Change Science Research Articles

LA CIENCIAS SOCIALES Y LA INVENCIÓN DEL TERCER MUNDO: A PROPÓSITO DE LA OBRA ACADÉMICA DE ORLANDO FALS BORDA (I)

La vida y obra de Orlando Fals Borda lo presenta como uno de los grandes de las ciencias sociales de América Latina. Este escrito pretende resaltar algunos aspectos de su trayectoria intelectual como fundador en 1959 de la primera facultad de Sociología en Colombia, coautor del primer estudio empírico sobre la Violencia en Colombia (1962-1963), Se le atribuye el diseño y la creación de la red social colombiana más extensa, las juntas de acción comunal, Se le reconoce como uno de los sistematizadores y divulgadores más destacados de la Investigación Acción Participativa, -IAP-, Autor

Can Science Change our Notion of Existence?

I explore the question of whether scientific changes can induce mutations in our ordinary notion of existence. I conclude that they can’t, partially on the grounds that some of the proposed alternative-notions of existence are only terminologically-distinct from our ordinary notion, and so don’t provide genuine metaphysical alternatives, and partially on the grounds that the ordinary notion of existence is criterion-transcendent. 1. It’s a truism that science discovers things about the world we live in that we didn’t expect (that we didn’t even see coming). Certainly the science of the early modern period did just that: that our sun is only one among the stars, that other planets have moons, that there are micro-organisms too small for the naked eye to see; and science was both acclaimed and reviled as a result. Nearly as much of a truism, as the one about science discovering new things, is that science transforms the inherited concepts of ordinary life. We have ordinary ideas about motion, roughly encapsulated in Aristotelian physics, perhaps belonging to a folk-physics that’s conceptually innate (in some sense of “conceptually innate”).1 These concepts were drastically transformed by Newton. More recently, most of the popular literature of physics has been motivated by attempts to communicate to ordinary people drastically-changed notions of space and time, shape and velocity, as much perhaps as it has been motivated by the desire to present what the world we live in is actually like. Philosophers, of course, worry about whether basic notions of causality and identity scale down to the quantum level; and many argue that they don’t. Are all of our concepts open to mutation from empirical pressure? Quine thought that this was even true of the concept of existence. Having attached our concept of existence to the first-order quantifier, he serenely contemplated the possibility of a future shift in logic accompanied by a shift in quantifierapparatus, or even a replacement of the quantifiers altogether with something else far too alien to allow ontology to survive. Logic for Quine was open to mutation; so, therefore, he thought, are all the concepts dependent on its structure. 1 Pylyshyn (2003, 282, footnote 1) notes then unpublished work of Ian Howard that seems to show “that people’s naive physics, as measured by their predictions of falling objects, conformed to Aristotelian rather than Newtonian or Galilean principles.”

In vivo optical spectroscopy (INVOS) and arterial lines: a must in shoulder surgery?

Monitoring physiological parameters has changed the face of anaesthesia. We have become accustomed to the safety margins that the pulse oximeter, capnograph, non-invasive blood pressure (BP) and electrocardiogram (ECG) leads provide us, especially in the supine position. However, it is a changing science as new monitoring systems come into the market, and as such, we have to adjust our anaesthetic techniques in order to provide the safest anaesthetic for our patients, especially if it is performed on patients in unusual positions.

Research on Environmental Optimization Mechanism of the Northeast Old Industrial Base

Seeing the important strategic position of the Northeast Old Industrial Base the paper establishes an evaluation indicator system of low-carbon on environment optimization mechanism firstly. On this basis, with the gray relative entropy method the paper evaluates the environmental optimization effect of the Northeast Old Industrial Base in 2002-2007. Eventually the paper draws a scientific and precise entropy change series of low-carbon system with the gray relational entropy model, and as to the Northeast Old Industrial Base the results means that environmental optimization of low-carbon system in the Northeast region is in a cyclical and orderly change path.

A Research On The Writing Skills Of Primary School Second Grade Students In Terms Of Varıous Variables: Erzincan Sample

