The STS Compages
worldsfair | January 12, 2009
Here's a slide I recently made in a lecture on the scientific method, to illustrate how easy it is to produce very different hypotheses for a particular observation.
Basically, the backdrop was to consider a scenario where environmentalists had noticed a significant drop in stork population, and also where the government recording its national birthrate dropping significantly (this apparently happened in China in the 80s, although the use of these two observations works nicely because there's also a well known folktale link between storks and babies). Building from a visual that Hadi…
bcohen | January 6, 2009They are cultural, philosophical, and political.
Not even John Lennon can overcome the flaws, given their deep cultural basis.
Nicholas Negroponte, co-founder and director of the MIT Media Laboratory, introduced the idea for the $100 laptop in 2005. The laptop would be geared towards children in "developing nations." Its intent was to help education in those countries. The project's goal, to be specific, is "To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves." The technical accomplishments of the laptop project were swift--low power…
bcohen | November 14, 2008Pt. I | Pt. 2
---
Part 2 with Keith Warner, discussing his book Agroecology in Action, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: How did science and social power intersect in your study?
KW: A particularly salient feature of my field work was the divergent assumptions held by actors about the evaluation of novel practices in farming. Many advocates of alternative agriculture argue for a systems-based approach to selecting and managing technology in farming systems, and critique dominant forms of agriculture as reductionistic (or simply narrow minded…
bcohen | November 10, 2008Click on the book cover to go to Part I of the respective discussion. Or, see here for a complete list of entries.
I: M. Egan on Barry Commoner II: C. Mody on nanotechnology
III: S. Halfon on int'l science policy IV: K. Marsh on forestry policy
V: D. Hess on social movements VI: L. Grossman on e-trash
VII: S. Parthasarathy on genetics policy VIII: A. Sachs on environmentalism
IX: J. Golinski on Enlightenment weather X: K. Joyce on MRI & visual knowledge
XI: D.G.…
bcohen | October 14, 2008I contributed an essay to the History of Science Society (HSS) newsletter called "Why Blog the History of Science?" It is now in print and available on line. Go go, check it out, you can learn about why all blogging should be understood along the Ayers-Onuf axis.
Here I'll excerpt that part:
About that axis. Two historians began a call-in radio show earlier this year. One of them, let's call him Ayers, considered it an opportunity to contribute to the public debate about current issues by discoursing on historical context - voting, race relations, the environment, what have you. His…
bcohen | October 3, 2008Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 - - -
Part 3 with Gregg Mitman, discussing his book Breathing Space, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: Following that--or perhaps too similarly--I see that the book has been reviewed widely, suggesting a diverse range of readers. But who did you want to write it for?
GM: The book is meant to be a crossover book. By that, I mean it was written to appeal to scholars and students in environmental history, medical history, history of science, and historical and cultural geography, and also to a more general readership…
bcohen | October 2, 2008Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 - - -
Part 2 with Gregg Mitman, discussing his book Breathing Space, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
WF: Given the class issues you deal with, the book is also a contribution to the history of environmental justice. How would you characterize environmental justice and issues of health?
GM: I think it is difficult to separate out issues of environmental and social injustice. When you combine inadequate access to health care, for example, with increased exposure to air pollution caused by the siting of bus depots in poor…
Breathing Space: On the Historical Connections of Allergies and Landscapes, with Author Gregg Mitman
bcohen | October 1, 2008Part 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3- - -
The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about Breathing Space: How Allergies Shape Our Lives and Landscapes (Yale University Press, 2007), with its author Gregg Mitman. Prof. Mitman is Interim Director of the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies and William Coleman Professor of History of Science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is also a professor in the Department of Medical History and the Robert F. and Jean E. Holtz Center for Science & Technology Studies.
If you were to ask how one could hold together so many…
bcohen | September 11, 2008Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 - - -
Part 4 with Jody Roberts and Michelle Murphy--discussing her book Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty--follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
- - - WF: The book is titled "Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty." Why is uncertainty a problem? Or, perhaps we should ask, where or when is uncertainty a problem?
MM: Uncertainty, I would suggest, is a constitutive feature of much environmental politics, and particularly chemical exposures. Legal standards that demand we know the predictable and…
bcohen | September 10, 2008Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 - - -
Part 3 with Jody Roberts and Michelle Murphy--discussing her book Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty--follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
- - - WF: Racism is a word that generally makes us feel uncomfortable, especially when it's linked to politics or science. When I've introduced the term in courses I've taught (using your writings) my students get visibly uncomfortable. It's not the case or the injustices that sets them off - they tend to agree with much of what's said - but they have a very…
bcohen | September 9, 2008Part 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 - - -
Part 2 with Jody Roberts and Michelle Murphy--discussing her book Sick Building Syndrome and the Problem of Uncertainty--follows below. All entries in the author-meets-blogger series can be found here.
- - - WF: So we've got the women on the inside organizing and collecting their own data. But how did this fit within the language and practices of the outside "experts" dealing with these cases?
