The OECD is a global economic forum working with 35 member countries and more than 100 emerging and developing economies to make better policies for better lives. Our mission is to promote policies that will improve the economic and social well-being of people around the world. The Organisation provides a unique forum in which governments work together to share experiences on what drives economic, social and environmental change, seeking solutions to common problems.

The Directorate for Education and Skills (EDU) leads the Organisation’s work to help member and non-member countries achieve high-quality learning for all, design better skills policies, and turn them into jobs and growth. The Directorate carries this out by providing statistics, analysis and policy advice to countries on a wide range of educational topics.

EDU is looking for an experienced Policy Analyst to join the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) Team. The selected person will be required to plan, conduct and supervise analytical work and to draft policy relevant reports, publications and other documents. S/he will work under the supervision of the lead PISA Analyst within the Division for Early Childhood and Schools (EDU/ECS) as a member of a team of analysts and researchers. More information is available below.

 

The Population Studies Center expects to have openings for postdoctoral fellows sponsored by National Institute on Aging (NIA) and The Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD). Positions will start on or about September 1, 2017. Applicants must have a Ph.D. in demography, public health, or one of the social sciences (e.g., sociology, economics, psychology) at the starting date.

For additional information on this position (including how to apply), visit the link below.

The PAA Affairs newsletter critically requires additional material from you, the PAA membership. Talk about book releases, new positions, or upcoming conferences. They’d like to hear about the release of new data, interesting training/courses, jobs, and short essays about how your research was utilized. Also, please limit your submissions to about 250 words and include a URL, if relevant, so everyone can learn more.

NEW! They are also interested in three new features:

1. Research to Policy: items of up to 750 words on how research was used to inform or design policy.
2. Thought pieces of fields, trends, or innovations in population studies, of up to 750 words.
3. Data points: An interesting chart (jpeg or gif) with 250 words of explanation.

Due to space constraints and the incredible scientific productivity of this community, they have chosen not to publish simple lists of journal articles published. If you are not sure if your news is newsworthy, just ask.

Please send your materials to either of the co-editors, Leora Lawton and Emily Merchant, by December 5, 2016.

Please note:

• It would help us tremendously if you put “PAA Affairs” in the subject heading when communicating about the newsletter.
• If you do NOT receive a ‘thanks’ or some other kind of confirmation, please assume your email got caught by some spam filter and resend.
• All submissions undergo editorial review for content and fit. The Editors reserve the right to select for inclusion among the items received, and to edit items for publication.

This seminar introduces Bayesian Poisson Tucker decomposition (BPTD) for modeling country–country interaction event data. These data consist of interaction events of the form “country i took action a toward country j at time t.” BPTD discovers overlapping country–community memberships, including the number of latent communities. In addition, it discovers directed community–community interaction networks that are specific to “topics” of action types and temporal “regimes.” The presentation shows that BPTD yields an efficient MCMC inference algorithm and achieves better predictive performance than related models. It also demonstrates that it discovers interpretable latent structure that agrees with our knowledge of international relations.

ATMS/ESS/OCN 593

Tuesdays, 3:30-4:20 pm

Meeting modern environmental challenges requires new perspectives, approaches, collaborations, and knowledge – and new ways of linking scholarship with society.

This one-credit, reading and discussion-based seminar will explore the theory and practice of linking knowledge with action in support of progress on critical environmental challenges. Concepts will be illustrated using examples from efforts to inform societal responses to climate change. The course will review both foundational and emerging literature on topics, including:

• Defining and developing actionable science
• Integrating across multiple disciplines and incorporating extra-scientific knowledge to address societal problems (transdisciplinary research)
• Collaborating with non-academic communities to generate societally relevant information (knowledge coproduction)
• Facilitating the transfer of knowledge from science producers to users (knowledge brokering)
• Groups that facilitate the exchange of information between science and society (boundary organizations)
• Knowledge/action systems
• Defining and evaluating success in linking knowledge to action

Students will be expected to come to weekly meetings prepared to actively discuss reading assignments, and to participate in the course’s online discussion board. Credit/no-credit only.

