Good morning PPOL community- I just wanted to let you all know that Lorén Trull, besides doing what was described as a “beautiful job, just as it should be” on her dissertation proposal, also has landed a fantastic job and will be a Presidential Management Fellow, Policy Analyst for the Office of Management & Budget in Washington D.C. She starts August 24th (great incentive to complete her dissertation). What a terrific position for a UNC Charlotte Public Policy PhD graduate. I’m proud as can be.
Professor Emerita, Department of Sociology
AUTHOR
Beth A Rubin
Shout out to PPOL faculty member Dr. Mickelson!
Dr. Mickelson ( University Professor of Sociology, Public Policy), her co-authors Dr. Amy Hawn Nelson and Dr. Steven Smith were on Charlotte Talks this week talking about their new book, Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: School Desegregation and Resegregation in Charlotte (Feb. 2015, Harvard Education Press). They also gave a shout out to the important research on which they drew by Public Policy and Economics faculty member, Prof. Steven Billings. All in all it was a fascinating and sobering show.
Congratulations to Dr. Mickelson again!
Public Policy’s University Professor, Dr. Mickelson has a book coming out that takes on potential resegregation of public schools. http://ui.uncc.edu/story/cms-segregation-desegregation.
Horror
Categories: Ruminations
Driving into work this morning and listening to NPR, I heard a report, read in calm and even tones, that ISIS is beheading,crucifying and burying alive CHILDREN. Yes, all caps and fairly frantic sounding. I felt nauseated and horrified and outraged. My outrage is directed towards the global civilized world that goes about it’s messy and distracting business rather than stopping everything in order to collectively stop this outrage against all of humanity. Perhaps these tales are exaggerated, but that is, of course, what good people said when they heard tales of the gas chambers during Hitler’s horror show. I wonder what it will take before there is a truly global effort to stop this nightmare?
Yesterday the Public Policy program co-sponsored a fascinating talk by Dr. Philip Schrodt who is a senior research scientist at the statistical consulting firm Parus Analytics and a pioneer in using event data to study political conflict. His discussion of the optimal strategies for analyzing rare events, and the challenge in posed to conventional analytic strategies was deeply stimulating. He also spoke of the vast amount of open source data and software to analyze that data. He talked also about crowd-sourced efforts to solve some of the problems of predicting, forecasting rare events. Is ISIS a rare event? Can “we” crowd source a coherent and effective global response?
Something must happen.
Congratulations to Maureen Koricke!
We are happy to announce that Maureen Walsh Koricke successfully defended her Dissertation November 25th!
Social Science Research and the Public Trust
Categories: Call for Papers and Contributions
Two days ago the Public Policy program at UNC Charlotte had the good fortune to host Dr. Jeffrey Wasserman, Vice President of RAND Corporation and Director of RAND Health. RAND’s vision is “To be the world’s most trusted source for policy ideas and analysis.” http://www.rand.org/about/vision.html. One of the questions that we had for Dr. Wasserman was how he managed to maintain their commitment to doing non-partisan, “rigorous and objective” research given the current polarization in Washington D.C. where even what strikes me as the most accepted tenants of science have become items of political debate (completely undermining my claim to students that some things are not a matter of opinion, but are “facts” (under constant scrutiny given the scientific method), of science. This question points to a particular structural vulnerability of RAND; they are entirely dependent on soft money (though they have quite a bit of it). Dr. Wasserman’s response is that they have an agreement with anyone who funds their research that RAND will publish what they find; they will not suppress findings even if the funder insists that findings unfavorable to the funders’ position should not see the light of day. That means that if funders won’t sign the full disclosure agreement, RAND will not take the money and they have walked away from millions of dollars. The same day, a colleague sent me an article from the Chronical of Higher Education about a recent possible ethical breach by three researchers from Stanford University and Dartmouth College who did an experiment that entailed sending out mailers to voters in Montana that, according to the Chronicle article “featured the state’s official seal and offered information about the political leanings of candidates for the state’s Supreme Court as part of an attempt to see whether such information would alter how Montanans voted” http://chronicle.com/article/DartmouthStanford/149687/.
