This post was published earlier in the newsletter of the European Research Network on Philanthropy The 20 ^th century has seen a tremendous growth of scientific enterprise. The increasing productivity of scientists has been accompanied by a proliferation of academic disciplines.

Diving deep into my archives I recovered an old file in which I describe how I got to study prosocial behavior. The file is dated 21 February 2000. I reproduce it below – and here’s a pdf.

The recent success of the Ice Bucket Challenge for ALS across the world raises numerous questions on philanthropy. In this post I give some background information to answer five of these questions. 1. Where will it end? It is hard to predict how much money will be raised for ALS through the Ice Bucket Challenge.

Here’s CRAP: a new policy regarding review requests I’ve decided to try out. CRAP means Conditional Review Acceptance Policy, the new default response to review requests. I will perform review only if the journal agrees to publish the article in a Free Open Access mode – making the article publicly available, without charging any fees for it from universities, authors, or readers. Here’s the story behind CRAP.

scatterplot I’ve been active on Twitter regarding the well-publicized study that hurricanes with feminine names kill more people than hurricanes with masculine names.

Wereldwijd houdt een toenemend aantal wetenschappers uit zeer uiteenlopende disciplines zich bezig met filantropie. Deze trend zien we ook in Nederland. Wat is er in de wetenschap bekend over de achtergronden en de impact van filantropie? En hoe ziet het Nederlandse academische landschap eruit? In deze bijdrage geef ik een beknopt antwoord op deze vragen.

The PhD project will focus on characteristics of individual crowdfunders and of crowdfunding projects that influence donation behavior. Specifically, the research investigates the effects of online context characteristics on motivations and giving behavior of crowdfunders as well as the organizational arrangements in which crowdfunding campaigns are embedded.

Often I encounter academics thinking that a high proportion of explained variance is the ideal outcome of a statistical analysis. The idea is that in regression analyses a high R Squared is better than a low R Squared. In my view, the emphasis on a high R2 should be reduced. A high R2 should not be a goal in itself.

Deze bijdrage verscheen op 27 januari op Filanthropium.nl. Dank aan Theo Schuyt voor commentaar op een eerdere versie van dit stuk en aan Sigrid Hemels en Frans Nijhof voor correcties van enkele feitelijke onjuistheden. PDF? Klik hier. De contouren van het toezicht op goededoelenorganisaties in de toekomst worden zo langzamerhand duidelijk.

Academic misconduct figures prominently in the press this week: Peter Nijkamp, a well-known Dutch economist at VU University Amsterdam, supervised a dissertation in which self-plagiarism occurred, according to a ruling of an integrity committee of the National Association of Universities in the Netherlands. The complaint led two national newspapers to dig into the work of Nijkamp.

The Center for Philanthropic Studies at VU University Amsterdam has a new director. As of January 1, 2014, René Bekkers continues the work of the Center’s founder, Theo Schuyt.