The Monkey Cage

The current issue of Inside Higher Ed has a good overview of the current brouhaha over whether the American Political Science Association’s 2012 meeting should be moved out of its designated site, New Orleans, due to Louisiana’s anti-gay and lesbian policies. APSA President Dianne Pinderhughes, speaking for the APSA Council, recently reaffirmed the Association’s intention to meet in New Orleans, pointing to local conditions and policies rather than state-level ones, the role that holding meetings in New Orleans can play in restoring the city, and APSA’s self-imposed prohibition against taking stands on policy issues. This reaffirmation has distressed many gay and lesbian activists, who are concerned not only about the hostile atmosphere for them in Louisiana but also about potential health risks of being in a place where the health care benefits that are available to family members would not be available to them or their partners. Talk of a boycott of the meeting is in the air.

For the Inside Higher Ed coverage, click here.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Bob Sommer, who teaches public policy communications and is president of Observer Media, publisher of The New York Observer, and John R. Maycroft, a graduate student in public policy, (both at Rutgers University, or as I like to call it, the University of New Jersey) went through 366 op-eds written by academics in three major (or more accurately, 2 major and one not so major) newspapers, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The Star Ledger. They find that (1) 90 to 95 percent of the op-eds agree with the editorial page stance on the issue, (2) most of the academics come from high-prestige universities, and (3) men wrote 78 percent of the op-eds in The Star-Ledger, 82 percent in The Times, and 97 percent in The Journal.

According to the New York Times article that discusses Sommer and Maycrott’s research, the authors find their latter discovery (men writing most of the op-eds) to be “the most astonishing.” I haven’t read their article, but I find it curious that they would say this is their most astonishing discovery. I’m assuming that most of the op-eds in the Wall Street Journal are economic or policy oriented. Therefore, as a baseline, they should see what percentage of academics in those fields are men. I haven’t looked at the latest numbers, but I think they are above 75 percent. Therefore, are 78 percent of the op-eds in The Star-Ledger, 82 percent in The Times, and 97 percent in The Journal such “astonishing” numbers?

Posted by David Park at 10:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Madonna G. Constantine, a professor at Teacher’s College at Columbia University, gained national attention when a noose was found hanging on her door. Little did I know that while this incident was going on, she was being investigated for plagiarism! After 18 months of investigation she was found to have plagiarized the works of two former students and a colleague. Not good. Read the details here in the NY Times.

Posted by David Park at 04:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Syracuse University political scientist Jeff Stonecash has been doing public opinion research for the last quarter-century, using university facilities and paying Syracuse students to serve as interviewers. He has conducted surveys for non-profit organizations and the local newspaper, among other sponsors, and for numerous candidates for public office — Republicans and Democrats alike. Now Stonecash is being told by Syracuse University authorities to cease and desist — this following complaints from a Democratic candidate about a survey that Stonecash recently conducted for his Republican opponent. The complainant alleges that Stonecash is a partisan Republican whose survey results are biased. (Actually, Stonecash is a registered Democrat.) When informed of these concerns, Stonecash indicated that he “would have done the same thing for [the Democratic candidate], but they never asked. I’m not a partisan pollster.”

This episode raises all sorts of questions about “applied” research in academic settings, especially in politically charged circumstances. For details, click here.

[Hat tip to Carol Sigelman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Via The Little Professor this Choice editorial on overdue reviews.

Reviewers frequently need more time with assignments—and that’s usually fine with us (see FAQ, above)—and in requesting extensions (or explaining tardy submissions) they sometimes offer “excuses.” For several years we have been collecting the best of them … Excuses fall into several large categories, pathos being always a fine choice: “Sorry this is late. The spirit was willing, but the flesh had a bad cold and was wallowing in Kleenex and self-pity.” And there’s passing the buck (to your children): “We are in the adoption process and have just been notified we are receiving three children ages four, two, and one. Our world is a bit upside down at the moment.” And too busy: “Before I get to the review, I need to finish a book manuscript, move out of my house, respond to a divorce settlement, go out of town (twice), and file my taxes.” The overworked/wild beast combo—always a winner: “I have become an accidental library director at a time when we are doubling the size of the library and I am up to my neck in alligators.”