MM: I also wanted to insist that what the "experts" were doing around SBS (and the politics of low-level chemical exposures more generally) was also crafted out of gendered…
worldsfair | August 5, 2008
Yesterday, Ben threw out the following question:
What does a scientist actually think the history of science offers?
To be frank, I don't think it's necessarily a tough question to answer, but I do think that my answer, and other answers presented will be a challenge to enact in the real life workings of scientific research.
So why is the historical context important? From an empirical standpoint, what it provides is another form of data - data that arguably has a huge impact in how science is done, and perhaps, how science should be done.
In my world, the world of biological scientific…
bcohen | July 29, 2008An advertisement from Frank Scott's company (as reprinted in Ted Steinberg's American Green). Talk about religion and nature--Scott thought it was un-christian not to keep a manicured lawn.
Our lawn finally came in this year after three years in this house. We hadn't put much of an effort into it, I'll admit, though the original builder sought to. Our dirt is awful, just god awful. Ask my dad. He, the ardent gardener, is astonished by how poor the soil is. But this year the crabgrass grew in. And it looks good, real good. Plus it's helped prevent erosion from the occasional torrential…
bcohen | June 19, 2008Pt 1 | Pt 2
- - -
Part 2 with Graham Burnett, author of Trying Leviathan, follows below. All entries in the author-meets-bloggers series can be found here.
WF: What would you have biologists today take from this book? I ask because you are at some pains in Trying Leviathan to argue for the contingencies of taxonomic systems, which appear always to be in flux, and seem generally to reflect a host of larger cultural preoccupations.
DGB: I don't think of my book as having special "lessons" for biologists. Indeed, I rather incline away from thinking of my books as having "lessons" for…
bcohen | June 18, 2008Part 1 | Part 2
- - -The World's Fair is pleased to offer the following discussion about a most unique and forceful book, Trying Leviathan: The Nineteenth-Century New York Court Case That Put the Whale on Trial and Challenged the Order of Nature (Princeton University Press, 2007), with its author D. Graham Burnett. He is associate professor of history at Princeton University.
Professor Burnett is the author of three previous books, Masters of All They Surveyed (Chicago University Press, 2000), A Trial by Jury (Knopf, 2001), and Descartes and the Hyperbolic Quest (American Philosophical…
bcohen | June 3, 2008This post was written by guest contributor Cyrus Mody.*
There's a new study reported in Nature Nanotechnology entitled "Carbon nanotubes introduced into the abdominal cavity of mice show asbestos-like pathogenicity in a pilot study." Or, as the title seems to have been understood by reporters at the New York Times and elsewhere, "Blah NANO blah blah blah ASBESTOS blah PATHOGEN blah blah."
The gist of the original Nature Nano study is this: (1) we know asbestos fibers, once heralded as a godsend, can cause mesothelioma, a cancer of the lining of the lungs. (2) We know this has something to…
bcohen | May 28, 2008Scientists and engineers have helped empower the environmental justice (EJ) movement. But how has their participation changed their own scientific and engineering identities? A workshop this weekend will explore the matter.
(click on the image--a larger pdf version will open in a new window)
This website provides further information about the workshop, including a more substantive overview and a list of participants. For anyone in the Charlottesville area, note that we're hosting a public reception for the event on Friday at 5:00 pm. Stop by, have some spinach dip, talk about…
bcohen | May 20, 2008"In the long run men hit only what they aim at." H.D. Thoreau, Walden
This post's title is the poorly reasoned conclusion to a poorly reported and poorly conducted study. I couldn't tell if it was simply bad reporting at The Boston Globe or bad research. Either way (or both ways) it suggests that evidence is meaningless without a context and that scientific research is meaningless without a fuller recognition of its cultural moorings. Put another way, given data, what are we to conclude?
In this case, "two new studies by economists and social scientists have reached a perhaps startling…
bcohen | May 15, 2008Notice of a conference at the University of Toronto: Reclaiming the World: The Future of Objectivity.
If you're interested in what people are talking about when they're talking about reclaimig the world and the future of objectivity -- as in, how does one do that exactly? -- you can find the abstracts for the papers here.
The full program is available here.
Here is the overview of the conference itself:
The notion of objectivity has come under severe criticism due to developments in the humanities and in the sciences. These criticisms have profound ramifications for how we understand the…
bcohen | May 1, 2008"What seems a detour has a way of becoming, in time, a direct route." R. Powers, Three Farmers...
Preface | Pt. 1 | Pt. 2 | Pt. 3 | (Sidebar 1) | Pt. 4 | Pt. 5 | Pt. 6Pt. 7 | (Sidebar 2a) | (Sidebar 2b) | Pt. 8 | Pt. 9 | Conclusion
[Note: if you're new to the series, don't know what's going on, and want a shortcut, I'd say you can start with Part 3, skip the sidebars, and still cut a reasonable swath.]
It was gravity. Gravity gives us the answer. Not sunlight, not the pathetic fallacy, not Olga the tour guide, not forensic expertise about the shine off the cannonball. Gravity. So there…