Science and the State

Science and the State
Author: John Gascoigne
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 265
Release: 2019-03-21
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107155673

The first historical overview of the partnership between science and the state from the Scientific Revolution to World War II.

Science Magazine's State of the Planet 2006-2007

Science Magazine's State of the Planet 2006-2007
Author: Donald Kennedy
Publisher: Island Press
Total Pages: 217
Release: 2006-06-15
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1597266248

How often in today's environmental debates have you read that "the science is in dispute"-even when there is overwhelming consensus among scientists? Too often, the voice of science is diminished or diluted for the sake of politics, and the public is misled. Now, the most authoritative voice in U.S. science, Science magazine, brings you current scientific knowledge on today's most pressing environmental challenges, from population growth to climate change to biodiversity loss. Science Magazine's State of the Planet 2006-2007 is a unique contribution that brings together leading environmental scientists and researchers to give readers a comprehensive yet accessible overview of current issues. Included are explanatory essays from Science magazine editor-in-chief Donald Kennedy that tie together the issues and explore the relationships among them. Each of the book's 18 chapters is written by the world's leading experts, such as: Joel Cohen on population Peter Gleick on water Daniel Pauly on fisheries Thomas Karl on climate change science Paul Portney on energy and development Elinor Ostrom and Thomas Dietz on commons management Interspersed throughout are Science news pieces that highlight particular issues and cases relevant to the main scientific findings. An added feature is the inclusion of definitions of key terms and concepts that help students and nonspecialists understand the issues. Published biennially, State of the Planet is a clear, accessible guide for readers of all levels-from students to professionals.

The State of Science

The State of Science
Author: Marc Zimmer
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 221
Release: 2020-07-20
Genre: Science
ISBN: 1633886409

New research and innovations in the field of science are leading to life-changing and world-altering discoveries like never before. What does the horizon of science look like? Who are the scientists that are making it happen? And, how are we to introduce these revolutions to a society in which a segment of the population has become more and more skeptical of science? Climate change is the biggest challenge facing our nation, and scientists are working on renewable energy sources, meat alternatives, and carbon dioxide sequestration. At the same time, climate change deniers and the politicization of funding threaten their work. CRISPR, (Clustered Regularly Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats) repurposes bacterial defense systems to edit genes, which can change the way we live, but also presents real ethical problems. Optogenetics will help neuroscientists map complicated neural circuitry deep inside the brain, shedding light on treating Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease. Zimmer also investigates phony science ranging from questionable “health” products to the fervent anti-vaccination movement. Zimmer introduces readers to the real people making these breakthroughs. Concluding with chapters on the rise of women in STEM fields, the importance of US immigration policies to science, and new, unorthodox ways of DIY science and crowdsource funding, The State of Science shows where science is, where it is heading, and the scientists who are at the forefront of progress.

Instrumentation Between Science, State and Industry

Instrumentation Between Science, State and Industry
Author: B. Joerges
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
Total Pages: 292
Release: 2001
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 9780792367369

This book explores a little-studied arena that exists between science and technology, an arena in which a singular and important variety of open-ended, multi-purpose instrumentation is developed by practitioners (neither scientist nor engineer, call them research-technologists) for use in academia, industry, state metrology and technical services, and considerably beyond. The generic instrumentation designed in this almost subterraneously institutionalized/professionalized, interstitial arena fuels both science and engineering work. This involves intermittent crossings of the boundaries that demarcate and protect the conventional cognitive and artefact cultures familiar to many historians and sociologists. Research-technologists thereby comprise a distinctive (but never distinct) transverse science and technology culture that generates a species of pragmatic universality, which in turn provides multiple and diversified audiences with a common repertory of vocabularies, notational systems, images, and perhaps even paradigms. Research-technology practitioners deliver a lingua franca that contributes to cognitive, material, and social cohesion. Research-technology is about the complementarity between boundary-crossing and the stability/maintenance of boundaries.

Science, Technology, and Democracy

Science, Technology, and Democracy
Author: Daniel Lee Kleinman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Total Pages: 192
Release: 2000-09-28
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0791491862

Activists, scientists, and scholars in the social sciences and humanities explore in productive dialogue what it means to democratize science and technology. The contributors consider what role lay people can have in a realm traditionally restricted to experts, and examine the socio-economic and ideological barriers to creating a science oriented more toward human needs. Included are several case studies of efforts to expand the role of citizens—including discussions of AIDS treatment activism, technology consensus conferences in Europe and the United States, the regulation of nuclear materials processing and disposal, and farmer networks in sustainable agriculture—and examinations of how the Enlightenment premises of modern science constrain its field of vision. Other chapters suggest how citizens can interpret differing opinions within scientific communities on issues of clear public relevance. Contributors include Steven Epstein, Sandra Harding, Neva Hassanein, Louise Kaplan, Daniel Lee Kleinman, Daniel Sarewitz, Stephen H. Schneider, and Richard E. Sclove.

On the Frontier of Science

On the Frontier of Science
Author: Leah Ceccarelli
Publisher: MSU Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2013-11-01
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 087013034X

“The frontier of science” is a metaphor that has become ubiquitous in American rhetoric, from its first appearance in the public address of early twentieth-century American intellectuals and politicians who aligned a mythic national identity with scientific research, to its more recent use in scientists’ arguments in favor of increased research funding. Here, Leah Ceccarelli explores what is selected and what is deflected when this metaphor is deployed, its effects on those who use it, and what rhetorical moves are made by those who try to counter its appeal. In her research, Ceccarelli discovers that “the frontier of science” evokes a scientist who is typically male, a risk taker, an adventurous loner—someone separated from a public that both envies and distrusts him, with a manifest destiny to penetrate the unknown. It conjures a competitive desire to claim the riches of a new territory before others can do the same. Closely reading the public address of scientists and politicians and the reception of their audiences, this book shows how the frontier of science metaphor constrains American speakers, helping to guide the ends of scientific research in particular ways and sometimes blocking scientists from attaining the very goals they set out to achieve.

The Science of Empire

The Science of Empire
Author: Zaheer Baber
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 316
Release: 1996-05-16
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780791429204

Investigates the complex social processes involved in the introduction and institutionalization of Western science in colonial India.

The Disordered Police State

The Disordered Police State
Author: Andre Wakefield
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Total Pages: 238
Release: 2009-08-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 0226870227

Probing the relationship between German political economy and everyday fiscal administration, The Disordered Police State focuses on the cameral sciences—a peculiarly German body of knowledge designed to train state officials—and in so doing offers a new vision of science and practice during the seventeenth and eighteenth-centuries. Andre Wakefield shows that the cameral sciences were at once natural, technological, and economic disciplines, but, more important, they also were strategic sciences, designed to procure patronage for their authors and good publicity for the German principalities in which they lived and worked. Cameralism, then, was the public face of the prince's most secret affairs; as such, it was an essentially dishonest enterprise. In an entertaining series of case studies on mining, textiles, forestry, and universities, Wakefield portrays cameralists in their own gritty terms. The result is a revolutionary new understanding about how the sciences created and maintained an image of the well-ordered police state in early modern Germany. In raising doubts about the status of these German sciences of the state, Wakefield ultimately questions many of our accepted narratives about science, culture, and society in early modern Europe.

Science without Myth

Science without Myth
Author: Sergio Sismondo
Publisher: SUNY Press
Total Pages: 224
Release: 1996-01-01
Genre: Science
ISBN: 9780791427330

This philosophical introduction to and discussion of social and political studies of science argues that scientific knowledge is socially constructed.