Posted by Henry at 08:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This New York Times story about SSRN rankings lead me to search for the top-ranked paper by political scientists. Can you guess what it is?

Continue reading "The Top Political Science Paper on SSRN" »

Posted by John Sides at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

I recently read Intuition, Allegra Goodman’s novel of high-stakes science, competitive research labs, and scientific fraud. IF you haven’t already done so, put it high on your reading list.

Anyway, I was immediately reminded of Intuition when I encountered, in the current issue of The Chronicle of Higher Education, a longish piece on what is apparently the increasingly widespread practice of sweetening or even outright faking the images in scientific articles. (The cite is: Jeffrey B. Young, “Journals Find Many Images in Research are Faked,” The Chronicle of Higher Education, June 6 2008, pp. 1, 10-11. I’ve provided the hard-copy cite because the article is available online here, but it’s gated and it’ll cost you, so you might prefer to track down the paper copy instead.)

Here are some relevant excerpts from the Chronicle article::

…[w]hen an editor of The Journal of Clinical Investigation did a spot-check of one of {a post-doctoral fellow’s] images for an article in 2005, [her] research proved a little too perfect. The image had dark bands on it, supposedly showing different proteins in different conditions. ‘As we looked at it, we realized the person had cut and pasted the exact same bands’ over and over again, says … the journal’s executive editor. In some cases a copied part of the image had been flipped or reversed to make it look like a new finding.

As computer programs make images easier than ever to manipulate, editors at a growing number of scientific publications are turning into image detectives, examining figures to test their authenticity. And the level of tampering they find is alarming …Ten to 20 of the articles accepted by The Journal of Clinical Investigation each year show some evidence of tampering, anfd about five to 10 of those parpers warrant a thorough investigation …. (The journal publishes about 300 to 350 articles per year.)

Experts say many young researchers may not even realize that tampering with their images is inappropriate. After all, people now commonly alter digital snapshots to take red out of eyes, so why not clean up a protein image in Photoshop to make it clearer? ‘This is one of the dirty little secrets — that every massages the data like this,’ says [a computer-science professor at Dartmouth who has been working with journal editors to help them detect image manipulation and who terms the magnitude of such fraud ‘phenomenal.’]

..[S]ome researchers are concerned about the level of scrutiny, arguing that it could lead to false accusations and unnecessarily delay research.

At least in my field, or the parts of it I know best, everybody Ieverybody is verbally committed to maintaining high ethical standards, so my purpose here isn’t to point fingers. Rather, it’s to note that:

*. Despite this commitment, we rarely discuss such matters.

*. We typiically become irate when we hear about such cases, and favor throwing the book at the miscreant.

*. When an impropriety occurs in our own shop, though, we prefer to handle it quietly, off the books, without taking “official” action or leaving behind much, if any, of a record of it and what was done about it.

*. When new procedures are put in place to protect against such fraud, we tend to regard them as cumbersome intrusions that make it even more difficult for us to do our work. Which they often are.

Again, I’m not pointing fingers — or, if I am, I’m pointing toward the mirror as well as toward others. And I’m certainly not preaching from on high, for my own discipline isn’t exactly leading the field in grappling with these issues. Ratherr, my point is that all this is an enormously complex set of issues that often becomes more gray than black and white in real-world situations (as opposed to abstract posturing or administrative rule-making). My consciousness of these complexities was enhanced a by the Chronicle piece, but my recent reading of Allegra Goodman’s novel had already done an excellent job of laying out the basic issues.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:44 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)

(Northwestern University grads, circa 1974)

From Inside Higher Ed:

Northwestern University just moves from one controversy to another with regard to this year’s commencement. Many law students are offended that Jerry Springer will be their speaker. And one of the university’s planned recipients for an honorary doctorate, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, was hastily uninvited after he became famous as Sen. Barack Obama’s ex-pastor. As these incidents were debated, the university hinted that graduates would get a big name as the main speaker. Now that the name is out — Chicago Mayor Richard Daley — many students are unimpressed, and some are complaining. The Chicago Tribune reported that one student e-mailed the university’s president and received a testy response. The student, Matthew Braslow, wrote: “If your goal in the speaker selection process was to make graduating seniors happy about leaving this university, then mission accomplished.” President Henry Bienen replied: “”Matthew, grow up…. You also sound like a very unhappy person. I am sorry for that. Hopefully things will improve for you over the years.”

