The Social Science Research Council (SSRC) has called on researchers, research foundations, the U.S. government, and the private sector to create new partnerships to address social science research challenges. A recent SSRC research report — “To Secure Knowledge: Social Science Partnerships for the Common Good” — argues that social science research faces serious threats from reduced federal funding and the public’s skepticism about data. The report includes recommendations such as creating a central database for public and private social data, and forging new public-private funding relationships. Hopefully these and other recommendations will be fruitful.
Archive: Sep 2018
CityLab has a new article about how urban and rural residents can find common ground. In the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange (RUX), for example, “participants go on three weekend-long retreats to strengthen bonds with people from other parts of the state, creating a ‘currency of connection’ (in the words of RUX organizers) to increase mutual understanding, spark collective problem-solving, and, of course, develop friendships across divides, whether real or perceived.” Fascinating!
In the September 2018 issue of Wired magazine Clive Thompson argues that we need software to help slow us down, not speed up. He discusses “friction engineering,” which is “software that’s designed not to speed us up but to slow us down. It’s a principle that inverts everything we know about why software exists.” In social scientific circles, a great example the article cites is the social media site Nextdoor’s attempts to redesign its software to reduce racial profiling [see also my August 13, 2018 post.]
One strange item about the article: the online title is “We Need Software to Help Us Slow Down, Not Speed up.” In the print magazine, however, the article appears on page 38 as “Slow Software: In Praise of Fiction.” Weird.
CityLab has a new article about how urban and rural residents can find common ground. In the Kentucky Rural-Urban Exchange (RUX), for example, “participants go on three weekend-long retreats to strengthen bonds with people from other parts of the state, creating a ‘currency of connection’ (in the words of RUX organizers) to increase mutual understanding, spark collective problem-solving, and, of course, develop friendships across divides, whether real or perceived.” Fascinating!
In the September 2018 issue of Wired magazine Clive Thompson argues that we need software to help slow us down, not speed up. He discusses “friction engineering,” which is “software that’s designed not to speed us up but to slow us down. It’s a principle that inverts everything we know about why software exists.” In social scientific circles, a great example the article cites is the social media site Nextdoor’s attempts to redesign its software to reduce racial profiling [see also my August 13, 2018 post.]
One strange item about the article: the online title is “We Need Software to Help Us Slow Down, Not Speed up.” In the print magazine, however, the article appears on page 38 as “Slow Software: In Praise of Fiction.” Weird.