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 […]
Statistical Association Takes on Use, Abuse of P-values
Even as it insists it’s not really saying anything new, the American Statistical Association Board of Directors has laid down a marker in the debate over what constitutes “statistical significance.”
The Deskilled Academic: Bureaucracy Defeats Scholarship
Intellectual labor comes to be largely external to the objectives of the bureaucratic regimes that dominate universities, argues our Daniel Nehring, and academics whose careers were built on intellectual labor turn out to be deskilled workers in organizational settings indifferent to their concerns.
Zika – What Are the Real Lessons from Ebola?
Another disease in the tropics has the World Health Organisation in a lather, and again biomedicine’s response will not be all that useful in the short term. Social science can help now to address the underlying problems that help the Zika virus to spread — if policymakers will listen.
University Amenities and University Food Banks
Is it possible, asks our Michelle Stack, to have an excellent university that is inequitable?
A Nobel Laureate Explains Peer Review’s Ins and Outs
The author of the new book ‘The Knowledge War’ discusses the intricacies of peer review as practiced, and concludes with a clarion call for reviewers and editors to remember their duties, not their interests.
Haven’t the Foggiest Which Weather Stories to Believe?
Thundersnow, willy-willys and the hottest/coldest seasons on record, there’s certainly no shortage of headlines about the weather. But many meteorological terms we […]
Common Rule Revision – The Ethics Police Fight Back
Revisions to the U.S. government’s regulations on ethical treatment of human research subjects that would exempt some experiments from direct oversight by institutional review boards are facing pushback from paternalistic guardians, says our Robert Dingwall, who don’t seem to believe subjects are competent to make decisions on their own.
The Mash of Cultures: Integration and Mixedness
At a time when the differences between cultures seem increasingly unbridgeable, what does the latest scholarship about intermarriage and integration tell us about how to improve sociocultural relations and social cohesion? The editor of a special issue of ‘The ANNALS of the AAPSS’ offers some ideas …