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 08:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

That’s Michael Avery, an eighth-grader from Lake Sherwood, California. Like many kids his age, Michael likes to play basketball.

After high school, Michael is going to play basketball in college. Not only that: He’s going to play at a perennial basketball powerhouse, the University of Kentucky.

Note that I didn’t just say that young Michael wants to play basketball in college, let alone at the University of Kentucky. I said he’s going to. In fact, he’s already accepted the scholarship offer that Kentucky coach Billy Gillespie extended to him earlier this month.

Now, I’m a close follower of college basketball. But this development — recruiting kids who are still in junior high — takes me completely off guard. I guess I just haven’t been paying attention, but I had no idea that it had come to this.

It shouldn’t have taken me off guard, because it turns out that this isn’t the first time it’s happened. Within the last couple of years, Southern Cal’s coach, Tim Floyd, has inked two middle school students, and Arizona’s Lute Olson has offered schollies to two kids who hadn’t even started eighth grade yet. And the same week that Michael Avery accepted his offer, Gillespie got another commitment for Kentucky, albeit this time from a veritable grey-beard — ninth-grader Vinny Zollo from Greenfield, Ohio. A recruiting analyst is quoted in Sports Illustrated as saying “It’s like an arms race. You’ve got to offer first.” Apparently this is now becoming standard operating procedure in the cutthroat business of recruiting for big-time college sports.

With so many successful programs pursuing this strategy, it occurs to me that academic departments should consider following their lead. If it”s good enough for the athletics department, then why not for the political science department, too? In fact, in my department there’s a very productive married couple who have two young daughters. These girls obviously have the political science genes and they’re growing up in an academically-oriented home. So why wait? Let’s sign ‘em up as faculty members before Columbia or UCSD hears about ‘em!

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 04:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)

The NYT tells us that Samantha Power (who is, on a variety of levels, one of the most interesting senior foreign policy types in US politics) has just resigned from Obama’s campaign after a supposed-to-be-off-the-record quote about Hillary Clinton being a ‘monster’ was published by The Scotsman. Which makes this piece from David Glenn in the Chronicle a few months ago all the more interesting.

Ms. Power is just one of dozens of university-based scholars advising the current crop of presidential candidate … The role of presidential advisers has changed a great deal since the early 1960s, when John F. Kennedy was closely identified with a clutch of Ivy League scholars. One of those advisers, the late Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, is credited with writing one of the most famous lines in Kennedy’s Inaugural Address: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.”

Ms. Power and the other scholar-advisers of the 2008 season face challenges that Galbraith’s generation never knew. The public is much more skeptical of credentialed expertise than it was during the Kennedy administration. And new technologies make the candidate-adviser relationship more perilous than it once was. In theory a student in one of Ms. Power’s Harvard courses might post one of her classroom comments (perhaps wildly out of context) on a blog and create a news-media storm within hours.

“That’s the one thing that terrifies me,” Ms. Power says. “That I’ll say something that will somehow hurt the candidate.” She says that in public lectures and interviews, she sometimes fights the urge to make unkind statements about other candidates. “That’s just not Obama’s style,” she says. “Left to my own devices, I’d articulate my frustrations in a much harsher way.”

If further reinforcement be needed, this tells me again how bad I (and I suspect many other blogging academics) would be at real world politics in the highly unlikely event that someone wanted me to work for them in a campaign. It’s pretty easy to shoot off your mouth when you’re only representing yourself, but it’s obviously not so great when others can use what you say to attack the candidate that you work for.

Posted by Henry at 04:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you enroll in a doctoral program in political science, what are the chances that you’re going to end up with your degree?

It depends, of course, on your background preparation, your determination, your “fit” with the program in which you enroll, and a host of other factors that may be impossible to foresee at the time you enter a program. A new study by the Council of Graduate Schools suggests that it also depends on how much of your life you’re willing to spend pursuing the degree. (Click here for a pre-publication presentation of some of the study’s main findings.)

