Scientific Account Research Articles

Data-Driven Cell-Line and Process Development

Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology NewsVol. 34, No. 4 Bioprocessing TutorialData-Driven Cell-Line and Process DevelopmentIntegrated Workflow Support and Data Platform for Systematic Decision-MakingLukas Flueck-Kabay, Maria Wendt, and Hans Peter FischerLukas Flueck-KabaySearch for more papers by this author, Maria WendtSearch for more papers by this author, and Hans Peter FischerLukas Flueck-Kabay, Ph.D., is scientific account manager, Maria Wendt, Ph.D., is senior scientific consultant, and Hans Peter Fischer, Ph.D. (E-mail Address: hans-peter.fischer@genedata.com), is head of the biologics business unit at Genedata. Website: www.genedata.com.Search for more papers by this authorPublished Online:14 Feb 2014https://doi.org/10.1089/gen.34.04.15AboutSectionsView articleView Full TextPDF/EPUB Permissions & CitationsPermissionsDownload CitationsTrack CitationsAdd to favorites Back To Publication ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmail View articleFiguresReferencesRelatedDetails Volume 34Issue 4Feb 2014 Information© 2014 by GEN PublishingTo cite this article:Lukas Flueck-Kabay, Maria Wendt, and Hans Peter Fischer.Data-Driven Cell-Line and Process Development.Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News.Feb 2014.28-29.http://doi.org/10.1089/gen.34.04.15Published in Volume: 34 Issue 4: February 14, 2014PDF download

Understanding the Language Demands on Science Students from an Integrated Science and Language Perspective

This case study of a science lesson, on the topic thermal expansion, examines the language demands on students from an integrated science and language perspective. The data were generated during a sequence of 9 lessons on the topic of ‘States of Matter’ in a Grade 7 classroom (12–13 years old students). We identify the language demands by comparing students' writings with the scientific account of expansion that the teacher intended the students to learn. The comparison involved both content analysis and lexicogrammatical (LG) analysis. The framework of Systemic Functional Linguistics was adopted for the LG analysis. Our analysis reveals differences in the meaning and the way LG resources were employed between the students' writings and the scientific account. From these differences, we found the notion of condition-of-use for LG resources to be a significant aspect of the language that students need to appropriate in order to employ the language of school science appropriately. This notion potentially provides a means by which teachers could concurrently address the conceptual and representational demands of science learning. Finally, we reflect on how the complementary use of content analysis and LG analysis provides a way for integrating the science and language perspectives in order to understand the demands of learning science through language.

The Enigma of the Inversion

Part Two implements Marx's suggested strategy of inverting Hegel's methodology. This is applied to Hegel's speculative subject of the ‘idea’ and to his twofold mystical application of it to the cognitive/subjective processes. The analysis concludes with the main points this generates in the contradiction contained in the relation of method and system. By doing so, the materialist foundations for an evolutionary and scientific account of the method of dialectic are positied and developed, precisely through the discovery of the content of the ‘rational kernel within the mystical shell’.

The Carbon Footprint of Conference Papers

The action required to stem the environmental and social implications of climate change depends crucially on how humankind shapes technology, economy, lifestyle and policy. With transport CO2 emissions accounting for about a quarter of the total, we examine the contribution of CO2 output by scientific travel. Thankfully for the reputation of the scientific community, CO2 emissions associated with the trips required to present a paper at a scientific conference account for just 0.003% of the yearly total. However, with CO2 emissions for a single conference trip amounting to 7% of an average individual’s total CO2 emissions, scientists should lead by example by demonstrating leadership in addressing the issue.