Advanced undergraduates may register with permission of instructors. Postdoctoral researchers interested in auditing the course should contact instructors. Instructors: Meade Krosby (mkrosby@uw.edu) and Amy Snover (aksnover@uw.edu).

This is a call for paper proposals for Volume 19 of Advances in Medical Sociology, which will focus broadly on immigration and health. Additional information on the aims and scope of the volume is provided below. Articles may be empirical contributions or critical commentaries, and may be between 5,000 and 10,000 words. Each volume of Advances in Medical Sociology takes a focused approach to one subject or area of research, similar to a journal special issue. All papers are rigorously peer-reviewed, and the series is abstracted and indexed by Scopus and SocINDEX. If interested in contributing, please submit a one-page proposal detailing the purpose, methodology/approach, findings, implications, and originality/value of the paper. Proposals are due no later than February 1, 2017. Please send these to Reanne Frank, Volume Editor, at frank.219@osu.edu.

Volume 19 Aims and Scope:

Presently, immigrants constitute over 13 percent of the total U.S. population and, together, immigrants and their U.S.-born children are projected to account for over one-third of all Americans by 2065. Alongside these growth patterns, heated debates over the costs of immigration to the nation have emerged, with a substantial number of Americans expressing the view that immigrants are a burden to the country, drain public benefit programs, and negatively impact the nation’s health and wellbeing. Given that these views run counter to much of the existing evidence, a special volume dedicated to immigrant health provides scholars with an important platform to re-orient present debates and shed new light on our understandings of population health more broadly. Too often, the topic of immigrant health fails to be grounded in core sociological concepts such as stratification and inequality. Volume 19 of Advances in Medical Sociology will leverage a population health perspective to help unravel the patterns and paradoxes of immigrant health, and in doing so, help to clarify more broadly how health disparities emerge and persist in the contemporary U.S.

Potential topics may include, but are not limited to the immigrant health paradox, health selection, social and structural perspectives on immigrant health, the role of social ties and documentation status, residential segregation and ethnic enclaves, health care provision, discrimination and its consequences for the mental and/or physical health of immigrants, segmented assimilation and the health of children of immigrants, food insecurity and economic hardship, mixed documentation status families, and comparative cross-national perspectives.

For more information about Advances in Medical Sociology, visit its website.

Position Description Summary:
The George Washington University Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies ( WGSS) Program and the Trachtenberg School of Public Policy and Public Administration ( TSPPPA) seek to hire a gender policy scholar for a joint appointment, full-time tenure-track position in the Trachtenberg School at the beginning to advanced Assistant Professor rank to begin as early as fall, 2017. Teaching and service will be evenly allocated between WGSS and TSPPPA. The successful candidate will complement existing research and teaching strengths in global feminisms and/or intersectionality to potentially include gender and economic policy, feminist economics, poverty, health policy, immigration, labor, LGBT policy issues, or incarceration.

Minimum Qualifications:
Applicants must have a doctoral degree (granted or in-hand by time of appointment) in a relevant social science field such as public policy, public administration, political science, economics, sociology, or other social science and be able to teach one or more core courses in both WGSS and TSPPPA programs. We seek scholars with strong methodological skills and a profile of high quality existing research or demonstrated potential for such research in gender and public policy that will support the missions of the WGSS Program and the Trachtenberg School.

Long considered an axiom of science, the reproducibility of scientific research has recently come under scrutiny after some highly-publicized failures to reproduce results. This has often been linked to the failure of the current model of journal publishing to provide enough details for reviewers to adequately assess the correctness of papers submitted for publication. One early proposal for ameliorating this situation is to bundle the different files that make up a research result into a ‘compendium’. At the time it was originally proposed, creating a compendium was a complex process. In this talk, Ben Marwick shows how modern software tools and services have substantially lightened the burden of making compedia. He describes current approaches to making these compendia to accompany journal articles. Several recent projects of varying sizes are briefly presented to show how he and his colleagues are using R and related tools (e.g. version control, continuous integration, containers, repositories) to make compedia for our publications. He explains how these approaches, which they believe to be widely applicable to many types of research work, subvert the constraints of the typical journal article, and improve the efficiency and reproducibility of their research.