Two of the authors of case study on using Twitter for research describe the ethical challenges of working in a rapidly changing landscape, why it’s important to be able to visualize what your analysis is finding, and why it’s important not to let your analysis be derived from some sort of ‘black box’ that you as the researcher don’t fully understand.
A case study, drawn from Bob Graham’s new book, about how coalitions formed to reverse measures seen as anti gay — such as the religious freedom act that Mike Pence signed and then revised — is available for free here.
Sociologist Philip Cohen of the University of Maryland introduces SocArxiv, a fast, free, open paper server to encourage wider open scholarship in the social sciences.
As well as beginning the long and painful divorce with the European Union, Dominic Abrams and Giovanni A. Travaglino say about Brexit, the United Kingdom is also entering a social space with very different, and very worrying, future dominated by what they term ‘rivalrous cohesion.’
While the choice of who will be Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump’s vice presidential candidates currently consumes the American chattering class, once the choice is made the chosen are more likely than not to slide into obscurity.
The UK’s referendum on remaining in the European Union or leaving it generated an avalanche of campaign information, including hundreds of interventions by social scientists. David Walker casts a sceptical eye over the experience, asking whether the wafer-thin majority for Leave signals a failure of social scientists input.
The more brazen the willingness to commit academic fraud, the harder it becomes to prevent, suggests Ian Freckelton. So while there is a role for codes of conduct or even criminal courts, finding ways to push temptation to deceive even further out of mind will likeley prove even more successful.
Mylynn Felt, author of a popular paper on social media and the social sciences, hopes to see a growing blend of established qualitative techniques with newly emerging big data research methods in future social science work.
An article in the journal Psychological Science, “The New Statistics: Why and How” by La Trobe University’s Geoff Cumming, has proved remarkably popular in the years since and is the third-most cited paper published in a Sage journal in 2013. The idea of an autonomous vehicle – i.e., a self-driving car – isn’t particularly new. Leonardo da Vinci had some ideas he […] Social sciences can also inform the design and creation of ethical frameworks and guidelines for AI development and for deployment into systems. Social scientists can contribute expertise: on data quality, equity, and reliability; on how bias manifests in AI algorithms and decision-making processes; on how AI technologies impact marginalized communities and exacerbate existing inequities; and on topics such as fairness, transparency, privacy, and accountability. Philosophy has been instrumental to AI since its inception, and should still be an important contributor as artificial intelligence evolves.. The new AI Disclosures Project seeks to create structures that both recognize the commercial enticements of AI while ensuring that issues of safety and equity are front and center in the decisions private actors make about AI deployment. If schools provide the proper support and resources, they will help educators move from anxiety to empowerment when integrating AI into the classroom.
EXPLORE
Impact
Paper Opening Science to the New Statistics Proves Its Import a Decade Later
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A Milestone Dataset on the Road to Self-Driving Cars Proves Highly Popular
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Why Social Science? Because It Can Help Contribute to AI That Benefits Society
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Innovation
Philosophy Has Been – and Should Be – Integral to AI
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New SSRC Project Aims to Develop AI Principles for Private Sector
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AI Upskilling Can and Should Empower Business School Faculty
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