to improve social programs worldwide.
One thing has become clear to sociologist Diane Reay across her research – “It’s primarily working-class children who turn out to be losers in the educational system.” Whether it’s through the worst-funded schools, least-qualified teachers, most-temporary teaching arrangements or narrowest curricula, students from working class backgrounds in the United Kingdom (and the United States) draw the shortest educational straws.
“The brain is an association-seeking machine,” Harvard social psychologist Mahzarin R. Banaji tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast. “It puts things together that repeatedly get paired in our experience. Implicit bias is just another word for capturing what those are when they concern social groups.
In this Social Science Bites podcast, social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson lays out the case that inequality should be fought specifically because it fosters a litany of ill effects.
How did humans diverge so markedly from animals? Apart from physical things like our “physical peculiarities,” as experimental psychologist Celia Heyes puts it, or our fine motor control, there’s something even more fundamentally – and cognitively — different. hear more in our newest Social Science Bites podcast.
In determining what makes a successful prison, where would you place ‘trust’? Alison Liebling, director of the Cambridge University Institute of Criminology’s Prisons Research Centre, would place it at the top spot. As she tells interviewer David Edmonds in this Social Science Bites podcast, she believes what makes a prison good is the existence and the practice of trust.
While they aren’t as unpopular as politicians or journalists, people who work with statistics come in for their share of abuse. “Figures lie and liars figure,” goes one maxim. And don’t forget, “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.” But some people are the good guys, doing their best to combat the flawed or dishonest use of numbers. One of those good guys is the guest of this Social Science Bites podcast, David Spiegelhalter, professor of the public understanding of risk at Cambridge and current president of the Royal Statistical Society.
When online charitable appeals take off, social psychologist Sander van der Linden perks up. He studies ‘viral altruism,’ and in this Social Science Bites podcast he details to host David Edmonds how he studies this phenomenon.
“We are, as a species, addicted to story,” says English professor Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal. “Even when the […] Tom Burns, whose combination of play — and plays – with teaching in higher education added a light, collaborative and engaging model […] The creation of the Coalition for Advancing Research Assessment (CoARA) has led to a heated debate on the balance between peer review and evaluative metrics in research assessment regimes. Luciana Balboa, Elizabeth Gadd, Eva Mendez, Janne Pölönen, Karen Stroobants, Erzsebet Toth Cithra and the CoARA Steering Board address these arguments and state CoARA’s commitment to finding ways in which peer review and bibliometrics can be used together responsibly. “We are, as a species, addicted to story,” says English professor Jonathan Gottschall in his book, The Storytelling Animal. “Even when the […] The interactional skill of large language models enables them to carry out qualitative research interviews at speed and scale. Demonstrating the ability of these new techniques in a range of qualitative enquiries, Friedrich Geiecke and Xavier Jaravel, present a new open source platform to support this new form of qualitative research. Title of course: Space/Power/Species What prompted the idea for the course? A few years ago, I came across the architect Joyce Hwang’s […]
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Impact
Canada’s Storytellers Challenge Seeks Compelling Narratives About Student Research
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Tom Burns, 1959-2024: A Pioneer in Learning Development
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Research Assessment, Scientometrics, and Qualitative v. Quantitative Measures
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Innovation
Canada’s Storytellers Challenge Seeks Compelling Narratives About Student Research
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Our Open-Source Tool Allows AI-Assisted Qualitative Research at Scale
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This Anthropology Course Looks at Built Environment From Animal Perspective
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