Theory of mind and Darwin’s legacy

We do not have an adequate theory of consciousness. Both dualism and materialism are mistaken because they deny consciousness is part of the physical world. False claims include (i) behaviorism, (ii) computationalism, (iii) epiphenomenalism, (iv) the readiness potential, (v) subjectivity, and (vi) materialism. Ontological subjectivity does not preclude epistemic objectivity. Observer relative phenomena are created by consciousness, but consciousness is not itself observer relative. Consciousness consists of feeling, sentience, or awareness with (i) qualitativeness, (ii) ontological subjectivity, (iii) unified conscious field, (iv) intentionality, and (v) intentional causation. All conscious states are caused by lower level neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the brain as higher level features. Efforts to get a detailed scientific account of how brain processes cause consciousness are disappointing. The Darwinian revolution gave us a new form of explanation; two levels were substituted: a causal level, where we specify the mechanism by which the phenotype functions, and a functional level, where we specify the selectional advantage that the phenotype provides. Sociobiology attempted to explain general features of human society, ethics, etc. It failed. For the incest taboo, it confuses inhibition with prohibition. It did not explain the moral force of the taboo. To explain the function of consciousness we cannot ask, "What would be subtracted if we subtracted consciousness but left everything else the same?" We cannot leave everything else the same because consciousness is necessary for higher functions of human and animal life. The unified conscious field gives the organism vastly increased power.

Towards an enactive account of action: speaking and joint speaking as exemplary domains

Sense-making, within enactive theories, provides a novel way of understanding how a comprehensible and manageable world arises for a subject. Elaboration of the concept of sense-making allows a fundamental reframing of the notion of perception that does not rely on the pick up of information about a pre-given world. In rejecting the notion of the subject as an input/output system, it is also necessary to reframe the scientific account of skilled action. Taking speech as an exemplary domain, I here present the outline of an enactive account of skilled action that is continuous with the concept of sense-making. Extending this account to the rich domain of joint or synchronous speaking allows many of the principal themes of the emerging enactive account to be considered as they relate to a familiar and important human practice.

Merleau-Ponty's phenomenological critique of natural science

AbstractIn his Phenomenology of Perception Merleau-Ponty maintains that our own existence cannot be understood by the methods of natural science; furthermore, because fundamental aspects of the world such as space and time are dependent on our existence, these too cannot be accounted for within natural science. So there cannot be a fully scientific account of the world at all. The key thesis Merleau-Ponty advances in support of this position is that perception is not, as he puts it, ‘an event of nature’. He argues that it has a fundamental intentionality which configures the perceived world as spatio-temporal in ways which are presupposed by natural science and which cannot therefore be explained by natural science.This is a striking and original claim. When one looks in detail at the considerations Merleau-Ponty advances in support of it, however, these turn out to be either inconclusive or to draw on idealist presumptions which a contemporary naturalist will reject. So while there is much of interest and value in Merleau-Ponty's critical discussion of naturalism, he does not succeed in establishing his central claim.

Leave Everything as it is—A Critique of Marxist Interpretations of Wittgenstein

The philosophers have only to dissolve their language into the ordinary language, from which it is abstracted, in order to recognize it as the distorted language of the actual world and to realize that neither thoughts nor language in themselves form a realm of their own, that they are only manifestations of actual life. (Karl Marx, The German Ideology) It is often supposed that Marxist philosophy and Wittgensteinian philosophy are not just very different but that they are opposed to each other. Wittgenstein was notoriously against theorizing in philosophy whereas Marx tried to give a scientific account of human society and culture. Marx famously said that ‘[t]he philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point is to change it’, while Wittgenstein was concerned with conceptual considerations and had very little to say about workers' struggles. My aim in this paper is to show that these apparent differences dissolve once one realizes that Marx and Wittgenstein thought differently about the nature of philosophy. In the course of coming to this conclusion I will look at misinterpretations of Wittgenstein's philosophy from Perry Anderson and Alex Callinicos as well as at Wittgensteinian criticisms of Marxist philosophers such as Leon Trotsky, John Rees and Slavoj Žižek. I will conclude that Marxist philosophers stand to gain from a clearer understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy and that Wittgensteinians can similarly gain from an appreciation of the kind of analysis of economics, society and politics offered by Marxists.