Let’s begin with some trends for the social sciences in general, and then turn to political science in particular. Here is a chart showing the degree completion rates for doctoral students in various fields at the end of three years, four years, … ten years. What the chart reveals is that:

• After seven years, four out of every ten social science doctoral students (40.9%) had completed their degree work. That placed social science students on the low side — not as low as those in the humanities (29.3%), but well below those in engineering, the life sciences, and math and physical sciences.

• However, whereas the completion rates of students in the latter three fields more or less leveled off in years 8-10, the rates for students in the social sciences and humanities kept rising. The social science students ultimately caught up with the engineers but continued to lag well behind those in the life sciences or math and the physical sciences.

Now, what about political science in particular? The report indicates that:

• At every time point, students in political science, anthropology, and sociology had lower completion rates than their counterparts in psychology, economics, and communications. For example, by the end of Year 7 only about 27% of political science doctoral students had finished up.

• Political science students didn’t just throw in the towel after seven years. In fact, by the end of Year 10, their completion rate had risen to about 45% — still far below the 65 or 66% rate for students in psychology and communications but far above the seven-year cumulative completion rate of 27% in political science.

• On the other side of the coin, the cumulative attrition rate for political science doctoral students by Year 7 was approximately 35%. That was the highest within the social sciences.

• Some simple math establishes that about 38% of the political science doctoral who had entered seven years earlier were still in the program (the other 62% having completed their degree work or dropped out). And almost half of these 38% were still enrolled even after ten years.

These findings suggest some questions about which all of us probably some hunches but lack real evidence. For example, what is it about political science as a field of study that slows our students down relative to the performance of students in some other social science disciplines? (The fact that many of our students do extensive fieldwork obviously enters in, but there must be more to it than that.) What, for that matter, is there about the social sciences that slows our students down relative to the performance of students in most other fields (the obvious exception being the humanities)? And what can political science programs legitimately do to move our students along at a less glacial speed, especially given that most programs provide funding for no more than five or six years?

[Hat tip to Carol Sigelman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 07:32 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Tim Lambert points to (and excerpts) a recently published article suggesting that many social scientists (including a couple of well-known political scientists) did research on the social importance of smoking that was paid for by the tobacco industry.

ICOSI created a subcommittee, the Social Acceptability Working Party (SAWP), to develop measures to combat the social cost and passive smoking issues. SAWP’s initial chairman was RJR’s VP of Public Affairs, who also served on the TI Communications Committee. George Berman, a former PM employee who started a consulting firm, helped organize and direct SAWP (Senkus). …AWP members had already identified and approached social science academics (Berman) who were sympathetic to industry positions and agreed to participate (Pepples): Richard Wagner (professor of Economics at George Mason University), Robert Tollison (former economic consultant to the US Treasury Department and professor of Economics at Texas A&M and later George Mason University), Robert Nozick (professor of Philosophy at Harvard University), Sherwin Feinhandler (sociologist and lecturer at Harvard Medical School specializing in cultural anthropology of tobacco, alcohol and drug research), Peter Berger (professor of Sociology at Rutgers and later at Boston College), Aaron Wildavsky (Chairman of Political Science Department and Dean of the Graduate School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley), Edward Harris (a political scientist at South Connecticut State University), and Martin Gruber (finance expert at New York University). … A February 1980 SAWP progress report on the SC/SV project states that the academics would be commissioned to conduct “cross-cultural research” to “emphasize the social importance of smoking” (Goals of SC/SV), find ways to reverse the research describing the social costs of smoking, and “support the view that smoking is ‘normal’ behavior, a view that many social scientists would defend if given the information to do so”. Other activities included participating in academic conferences nominally sponsored by third (non-tobacco) parties and organized in ways that would minimize evidence of industry backing (Marcotullio). …

Continue reading "Academic ethics and social science" »

Posted by Henry at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Academicians in this country, especially those in the social sciences and humanities, are disproportionately left of center, or at least centrist, politically, rather than conservative. That finding has cropped up in so many surveys over the years that I won’t even bother to cite sources. Let’s just take it as a fact and go from there.

Go where? How about adressing the “Why?” questlon? It’s here that things begin to get interesting.

One answer is that conservatives are discriminated against in academia. They don’t get hired in the first place, and the fortunate few who do find academic employment aren’t tolerated for long by their liberal colleagues. That answer is simple, straightforward, and politically combustible. It’s the standard story that conservatives tell and liberals dispute.

