Science-Mart


Book Description

This trenchant study analyzes the rise and decline in the quality and format of science in America since World War II. Science-Mart attributes this decline to a powerful neoliberal ideology in the 1980s which saw the fruits of scientific investigation as commodities that could be monetized, rather than as a public good.




Science in Action


Book Description

From weaker to stronger rhetoric : literature - Laboratories - From weak points to strongholds : machines - Insiders out - From short to longer networks : tribunals of reason - Centres of calculation.




The Dismal Science


Book Description

See "Stephen Marglin on the Future of Capitalism" at FORA.tv. Economists celebrate the market as a device for regulating human interaction without acknowledging that their enthusiasm depends on a set of half-truths: that individuals are autonomous, self-interested, and rational calculators with unlimited wants and that the only community that matters is the nation-state. However, as Stephen Marglin argues, market relationships erode community. In the past, for example, when a farm family experienced a setback--say the barn burned down--neighbors pitched in. Now a farmer whose barn burns down turns, not to his neighbors, but to his insurance company. Insurance may be a more efficient way to organize resources than a community barn raising, but the deep social and human ties that are constitutive of community are weakened by the shift from reciprocity to market relations. Marglin dissects the ways in which the foundational assumptions of economics justify a world in which individuals are isolated from one another and social connections are impoverished as people define themselves in terms of how much they can afford to consume. Over the last four centuries, this economic ideology has become the dominant ideology in much of the world. Marglin presents an account of how this happened and an argument for righting the imbalance in our lives that this ideology has fostered.




Making Sense of Science


Book Description

A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist Most of us learn about science from media coverage, and anyone seeking factual information on climate change, vaccine safety, genetically modified foods, or the dangers of peanut allergies has to sift through an avalanche of bogus assertions, misinformation, and carefully packaged spin. Cornelia Dean draws on thirty years of experience as a science reporter at the New York Times to expose the tricks that handicap readers with little background in science. She reveals how activists, business spokespersons, religious leaders, and talk show hosts influence the way science is reported and describes the conflicts of interest that color research. At a time when facts are under daily assault, Making Sense of Science seeks to equip nonscientists with a set of critical tools to evaluate the claims and controversies that shape our lives. “Making Sense of Science explains how to decide who is an expert, how to understand data, what you need to do to read science and figure out whether someone is lying to you... If science leaves you with a headache trying to figure out what’s true, what it all means and who to trust, Dean’s book is a great place to start.” —Casper Star-Tribune “Fascinating... Its mission is to help nonscientists evaluate scientific claims, with much attention paid to studies related to health.” —Seattle Times “This engaging book offers non-scientists the tools to connect with and evaluate science, and for scientists it is a timely call to action for effective communication.” —Times Higher Education




Time and Chance


Book Description

This book is an attempt to get to the bottom of an acute and perennial tension between our best scientific pictures of the fundamental physical structure of the world and our everyday empirical experience of it. The trouble is about the direction of time. The situation (very briefly) is that it is a consequence of almost every one of those fundamental scientific pictures--and that it is at the same time radically at odds with our common sense--that whatever can happen can just as naturally happen backwards. Albert provides an unprecedentedly clear, lively, and systematic new account--in the context of a Newtonian-Mechanical picture of the world--of the ultimate origins of the statistical regularities we see around us, of the temporal irreversibility of the Second Law of Thermodynamics, of the asymmetries in our epistemic access to the past and the future, and of our conviction that by acting now we can affect the future but not the past. Then, in the final section of the book, he generalizes the Newtonian picture to the quantum-mechanical case and (most interestingly) suggests a very deep potential connection between the problem of the direction of time and the quantum-mechanical measurement problem. The book aims to be both an original contribution to the present scientific and philosophical understanding of these matters at the most advanced level, and something in the nature of an elementary textbook on the subject accessible to interested high-school students.




The Cognitive Science of Science


Book Description

Thagard examines scientific development from the interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science. Cognitive science combines insights from: philosophers analyze historical cases, psychologists carry out behavioral experiments, neuroscientists perform brain scans, and computer modelers write programs that simulate thought processes.




Science Secrets


Book Description

"Accessibly written in an engaging style, this book examines classic popular stories in the history of science. Some of the myths discussed include Franklin's Kite, Newton's Apple, and Thomson's plum pudding model of the atom. Martn̕ez successfully holds readers' attention by relying on rich documentation from primary sources to debunk speculations that have become reified over time. He argues that although scientists have disagreed with one another, the disagreements have been productive. Features includes extensive primary source documentation and detailed explanations of how to compare contradictory sources in order to determine which accounts are truly valid"-- Provided by publisher.




Stiff: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers


Book Description

A look inside the world of forensics examines the use of human cadavers in a wide range of endeavors, including research into new surgical procedures, space exploration, and a Tennessee human decay research facility.




Socioscientific Issues-Based Instruction for Scientific Literacy Development


Book Description

Socioscientific issues require individuals to use moral and ethical considerations to help in their evaluation of evidence and decision making, entailing controversial scientific phenomena. Such issues include genetic engineering and biotechnology. Socioscientific issues pedagogy has the potential to enhance students’ overall conceptual understanding of scientific phenomena that affect the daily lives of people across the globe. Socioscientific Issues-Based Instruction for Scientific Literacy Development is a critical scholarly publication that examines the development of a research-based integrated socioscientific issues pedagogy for use in the K-12 system, teacher education preparation, and informal education centers. The publication focuses on science education researchers and pre-service and in-service teachers’ abilities to design and implement meaningful learning opportunities for students to use rationalistic, intuitive, and emotive perspectives as they engage in information reasoning on scientific topics, such as climate change and CRISPR, that are of utmost importance. Teachers in the K-12 system and informal education settings will be able to use this text to enhance scientific literacy among their students. Instructors in teacher preparation programs will be able to use this research-based text to improve pre-service and in-service teachers’ abilities to use socioscientific issues pedagogy to enhance scientific literacy among K-12 students. Additionally, audiences including researchers, administrators, academicians, policymakers, and students will find this book beneficial for their studies.




Scientific Imperialism


Book Description

The growing body of research on interdisciplinarity has encouraged a more in depth analysis of the relations that hold among academic disciplines. In particular, the incursion of one scientific discipline into another discipline’s traditional domain, also known as scientific imperialism, has been a matter of increasing debate. Following this trend, Scientific Imperialism aims to bring together philosophers of science and historians of science interested in the topic of scientific imperialism and, in particular, interested in the conceptual clarification, empirical identification, and normative assessment of the idea of scientific imperialism. Thus, this innovative volume has two main goals. Indeed, the authors first seek to understand interdisciplinary relations emerging from the incursion of one scientific discipline into one or more other disciplines, such as in cases in which the conventions and procedures of one discipline or field are imposed on other fields; or more weakly when a scientific discipline seeks to explain phenomena that are traditionally considered proper of another discipline’s domain. Secondly, the authors explore ways of distinguishing imperialistic from non-imperialistic interactions between disciplines and research fields. The first sustained study of scientific imperialism, this volume will appeal to postgraduate students and postdoctoral researchers interested in fields such as Science and Technology Studies, Sociology of Science & Technology, Philosophy of Science, and History of Science.