The early Kant’s (anti-) Newtonianism

It is well known that during his pre-Critical period, Kant was a major proponent of Newtonian physics, for the project of the Universal Natural History explicitly uses “Newtonian principles” to explain the formation of the various bodies that constitute our solar system as well as those that lie beyond. What has not been widely noted, however, is that the early Kant also developed a major criticism of Newton, one that is based on subtle metaphysical issues pertaining to God, which are most at home in philosophical theology. Interestingly, this criticism is neither an inchoate precursor of his later criticisms of Newton’s account of absolute space, nor isolated to the abstract realm of metaphysics, but has a wide range of implications for the way in which a scientific account of the formation and constitution of the heavenly bodies ought to be developed, that is, for the kind of argument Newton offered in the Principia. That Kant remained interested in this set of issues later in his Critical period suggests that, alongside the revolutionary changes that comprise transcendental idealism, there are deep continuities not only in his Newtonian commitments, but in his anti-Newtonian tendencies as well.

“The testimony of my own eyes”: The Strange Case of the Mammal with a Beak

There has always been a significant element of trust when we look at an image of something we have not seen, above all when it looks naturalistic and convincing. Illustrators often employ naturalistic tricks in the service of the “rhetoric of reality.” The case study is the Australian Duck-Billed Platypus, which stretched credibility when it was first discovered, resembling an artificially confected monster. The first scientific account, by George Shaw in T he Naturalist’s Miscellany in 1799, is a masterpiece of wonder and scepticism in which he finally convinces himself and us of the reality of the strange beast. However, how many of us have seen a real one?

You’re gonna need a bigger boat

Creative ideas, even complex ones, can be assembled unconsciously and enter the conscious mind in a fully finished form. But there is nothing mystical or sacrosanct about the mechanisms giving rise to this mental phenomenon. Progress on the neuroscience of creativity can only occur if we fully expose Cartesian muses for what they are: teddy bears for grownups. This is not to say that neuroscientists understand yet what happens in the innards of the machine when we are creative, but I hope to show here where we are and where we are going on this matter. The aim of this article is not so much to persuade readers of a naturalistic explanation of creativity but to help with conceivability; that is, help them envision what a scientific account could, possibly, look like. Without a path towards such an ersatz explanation, we have little hope to lift the dense fog enveloping our beliefs in the specialness of the creative process, the instinctive tug we feel that the creative spark comes from on high. This article plants a seed of how such a seemingly magical event can be reverse engineered.

Ways of owning: Towards an economic sociology of privatisation

Economic sociology has been preoccupied with the institution of markets, to the relative neglect of ownership. It has inherited certain technical and governmental problematics regarding that which can or cannot be internalised within the market price system, leading to the assumption that the ‘social’ or the ‘public’ is a type of empirical externality. But by shifting attention towards institutions of ownership, the public and the private come to appear as primarily normative appeals, used to challenge and justify the drawing of boundaries in economic life. Boundaries are judged for their justice, as well as for their empirical efficacy. Adopting a pragmatist approach, this paper outlines three possible ‘orders of appropriation’ which can be appealed to when justifying and criticising privatisation in economic situations: the socialist, the neoliberal and the liberal. Beyond any scientific or technical account of property, each of these offers an ‘ultimate’ basis on which to view ownership, according to different and incompatible philosophical anthropologies.

Representing dialogues-in-the-field

Contemporary researchers can rely upon a wide repertoire of different and legitimized ways of representing field dialogues in scientific texts. This article addresses the issue of the crucial role these ways of reporting dialogues play in creating different data from the ‘same’ raw material and in the construction of very different kinds of scientific understanding of the phenomenon the original dialogues supposedly enlighten. By empirically illustrating this point, the author concludes by arguing in favor of the unavoidable rhetorical roots of scientific understanding. This typical relativistic claim does not lead to some kind of nihilistic stance. Rather, it delineates a clear zone of distributed responsibility. By defining what kind of knowledge they expect from a scientific account, the scientific community and, in a less visible way, the readers are crucial agents in orienting the researcher’s rhetorical choice as to represent dialogues-in-the-field. The researcher’s choice is, therefore, a profoundly dialogical decision.