As a result of scientific and technological changes, man who is sometimes a source and sometimes a consumer in a changing and developing world must have the power of expressing himself in order to survive throughout this continuous development. The developments in the world we live in haven’t composed of the man life through the intimate relations with a few people around him and visiting them. Various changes consisting of cultural, historical, political and even relations pertaining to human beings have been occurred day by day. Naturally man should express himself in terms of his attitudes and feelings against these changes. The easiest and best way of individuals’ expressing themselves permanently and efficiently is certainly writing. The sample of this study done through General Scanning Model consists of 109 intentionally chosen students. In the study, a form has been used each consisting of 14 items and students have been asked to fill out them. Then, students’ workbooks have been collected, their written expression skills have been studied and the data has been processed into “Composition Assessment Scale”. “Independent Samples T-Test” and “One Way Avona Test” in SPSS have been used for the statistic analyses of the data. It has been found out at the end of the study that “female students are good at writing more than male students, possessing a dictionary and a writing guide suitable for primary school student level improve the students’ writing skills, the higher students’ level is, the worse they write, there is a parallel relationship between the number books they have read for the last one year and students’ writing skills, there is no meaningful relationship between the type of books students are interested in and students’ writing skills, students who are in a better situation in terms of socio- economic aspect have a good writing skill and students who have better school marks are also good at writing.

The Climate-G testbed: towards large scale distributed data management for climate change

Climate-G is a large scale distributed testbed devoted to climate change research. It is an unfunded effort started in 2008 and involving a wide community both in Europe and US. The testbed is an interdisciplinary effort involving partners from several institutions and joining expertise in the field of climate change and computational science. Its main goal is to allow scientists carrying out geographical and cross-institutional data discovery, access, analysis, visualization and sharing of climate data. It represents an attempt to address, in a real environment, challenging data and metadata management issues. This paper presents a complete overview about the Climate-G testbed highlighting the most important results that have been achieved since the beginning of this project.

College students' temporal‐magnitude recognition ability associated with durations of scientific changes

AbstractThe purpose of this study was to explore college students' recognition of temporal magnitudes associated with durations of scientific changes through construct validation of a 30‐item instrument. We administered the instrument to 514 students from 10 higher education institutions in the United States. Among them, 419 students took the instrument at the end of science courses. The remaining 95 students took the instrument before and after a course on cosmic evolution, and additionally answered whether they knew, estimated, or randomly guessed at the temporal magnitude of each item in the instrument. We also collected exam scores for the cosmic evolution course students. Using descriptive statistics and a Rasch analysis, we investigated construct validity of the instrument in terms of psychological relevance, psychometric conformity, and instructional sensitivity. Results of this study indicate that (1) the temporal‐magnitude recognition ability is a measurable construct, (2) extremely small duration items are significantly more difficult for students to recognize accurate temporal magnitudes than other duration range items, (3) direct knowledge of the magnitude contributes to the measurement of the construct, (4) the instrument is sensitive to instruction designed to improve the construct, and (5) the temporal‐magnitude recognition ability is not significantly correlated with knowledge about the related scientific changes. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc., Inc. J Res Sci Teach 48: 317–335, 2011

Evolving Knowledge and Practice: Hepatitis C and Illicit Drug Use

The exponential rate of development in science and technology in recent decades has had a profound social impact. In particular, computing and the Internet have indelibly altered the world's social, economic, and intellectual landscapes. The Information Age has transformed leisure, employment, business, and financial systems, and modified historical approaches to organizing and executing political and social action. A concomitant revolution in communications has blurred the boundaries that historically demarcated work from play; for many people today, including academics, employment and leisure are remote and wireless.So, how has escalating scientific and technological change affected the health and quality of life of people in marginalized communities? How is evolving and sometimes conflicting knowledge put into practice, particularly by people living with chronic illness or at risk of blood-borne viral infections? What harm reduction practices and treatment strategies are currently recommended or could be recommended, and why? Reflecting on these questions, the organizers of the 11th HIV, Hepatitis and Related Diseases conference, which was hosted by Australia's National Centre in HIV Social Research during its twentieth anniversary, devised the theme evolving knowledge and practice to promote analysis of progress in scientific knowledge, biomedical technologies, and research methods. The conference theme invited presenters to explore how communities at risk of HIV and/or hepatitis C make sense of and negotiate developments in the production of knowledge and technologies. We were interested in highlighting the potential impact of such developments on people's everyday sexual, drug use, and health management practices. We also invited consideration of how researchers, educators, policy makers, health professionals, and lawyers respond to new scientific advances, innovative theory, and improved models of best practice in the prevention of blood-borne viruses like HIV and viral hepatitis, and sexually transmissible infections. The research articles selected for this special issue of Contemporary Drug Problems are drawn largely from those presentations at the conference that explored contemporary understandings of injecting drug use, hepatitis C prevention, and treatment. Two extra articles were commissioned in order to cover a range of methodological, theoretical, and empirical topics.Each year in Australia there are approximately 10,000 new hepatitis C infections with around 90% of these occurring among people who inject drugs (MACASHH, 2006). Hepatitis C prevention in 2010 remains a significant challenge given the population prevalence of the virus, the natural history of infection, a legislative framework of drug prohibition, and the not uncommon phenomenon of hepatitis C-related stigma and discrimination. Similarly, despite improvements over the past decade in the efficacy of treatment to suppress infection, strategies aimed at increasing hepatitis C treatment uptake have had little impact. Today in Australia, our health system is confronting an epidemic of hepatitis C-related liver disease.This collection of articles highlights the multidisciplinary nature of social research on hepatitis C and illicit drug use, with contributions from anthropology, sociology, epidemiology, and social psychology. The guest editorial team aimed to showcase rigorous and innovative research that we believe represents an evolution in knowledge and practice in these areas. For example, the article by Paquette, Bryant, and De Wit is unique in this issue because it advances our understanding of the research processes that allow us to study hepatitis C and injecting drug use in Australia. The authors show how the relatively new method of respondent-driven sampling can be used successfully in an Australian setting to recruit people who inject drugs (PWID); however, as they argue, the capacity of respondent-driven sampling to produce population estimates remains unclear. …

