Category Archives: Sociology
The market for blood
Slonim et al. (2014) discuss the problems of blood allocation in different countries and suggest a mechanism that can improve it. The present article is a summary of their main ideas.
In the wealthy countries blood is mostly supplied […]
Going postal: When radiation dosimeters got into a box
Author:
Maria Rentetzi is associate professor of history and sociology of science and technology at the National Technical University of Athens in Greece. She received her B.Sc. in Physics at the University of Thessaloniki, an MA in History and […]
What are we talking about when we talk about glass ceilings?
Every year, as the International Women’s Day approaches, a classic topic for the media is to summarize statistics related to the gender wage gap. The empirical evidence is overwhelming: differences between men and women in the labor market are […]
To approve or not to approve: this is not the question
Authors: José Carlos R. Alcantud and Annick Laruelle
José Carlos R. Alcantud is a professor of Economics at the department of economics and economic history and a member of the multidisciplinary business institute (IME) of the University of Salamanca
Annick […]
Why schools inflate grades
In 2012 the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Science was granted to two mathematicians, Lloyd Shapley and Alvin Roth, “for the theory of stable allocations and the practice of market design”. The market design in their theory was not exactly […]
Research funding: big vs. little science
With the delicate economical situation that many developed countries are experiencing in the last years, a significant number of questions and concerns have been risen about how to properly assign and distribute funding to scientific institutions and research group leaders. […]
The effects of Affirmative Action policies against discrimination
No one denies that there exist some forms of discrimination in the labor market and in many other places of our societies. There is, however, debate about the cause or causes of this discrimination and about the best ways to […]
Social networks and the Spanish 15-M movement
A complex myriad of factors, many of them related with the global economic crisis, have given rise to a large number of social movements in the latest years. From the Occupy movement to the Arab Spring, or the more recent […]
Epistemology in the courts. Or, Sherlock Holmes is dead, long live to Thomas Bayes.
Strange as it may sound to many people, the fact is that some of the most interesting work on epistemology that is being currently done in Spain is carried out at the headquarters of the Spanish gendarmerie (the well known […]