Ethnomedicinal Plant Diversity among the Jaunsaries in Tons Valley, Uttarakhand

The term Ethnobotany in a broad sense refer to the study of plant and man interaction and traditional uses of the biota by observation of nature by indigenous people. Traditional knowledge of local peoples about natural resources is very valuable and useful. Apart from dealing with the scientific /taxonomical data of plants, ethnobotany also involves preparation of local vegetational account, recording the association of plant with the people in the same habitat, its uses in medicine and others uses. There is mention of plants in folklore and religion. Ethnobotanist, thus, prepares a thorough scientific account of plants and correlates them with people. The ethnomedicinal explorations were conducted in this area with a view to collect information on the medicinal plants along with the information on their uses in traditional medicines as practiced by tribals and medicine men of the region since time immemorial.

Can Innate, Modular “Foundations” Explain Morality? Challenges for Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory

Jonathan Haidt's Moral Foundations Theory is an influential scientific account of morality incorporating psychological, developmental, and evolutionary perspectives. The theory proposes that morality is built upon five innate "foundations," each of which is believed to have been selected for during human evolution and, subsequently, tuned-up by learning during development. We argue here that although some general elements of Haidt's theory are plausible, many other important aspects of his account are seriously flawed. First, innateness and modularity figure centrally in Haidt's account, but terminological and conceptual problems foster confusion and ambiguities. Second, both the theory's proposed number of moral foundations and its taxonomy of the moral domain appear contrived, ignoring equally good candidate foundations and the possibility of substantial intergroup differences in the foundations' contents. Third, the mechanisms (viz., modules) and categorical distinctions (viz., between foundations) proposed by the theory are not consilient with discoveries in contemporary neuroscience concerning the organization, functioning, and development of the brain. In light of these difficulties, we suggest that Haidt's theory is inadequate as a scientific account of morality. Nevertheless, the theory's weaknesses are instructive, and hence, criticism may be useful to psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers attempting to advance theories of morality, as well as to researchers wishing to invoke concepts such as innateness and modularity more generally.

INTROSPECTION, THEORY AND INTROSPECTIONISM

Modern psychology, it is widely held, was born as a “science of mental life” based almost exclusively on the method of introspection. The most salient example is E.B. Titchener’s influential system of psychology known as “introspectionism.” Early in the twentieth century, this approach fell into disfavor—and, in turn, introspection as such also came to be seen as a dead end in psychology. As this paper argues, Titchener’s psychology was based on the key notions of elementism, reductionism and sensationism. His philosophical commitment to these suppositions was deep and the general aim was to deliver a comprehensive scientific account of human mental life in accordance with that pre-experimental, theoretical agenda. The scientific goal of introspectionism was thus not to describe mental phenomena as they naturally and plainly form part of the subject’s experience. Here, Titchener’s approach contrasts rather starkly with contemporary introspective approaches, such as Descriptive Experience Sampling, that aim to bracket assumptions and theory. In sum, this paper calls into question the assumption that introspectionism in psychology should be regarded as an archetypal instantiation in the history of science, of a psychological system built on a fundamental commitment to introspection.

Collective Punishment: A Coordination Account of Legal Order

Although most economic and positive political theory presumes the existence of an effective legal regime (protecting property rights or implementing legislative or judicial choices, for example), behavioral social science has devoted little systematic attention to the question of what constitutes distinctively legal order. Most social scientists take for granted that law is defined by the presence of a centralized authority capable of exacting coercive penalties for violations of legal rules. This unexamined presumption, however, leaves us with few tools in social science to answer key questions about the emergence and maintenance of legal order. A focus on centralized coercion fails to distinguish between spontaneous social order based on social norms and deliberate order structured by organized efforts to create and enforce rules in the absence of centralized coercion. In this paper we discuss several settings in which centralized coercive force is absent and yet social order relies on distinctively legal attributes and institutions. Drawing on a model developed in Hadfield & Weingast (2011), we use these settings to show how distinctively legal attributes and institutions work to coordinate decentralized collective punishment. We focus in particular on how legal institutions reduce ambiguity and solve incentive problems to support a decentralized equilibrium characterized by compliance with deliberately chosen rules. We thus sketch out how a social scientific account of law can help distinguish social norms from legal rules and identify the institutions that support legal order in a wide range of settings that do not presume the existence of centralized coercion.

