Perceptions Of Science Research Articles

Changing Scientific Perceptions of the Eastern Tropical Rain Forests: A Personal View

Changing Scientific Perceptions of the Eastern Tropical Rain Forests: A Personal View

A quiet, pleasant sounding environment—A goal for the ASA

A quiet and tranquil environment may seem an unreachable goal, but this profession has a responsibility to assist in the striving for it. The ASA has the disciplinary strengths in engineering, standards, perceptual science, environmental control, and physiological and psychological health studies that are required for the effort. As an international scientific and engineering organization with strong constituencies in academia, industry, and government, the ASA has the credibility to provide the balanced leadership in education, technical developments, and policy analysis that is needed. The ASA needs to assemble and organize these resources to provide assistance to society at large in this complex area.

A Vision of Clean Air

Atmospheric change has emerged as a major global environmental issue of national and international concern in the 1990's. The dominance of the legislative and regulatory perception of atmospheric processes over their scientific understanding has left both regulators and atmospheric scientists ill-prepared to respond to emerging atmospheric-environmental issues. A view of clean air is presented whereby the legislative/regulatory and scientific perception of the physical and chemical processes of the atmosphere are linked to achieve the goal of a healthy atmosphere and sustainable environment.

How Can Perceptual Science Help the Handicapped?

How Can Perceptual Science Help the Handicapped?

Ecosystem modelling: Science or technology?

Recent interest in ecosystem modelling emerges from large-scale problems such as acid deposition or climate change. Knowledge about future states of ecosystems can be based on management experience and scientific observation. The former cannot be extrapolated outside the range of past variations in boundary conditions. Thus, the long-term changes in the chemical or physical climate require the identification of key-processes for successful model predictions. This scientific task is implicitly based on assumptions about the appropriate scale of integration in space and time. No scientific discipline exists by which these assumptions can be formally derived at the ecosystem level. The example of modelling soil and water acidification is used to discuss the possible consequences of a technological or a scientific perception of the problem posed, respectively. These approaches often suffer from inconsistent treatment of their basic assumptions in the first case, and from lack of theory in the latter case. On the basis of the available data and theory the question posed remains undecided. However, there is a risk that focusing ecosystem research on technological perception becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Environmental Contaminants and Low-Level Cancer Risks: Perceptions and Scientific Strategies

Scientific and public perceptions concerning low-level lung cancer risks may vary. Recently the public has been more convinced of causal links between low-level risk agents and cancer, and more interested in prevention of environmental exposures, especially those induced by others. Thus, scientific strategy is partly driven by the public need to resolve issues concerning the importance of low-level exposures and risks. Further, investigators have been challenged intellectually to create methodologies in order to study some of these relationships further, and scientific curiosity has been stimulated by the difficulties of pursuing such investigations. The importance of host characteristics, including the genetic bases of susceptibility, has become a major theme. Likewise, host behaviour has become a potential positive factor (e.g. diet) as well as a negative factor in the risk model for low-level agents. This paper discusses some of the information available on low-level agents and some of the methodological issues involved in studying them. The importance of measuring exposure as well as response is stressed, especially multi-pollutant exposures and interactions with host behaviour.

The Land Use Act and the State of Nigerian Land Law

The Land Use Act, 1978, is a product of the inherent contradictions of the colonial and neo-colonial dependent, pseudo-capitalist economic structures established in Nigeria since colonial times. By the 1970s these contradictions became so seŕious that they threatened to become a clog on the growth of the capitalist economy. If such contradictions were allowed to reach a nodal point, conditions for the self-negation of the existing socio-economic and legal order would have ensued. The legislature, it would seem, narrowly identified the problem with private ownership of lands from its own class perspective, that is without a scientific conception of the problems in terms of ownership in the theory of social relations. A scientific conception of the problems would have revealed the essence of the difficulties as relating, not merely to the procedural aspects of private ownership of the lands, such as certainty of title, registration of title, etc., but concerning the institution of private ownership as an economic and legal category around which the exploitation of man by man is organised in class-divided societies.Such a scientific perception of the problems would have demanded a lasting solution that not only abolished private ownership rights in land but also abolished private ownership of other means of production. The socialisation of all means of production would have amounted to a holistic approach to the solution of the problems in the interest of the nation as a whole.

The Weaker Seed. The Sexist Bias of Reproductive Theory

This history of reproductive theories from Aristotle to the preformationists provides an excellent illustration of the ways in which the gender /science system informs the process of scientific investigation. In this essay I examine the effects of the bias of woman's inferiority upon theories of human reproduction. I argue that the adherence to a belief in the inferiority of the female creative principle biased scientific perception of the nature of woman's role in human generation.