Obviously the project was insufficiently vetted by an Institutional Review Board and obviously the project reflects problematic research practices. The article raises questions about the ethical challenges of using experimental methods and the associated deception in political science research. What struck me about this article, after listening to Dr. Wasserman, is the deepening precarity of social science research in the contemporary political climate. How will knowledge about this political science study contribute to the current and growing antipathy of non-academics to academic research? The Political Science program at the National Science Foundation has already experienced dire restrictions on their funding due to skepticism and hostility on “the hill” towards political science research. Research cannot proceed without both public trust and funding support. RAND maintains the public trust by refusing money from people who reject RAND’s insistence on research transparency and is able to secure funding. Despite RAND’s success to date, Wasserman indicated that intense political polarization and hostility towards aspects of the research process are real threats that are growing. Researchers are in an interesting bind then since sometimes transparency undermines certain data gathering strategies. The public often does not understand scientific research, data gathering (such things as sampling etc.) and deception in research. How, then, do we as a social science community educate the public about social science, while encouraging innovative research?
Great Speakers coming to UNC Charlotte
Categories: Events
Project Mosaic will host a public lecture by Dr. Nathaniel Hendren, Harvard University.
Title: Intergenerational Mobility and Equality of Opportunity in the US.
When: October 2, 2:00 p.m. in the College of Health and Human Services 159.
Public Policy will host a lecture by Dr. Jeffrey Wasserman, RAND Corporation,
Title: TBA
October 29th: 12:30 p.m.
Jeffrey Wasserman is vice president and director of RAND Health. He currently leads the National Health Security Strategy project, sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, and earlier led projects related to public health entrepreneurship and the relationship between law and public health emergency preparedness. He was co–principal investigator on RAND’s Comprehensive Assessment of Reform Efforts (COMPARE) initiative and led a Gates Foundation–funded project on improving diagnostic tools for the developing world. His talk will focus on lessons learned in his 30 years as a policy analyst.
Congratulations Dr. Wodicka
Congratulations go out to Reid Wodicka who successfully defended his dissertation titled “Hot Spots in the City: The Relationship Between Neighborhood Characteristics and the Demand for Local Government Emergency Services.” on Wednesday, September 17, 2014.
Reid’s committee was comprised of Harry Campbell (Chair), James Walsh, Heather Smith and James Bird. Way to go Reid!!
More Good news- Congratulate Dr. Lapitan on her new job!
It is always exciting when one of ours obtains a good job! Please join me in congratulating Aileen Lapitan on her new job. This morning she sent me the following e-mail:
” I just want to share that I accepted a job offer at International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) which is headquartered in my home country, Philippines. IRRI is part of worldwide consortium–the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR), and its research area is mostly in Asia.
The position is called “Associate Scientist – Social Science”. I will be working in a multi-cultural team of agronomists, agricultural engineers, economists and other social scientists. Our team studies and assists rice farmers in unfavorable environments. Particularly, we are focused on “heirloom” rice varieties which are ones that indigenous peoples in the uplands have been handing down from generation to generation (as opposed to hybrids developed by major seed companies and sold at a high price from season to season). Heirloom varieties have a distinct flavor that attract higher-end consumers. They also have good tolerance of pests that they require less to zero chemical pesticides. Their yields are however not as high as those of hybrid varieties, due mainly to biophysical limitations of their environment. Our team is working on promoting livelihoods of those upland farmers through scientific enhancement of sustainable farming practices and value-chain linkages. Another important aspect of the project is the preservation of cultural legacies of indigenous peoples as identified with their own heirloom varieties. I’m excited to get started on the work. My flight home is on September 22.”
Congratulations to Dr. Jean Claude Thill and PPOL student Mauricio Quinones Dominguez!
More good news! I am delighted to congratulate Professor Jean-Claude Thill, Knight Foundation Distinguished Professor of Geography and Earth Sciences and Professor of Public Policy and second year Public Policy Student have been informed that their proposal has been funded. They received the following message;
“Dear Jean-Claude Thill,
I am very pleased to inform you that the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy’s research proposals evaluation committee for the Program on Latin America and Caribbean has recommended supporting your work on ‘Spatial Analysis of Priority Attention Housing (PAH) Development Projects in the Urban Area of Cali, Colombia.’ We received roughly 200 proposals, some very good, which far exceeded our budget for this program. This award reflects the committee’s judgment that your proposal and your past work show excellent potential for improving understanding of land policies and urban development in Latin America. ….
We congratulate you and look forward to working with you on this important project.
Sincerely,
Martim Oscar Smolka
Senior Fellow and Director
Program on Latin America and the Caribbean
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