Teachers as journalists?

I start by considering some of the similarities between journalists and science teachers in their work and then go on to examine three questions that are of importance in dealing with creationism in schools: Is the issue one that is worth dealing with? How might one deal with it? What does one hope to achieve by dealing with it? I conclude that (1) it is worth science teachers dealing with the issue of creationism in schools but only if they wish to; (2) science teachers should not give the impression that the theory of evolution is scientifically controversial; (3) while one is very unlikely to change the mind, as a result of school teaching, of someone who does not, on religious grounds, accept the theory of evolution, it is very worth presenting the scientific account of the theory and enabling students to review the evidence for it.

Competing Conceptions of Animal Welfare and Their Ethical Implications for the Treatment of Non-Human Animals

Animal welfare has been conceptualized in such a way that the use of animals in science and for food seems justified. I argue that those who have done this have appropriated the concept of animal welfare, claiming to give a scientific account that is more objective than the "sentimental" account given by animal liberationists. This strategy seems to play a major role in supporting merely limited reform in the use of animals and seems to support the assumption that there are conditions under which animals may be raised and slaughtered for food that are ethically acceptable. Reformists do not need to make this assumption, but they tend to conceptualize animal welfare is such a way that death does not count as harmful to the interests of animals, nor prolonged life a benefit. In addition to this prudential value assumption, some members of this community have developed strategies for defending suitably reformed farming practices as ethical even granting that death and some other forms of constraints are harms. One such strategy is the fiction of a domestic contract. However, if one accepts the conceptualization of human welfare give by L. W. Sumner, and applies it to animals in the way that I think is justified, an accurate conceptualization of animal welfare has different implications for which uses of animals should be regarded as ethically acceptable. In this paper I give an historical and philosophical account of animal welfare conceptulization and use this account to argue that animal breeders, as custodians of the animals they breed, have the ethical responsibility to help their animal wards achieve as much autonomy as possible in choosing the form of life made available to them and to provide that life. Attempts to avoid these implications by alluding to a contract model of the relationship between custodians and their wards fail to relieve custodians of their ethical responsibilities of care.

Chapter 17 Activities between 1910 and 1917

There was a shift away from, but not an abandonment of, mining and Dalradian topics after Gregory's January 1910 presidential address, towards geomorphological topics such as the origin of fjords, sea lochs, lakes and glacial deposits. In the summers of 1910 and 1912 he went to Spain, probably with Audrey, on holiday as no overt scientific account followed, but he included his coastal observations in Gregory (1913). In August–September 1910 he visited Sweden in connection with the International Geological Congress, returning immediately to the BA Meeting in Sheffield. From 1910–13 he was President of the Scottish Ski Club ( Who Was Who , 3). In 1911 he was elected Dean of the Science Faculty (Senate minutes), presumably for three years, and he made a long holiday trip with Audrey to France, Italy and Dalmatia, returning through Germany. It was also in 1911 that Gregory became a member of the Athenaeum Club (Athenaeum records), probably in order to enjoy more comfortable accommodation and more congenial company during his visits to London. He remained a member until his death. In 1912, he led an expedition to Benguella (Angola). His movements during the summer of 1913 are uncertain. Audrey had three thimbles purchased in 1913 in Langres, France, which suggests she might have been there with Gregory; however, she sometimes went on summer painting holidays to the continent when Gregory was away. There is a letter in August 1914 from Gregory showing his concern about her getting out of France quickly at the outbreak of the First World War. In 1914 he made his fourth visit to Australia for the BA meeting in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane, returning via China, Mongolia and Russia. During the first part of the war (1914–17) he remained in Glasgow with a wide range of publications, including …