Today, there is a new window of opportunity to adopt agent computing as a mainstream analytic tool in economics. Here, I discuss four major aspects in which this technology can improve economic policymaking: causality and detail, scalability and response, unobservability and counterfactuals, and separating design from implementation. In addition, I highlight the crucial role that policy agencies and research funders have in this endeavor by supporting a new generation of computationally-enabled social scientists.

Agent computing is a simulation tool that has been successfully adopted in many fields where policy interventions are critical. Economics, however, has failed in doing so. Today, there are new opportunities for bringing agent computing into economic policy. In this post, I discuss why this technology has not been adopted for economic policy and point out new opportunities to do it.

News media serves as a window into the society its readership represents. A newspaper’s description of a social group both demonstrates and constructs perceptions of that group within its audience. Understanding long-term trends or spatial differences in the representation of minority groups in news media can contribute to ongoing theoretical debates about the role and perception of minority groups in society. 

Fifty years after the "Summer of Love" transformed American youth culture, Andrew Anglin, the proprietor of the neo-Nazi website The Daily Stormer, announced to his followers that the summer of 2017 would be "The Summer of Hate."

In this follow-on post, we focus on data analysis and discuss co-occurrences of tags in images, and present an example of a co-occurrence network that represents a kind of "mental model" of SAGE journal images derived from the tags.

We are pleased to announce that the 2019 Concept Grants program is now open for applications. Now in its second year—learn more about the inaugural winners here—the Concept Grants program funds innovative software ideas that support social science researchers to work with big data and new technology. We have a small number of grants available, up to a maximum value of $35k (or £25k). Deadline for applications is 15th February 2019.

Apply now

Nowadays, issues related to the diffusion of fake news, rumours, hoaxes, as well as the diffusion of malware and viruses in online social networks have become so important as to transcend the virtual ecosystem and interfere with our businesses and societies. Currently, we are unable to effectively deal with these issues.

To learn more about the potential for VR to transform data visualization, Katie Metzler worked with SAGE colleagues, Diana Aleman and Andrew Boney and the team at Datavized, a startup based in New York City, on a project to turn data from one of SAGE’s data products, SAGE Stats, into a 3D VR experience.

At SAGE, we recently asked the question how could Cloud Vision APIs be applied to support scholarly publishing? For example, can they be used for new products or product features, to improve the editorial workflow, or to otherwise enhance SAGE operations or quality of life?

We are delighted to announce the first three winners of our Concept Grants program.

Each has been awarded $35k to develop their ideas and help more social scientists to work with big data.