Cooperação, estratificação e perfil da pesquisa em estratégia no Brasil

The documentary analysis of publications permits to identify scientific production standards associated with characteristics and tendencies expressed in a certain area of knowledge. Considering the area of Strategy in Organizations and its thematic axes, this study analyzed 765 articles published between 2001 and 2006, in the proceedings of EnAnpad’s and 3Es in order to evaluate quantitatively the research design mostly used throughout the period. Moreover, tendencies expressed in terms of stratification standards and cooperation in the area were also investigated. The data were treated in a descriptive-quantitative way, through statistic procedures and multivariate technique of analysis of multiple correspondence. The findings indicated a predominance of a scientific production focused on empirical articles, mainly case studies and surveys. Additionally, the results revealed the growth of the area concerning the number of articles, authors and institutions, accompanied by greater cooperation in scientific production and changes regarding the regional and institutional stratification standards.

Changing lives and changing science? The merits and limits of “interdependent science”

Changing lives and changing science? The merits and limits of “interdependent science”

Joint Acceptance and Scientific Change: A Case Study

ABSTRACTRecently, several scholars have argued that scientists can accept scientific claims in a collective process, and that the capacity of scientific groups to form joint acceptances is linked to a functional division of labor between the group members. However, these accounts reveal little about how the cognitive content of the jointly accepted claim is formed, and how group members depend on each other in this process. In this paper, I shall therefore argue that we need to link analyses of joint acceptance with analyses of distributed cognition. To sketch how this can be done, I shall present a detailed case study, and on the basis of the case, analyze the process through which a group of scientists jointly accept a new scientific claim and at a later stage jointly accept to revise previously accepted claims. I shall argue that joint acceptance in science can be established in situations where an overall conceptual structure is jointly accepted by a group of scientists while detailed parts of it are distributed among group members with different areas of expertise, a condition that I shall call a heterogeneous conceptual consensus. Finally, I shall show how a heterogeneous conceptual consensus can work as a constraint against scientific change and address the question how changes may nevertheless occur.

Four States of Knowledge: A Cultural Theory of the Co-Production of Science, Social Order, and Scientific, Cultural, and Policy Change

In States of Knowledge (2004), Sheila Jasanoff argues that we gain explanatory power by thinking of natural and social orders as being produced together, but she and her volume contributors do not yet offer a theory of the co-production of scientific knowledge and social order. This article uses Mary Douglas’s cultural theory to identify four recurring states of knowledge and specifies political cultural conditions for the co-production of scientific knowledge, social order, and scientific, cultural, and policy change. The plausibility of this theory is illustrated by using it to explain the co-production and transformation of forest and wildlife science and management in the Pacific Northwest.

Retraction notice to ”Intraperitoneal application of caffeine prevents D-galactosamine induced hepatic expression of connective tissue growth factor (CTGF/CCN2) in the rat” [JHEPAT 50 (2009) 1053–1055

This article has been retracted at the request of the Editor-in-Chief. Reason: The above Letter to the Editor was a report in reference to a previous work published in the Journal of Hepatology (OA Gressner et al., Pharmacological application of caffeine inhibits TGF-B stimulated connective tissue growth factor expression in hepatocytes via PPAR gamma and Smad2/3-dependent pathways. J Hepatol 2008; 49: 758–767). It appears that in this Letter to the Editor, the manuscript submitted referred to 4 groups of 5 studied. This Letter to the Editor was accepted without any modifications. However, after acceptance of this letter by the Editors, the authors made major modifications at the stage of the galley proofs without informing the Editor or the Associate Editor. The changes introduced were major scientific changes because: 1.The number of per group was reduced from 5 to 1; therefore, instead of a total of 20 being studied, a total of only 4 were studied. 2.Throughout the manuscript sentences have been changed from rats to rat. 3.The standard deviation values were removed at the proof stage and more importantly some results were completely altered. 4.A full paragraph was added at the end of the paper, which was not present in the original version submitted to the Journal. In light of the above reasons, the Editors have concluded that the authors have presented falsified results which misled the Editors. As a consequence to the aforementioned breaches, we have decided to retract this Letter to the Editor from the Journal of Hepatology.