Discipline and the Material Form of Images: An Analysis of Scientific Visibility

This paper is about how natural objects are made visible and analyzable in scientific research. It is argued that the objects scientists actually work upon are highly artificial, in that their visibility depends upon complex instruments and careful preparatory procedures. Instruments and laboratory procedures do more than provide a window to the world; they lay the groundwork for specific analytic operations which utilize literary resources to represent phenomena graphically. Two specific cases from biology are discussed. The first is from a popular field manual, and is used to introduce themes for analyzing a more complex case, a neuroscience project using electron microscopy of brain tissue. The discussion of both cases concerns how specimens are modified into `docile objects' for purposes of investigation. These modifications are summarized under the headings of `marking', `constituting graphic space', and `normalizing observations'. Finally, it is claimed that these practices make up an `externalized retina' for scientific perception — a `retina' that depends upon disciplined conduct within the laboratory setting.

Research Issues in Teleoperator Systems

This paper briefly describes the Naval Ocean Systems Center's newly initiated program in teleoperator technology, as well as prior research conducted by our perceptual sciences group. The general objective of this program is to provide the technology base required to produce tele-operator systems which will be capable of performing man-like tasks in areas too hazardous or too costly for human habitation. Our approach has been guided by the conviction that substantial improvements in remote task peformance result when operators are provided a heightened sense of “remote presence”. We have pursued the development of a generic anthropomorphic teleoperator which will employ tools, vehicles and systems that currently exist for human use. For several years, we have been engaged in a program of research aimed at developing a scientific understanding of the dynamic interactions which occur between the human operator and the sensors, controls and displays that constitute the viewing and manipulator systems of teleoperators. The results of our past and current research studies are briefly described, along with a program plan for increasing understanding of man's role in teleoperator technology.

The Changing Perception of Soil Erosion in New Zealand

soil-conservation movement in New Zealand, in which a number of scientists played prominent roles. This movement culminated in soil-conservation legislation in 1941. A strong reaction from the agricultural community followed, and farmers sought to discount the problem of soil erosion. Gradually, opposition gave way to acceptance of soil conservation measures. As acceptance spread amongst farmers, government scientists began to question the beliefs on which soil-conservation policy was based. SINCE THE DAYS of Homer and Plato, soil erosion has been one of the most widely recognized symptoms of disharmony between man and his environment. The literature is replete with accounts of soil erosion accelerated by the hand of man in almost every part of the world where agriculture and pastoralism have been practised. Perhaps in no other field are well established differences between scientific or technical personnel and land managers in the perception of the hazard more evident. In many lands, the former have viewed with alarm the results of what they perceive to be accelerated soil erosion, while the latter frequently discount the significance of the process even if they accept that there may be a relationship between their land occupation and management and the rate of soil erosion. Changing perception of a natural hazard or process of resource degradation is less commonly documented, especially if it represents change on the part of scientific or technical experts. The case of soil erosion in New Zealand seems to constitute such an instance, and is interesting from several viewpoints. Its perception by scientific personnel has clearly changed over time, less in accordance, it seems, with real variations in objectively measured rates of erosion than with the changing publicity afforded to soil erosion in other countries. The effectiveness with which the scientific view has been propounded and accepted has varied similarly. After soil erosion had been suggested to be a threat to the national economy, the unanimity of the scientific view led to the enactment of soil-conservation legislation, yet only a few years later a bitter backlash sought to deny both the significance of the process and the credibility of the threat. The purpose of this paper is threefold: to outline the changing scientific perception of soil erosion in New Zealand during the last hundred years; to consider the setting in which scientific concern led to the enactment of legislation; and to review the significance of this changing perception.

Sun and Salt, 1500-1700

During the Renaissance, the su was regarded primarily as a source of light which gave form to all things*; during the Enlightenment, paradoxically, the sun was regarded primarily as a source of heat. Paracelsian chemistry of the 1500s introduced salt as a third principle which embodied the other two, mercury and sulphur; salt was that universal mediating presence which represented earth. By the late 1700s salt was no longer a metaphysical principle but an acid-base compound, and volatile salts aroused most interest. These changes in scientific perceptions of sun and salt ran parallel to one another: beginning as transcendent sources of form, sun and salt came to be considered manipulable sources of energy. Our r-;odern approach to energy derives from a period during which Europeans gradually lost their belief in the creative agency of two essentials to human life.

A NOTE ON CAUSALITY AND MODELS

An argument is given that a purely deductive logic is not capable of modelling the process of perception, since perception relies on some method of inference of the (causal) relationships between events. The similarity between scientific explanation and perception is also hinted at, and an addendum briefly gives a possible representation for the inference of causal relationships.