Now, however, comes quite a different answer. Based on their recent research, Matthew Woessner and April Kelly-Woessner contend that the culprit isn’t discrimination against conservatives, but rather self-selection on the part of conservatives. In a paper titled “Left Pipeline: Why Conservatives Don’t Get Doctorates, Woessner and Kelly-Woessner conclude that “The personal priorities of those on the left are more compatible with pursuing a Ph.D.” than are the priorities of their conservative counterparts. For example, liberal undergraduates are more likely than conservatives to do research projects with their professors. More importantly, conservative undergraduates are outnumbered by two to one in the social sciences and humanities. Conservative students are more oriented toward financial security and raising famlies. Accordingly, they gravitate toward more “practical” courses of study that lead them into highly remunerative professions like accounting and computer science. They’re also less willing to delay having children — a common pattern in academic life, where childbirth often awaits a favorable tenure vote.

For a chatty and not especially informative introduction to this project in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, click here. For a copy of the paper itself, click here.

(By the way, you should check out Matthew’s website, which has some handsome photos of the canine members of the family.)

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

To follow up on Lee’s post, here is Cosma Shalizi.

An anecdote relevant to Shalizi’s re-framing of Jensen’s original argument: I have a colleague who has taught the same large introductory course several times. By now, the class content doesn’t change from semester to semester, and in all likelihood the class demographics don’t change much from semester to semester. But last spring he made one change: he replaced his casual attire with a shirt, pants, and jacket. He told us that his teaching evaluations went up noticeably.

Posted by John Sides at 10:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

1. Don’t start with a joke. The audience is not accustomed to you or your speaking style yet. Humor will be difficult at this point.
2. Do start with a menu. Tell them exactly what you’ll be speaking about and in what order.
3. Do provide an empowerment promise. Explain why your audience will come away from the talk better than when they entered.

That is some of the advice from Patrick Henry Winston of MIT. Much more is here. Should graduate students be required to give a successful talk as a condition of their Ph.D.? I’d say yes. (Not that faculty wouldn’t also benefit — and perhaps benefit more — from Winston’s advice.)

[Hat tip to Ben Casnocha, via Marginal Revolution.]

Posted by John Sides at 03:41 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

“Dressing fashionably in academia is like clearing the four-foot high jump. The bar is not that high.”

“There is something about the combination of denim and tenure that is inherently preposterous.”

Those are just two of the many bon mots contained in Erik Jensen’s delightful analysis of academic attire, here. Jensen, a law professor at Case Western Reserve, has some fun at the expense of unkempt academics (in whose ranks I proudly place myself), for whom he goes so far, whimsically, as to propose a dress code.

[Hap tip to Carol Sigelman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 01:15 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

In the internet age, plagiarism looms as a vexing problem on college campuses. Sometimes, though, it’s the professors, not the students, who are the culprits.

In a paper (“A Tale of Two Citations”) published in the January 24 issue of Nature (here, gated), Mounir Errami and Harold Garner of the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center report on the results of their foray into plagiarism detection in biomedical research.

Errami and Garner used eTBLAST, a text search program, as an initial screener of papers in Medline, the widely used online database of biomedical abstracts. Medline contains millions of records, and at the rate eTBLAST performs its searches, it would have taken Errami and Garner many years to perform a complete search. By taking some understandable shortcuts, they identified a large number of suspicious-looking abstracts, “manually” a subset of a few thousand of these, and turned up what they called 73 “plagiarism candidates.” Each of these “candidates” was a paper by one author or one set of authors that appeared to duplicate a paper by another author or set of authors. Errami and Garner stop short of describing these as cases of plagiarism, because such a charge is extremely serious and is subject to verification by editorial boards and university ethics committees and to counter-actions for libel or slander. In related work, Errami and Garner have identified a much more widespread tendency toward duplication of papers by the same author or authors; indeed, they characterize the rate of self-duplication as about 33 times higher than that of apparent duplication of others’ work.

What can be done? One problem, Errami and Garner note, is “the lack of clear standards for what level of … re-use is appropriate,” but “probably the single most important factor” is “the belief that one can get away with” such re-use. Consequently, they recommend that journal editors begin using the new computational tools to detect duplications and let it be known that they are doing so. “Above all, the fear of having some transgression exposed in a public and embarrassing manner could be a very effective deterrent,” they conclude.

