Cutting NSF Is Like Liquidating Your Finest Investment
Look closely at your mobile phone or tablet. Touch-screen technology, speech recognition, digital sound recording and the internet were all developed using […]
Diets on the Internet: You Might as Well Make Them Up
Contradictory diet advice is everywhere – Katy Perry’s acupunctured fish, Matthew McConaughey and the caveman diet, Gwyneth Paltrow’s macrobiotic meals. It seems […]
A Social Science Audit for Facebook’s News Feed?
How can the public learn the role of algorithms in their daily lives, evaluating the law and ethicality of systems like the Facebook News Feed, search engines, or airline booking systems? Earlier this month Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society hosted a conversation about the idea of social science audits of algorithms, and J. Nathan Matias reports on the discourse.
Economists Behaving Badly Linked to Pressure to Publish
Sarah Necker describes her landmark study on economists’ research norms and practices and finds that while we all agree that fabrication, falsification and plagiarism are bad, a few academics admit they have accepted or offered gifts, money, or sex in exchange for co-authorship, data or promotion.
Viva Voce Podcasts: What You Do, Not What You’ve Done
Make an impact! make an impact! Early career social scientists here that refrain all the time. Gemma Sou cast around for a way to give her colleagues a voice in that quest, and hit upon podcasts.
British Academy Elects a Full Slate of New Fellows
The British Academy last week elected a full slate of distinguished UK academics from 19 universities as fellows for 2014. The 42 […]
On the Ethics of Facebook – and Drawing the Right Conclusions
What does the Facebook emotional contagion study really tells us about research ethics? Perhaps, argues Robert Dingwall, that its time to deregulate public social science.
What Do Rising Retraction Rates Mean for Peer Review?
Could the increasing number of retractions in quality journals be a sign that its time to embrace post-publication open evaluation as a corrective to pre-publication peer review?
No Longer the Age of Consent: Facebook’s Emotional Manipulation Study
Facebook’s unannounced study using its users’ newsfeeds offers a case study in research ethics: where did it lie of the spectrum from ‘ho harm, no foul’ or to an unacceptable violation of participants’ rights? Ethicist David Hunter examines.