Special Issue on Climate Change and Food Science

Special Issue on Climate Change and Food Science

IS THERE COLLECTIVE SCIENTIFIC KNOWLEDGE? ARGUMENTS FROM EXPLANATION

If there is collective scientific knowledge, then at least some scientific groups have beliefs over and above the personal beliefs of their members. Gilbert's plural-subjects theory makes precise the notion of ‘over and above’ here. Some philosophers have used plural-subjects theory to argue that philosophical, historical and sociological studies of science should take account of collective beliefs of scientific groups. Their claims rest on the premise that our best explanations of scientific change include these collective beliefs. I argue that Gilbert's account of collective scientific belief does not provide a better explanation of scientific change than a non-collective alternative. A different defence of collective scientific belief and knowledge is needed.

Atmosphere: An International and Interdisciplinary Scientific Open Access Journal

The new online, Open Access journal Atmosphere has been launched to present reviews, regular research papers, communications and short notes on atmospheric topics. These topics include experimental and theoretical work related to the physical atmosphere, such as turbulence, atmospheric flow, dynamic and physical processes and mechanisms, atmospheric chemistry, such as changes in atmospheric composition, including aerosols, ozone, air pollution, chemical weather, meteorology and scale interaction, climate, climate change and environmental science, including water and energy cycles. [...]

Discussion: Kuhn's Evolutionary Analogy in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions and “The Road since Structure”

Recently, Barbara Renzi argued that Kuhn's account of scientific change is undermined by mismatches in the analogy that Kuhn supposedly draws between scientific change and biological evolution. We argue that Renzi's criticism is inadequate to Kuhn's account of scientific change, as Kuhn does not draw any precise analogy between the mechanisms of scientific change and biological evolution nor aims to argue that the mechanisms of scientific change and biological evolution are similar in any important respects. Therefore, pointing to mismatches between the central concepts that feature in the descriptions of the two phenomena simply misses the point of Kuhn's analogy.

The making and breaking of paternity secrets in donor insemination

This paper analyses the complex issues faced by regulators of the infertility treatment industry in response to the social and technological changes that heralded a new openness in knowledge about...

Sabbatian Charlatans: the first Jewish cosmopolitans

This paper utilises the concept of the charlatan in order to analyse the fortunes of two Jewish ‘false messiahs’, Wolf Eibeschütz and Jacob Frank. As the Encycopédie put it, charlatanry is ‘the vice of him who strives to recommend himself, or things belonging to him, as being endowed with imaginary qualities’. While charlatans obviously existed in every age and ‘every class had its charlatans,’ in some periods charlatanry was particularly prominent and widespread. Thus, charlatanry was especially likely to appear in the periods of social, cultural, and scientific change, in which empirical research out ran theory, and the rapid development of technology eluded the abilities of its conceptualisation, let alone the possibilities of explaining it to the general public. In other words, charlatanry was likely to hold sway whenever the ‘fringe of the inexplicable’ became especially large, and the gap between those in the know and the rest of the population particularly wide. The mid-eighteenth century was the golden age of European charlatanry. Members of the pan-European guild of the itinerant charlatans drifted from court to court, rotated from salon to salon, exchanging experiences, swapping mistresses, and underwriting each other's false bills of exchange. The most important representatives of this type were contemporaries and often knew each other. The last part of the paper discusses contacts between Jacob Frank and Giacomo Casanova.

JAMES B. ASHBROOK AND HIS HOLISTIC WORLD: TOWARD A “UNIFIED FIELD THEORY” OF MIND, BRAIN, SELF, WORLD, AND GOD

Abstract.James B. Ashbrook's “new natural theology in an empirical mode” pursued an integrated understanding of the spiritual, psychological, and neurological dimensions of spiritual life. Knowledge of neuroscience and personality theory was central to his quest, and his understandings were necessarily revised and amplified as scientific findings emerged. As a result, Ashbrook's legacy may serve as a case example of how to do religion‐and‐science in a milieu of scientific change. The constant in the quest was Ashbrook's core belief in the basic holism of brain, mind, personality, the nature of reality, and the underlying reality of God.