Unfortunately, that deterrent is rarely employed. Rather, those who detect these ethical transgressions tend to sweep them under the rug — a tendency with which I have some second-hand experience.

Although it’s now dated, the most telling analysis of plagiarism I’ve ever encountered is Thomas Mallon’s book, Stolen Words, a review of which appears here. As the reviewer indicates, the “star case” in Mallon’s book was a faculty member at Texas Tech University, who, as luck would have it, occupied the office next door to my own. After being caught in the act, he was quietly let go — exactly the course of action against which Errami and Garner warn.

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 05:20 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

What happens when colleges are barred from using race or ethnicity in their admissions decisions? Opposition to the use of racial or ethnic criteria in college admissions has been spearheaded by whites. However, a new study of freshman enrollment patterns, 1990-2005, at the University of Florida, the University of Texas, and UC-Berkeley, UC-San Diego, and UCLA suggests that white applicants did not benefit from the ban on considering race or ethnicity in admissions decisions. Indeed, the study suggests that whites’ share of the student bodies at those schools actually declined somewhat. The study’s authors (former UCLA chancellor Charles E. Young, former Florida provost David R. Colburn, and former Florida director of institutional research Victor M. Yellen) attribute some of that decline to the increasing diversity of the states in which these schools are located. Even so, they pointedly conclude that the decline in white enrollments “can hardly be satisfying” to “those who campaigned for the elimination of affirmative action in the belief that it would advantage white students.”

The apparent impact on the enrollment of black students varied greatly from school to school. At the three UC campuses, the impact was “devastating,” but in Florida the decline was limited and in Texas black enrollments rebounded after an initial drop. The study’s authors attribute this differential impact across states to differences in the aggressiveness with which state and university officials worked to mitigate the effects of the affirmative action bans.

The primary beneficiaries of the bans, the study concludes, were Asian Americans, not whites. The previously existing admissions criteria had in effect discriminated against Asian Americans, whose share of the entering classes at these schools shot up after the bans were imposed.

The current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education contains a lengthy report on the study, along with considerable background material, but direct online access is restricted to Chronicle subscribers. Here is a copy of the Chronicle story that was posted elsewhere on the internet. The study itself will be published within the next few days in Interactions: UCLA Journal of Education and Information Studies.

[Hat tip to Carol Sigelman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 10:16 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Not many university presidents get publicly involved in political campaigns. To be sure, there’s no strict doctrine of the separation of school and state — indeed, in the last century, the U.S. had two presidents (Wilson and Eisenhower) who had themselves been university presidents (and of Ivy League schools, no less). But it’s generally been considered inappropriate for sitting university presidents — especially, the presidents of public universities — to take an active role in political campaigns.

Now that seems to be changing, as detailed in this item from insidehighered.com. I don’t know quite what to make of it, in terms of its implications, if any, for a school whose president is thus engaged, or what it says about the role of celebrity endorsements in American politics. Nor, for that matter, do I understand why a university president’s candidate preferences are considered newsworthy in the first place. Why should anybody care which candidate the President of State U is supporting? Am I missing something here?

[Tip of the hat to Carol Sigelman]

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 11:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Here is a great checklist to consult before sending off an article to be reviewed. It’s not a bad checklist for good writing generally.

[Hat tip to Chris Blattman, who writes a very interesting blog himself.]

Posted by John Sides at 04:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The true scientist is, religiously speaking, non- or even anti-religious. That, at least, is starting point for many discussions of the interplay, and often the tension between, science and religion. A recent (2005) survey of academicians in seven natural and social science disciplines (political science, economics, psychology, sociology, biology, chemistry, and physics) at elite U.S. universities casts new light on scientists’ religious views.

Among the findings from this survey, undertaken by Elaine Howard Ecklund, a sociologist at the University at Buffalo, and Christopher P. Scheitle, a Penn State doctoral student in sociology, and reported in a recent issue of Social Problems (abstract here), several stand out.

Continue reading "Religious Commitment in Academia: Political Scientists Stand Out" »

Posted by Lee Sigelman at 12:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)