Here be dragons: exploring the hinterland of science

This dissertation is an exploration of the hinterland of science and the strange ‘creatures’ dwelling there. In philosophical circles, the subject of pseudoscience has stirred relatively little philosophical excitement. The demarcation project has fallen on hard times, and many philosophers have grown suspicious of the very term ‘pseudoscience’, as it is believed to suggest a naïve conception of science and its borderlines. In this dissertation, I argue that, instead of abandoning the demarcation project altogether, we should search for more sophisticated tools to distinguish pseudoscience from bona fide science. The ‘silver bullet’ approach to pseudoscience is criticized, particularly with regard to the principle of methodological naturalism in science and the controversy about supernaturalism and intelligent design. I develop a theoretical framework for analyzing the structure of pseudosciences, based on the concepts of immunizing strategies and epistemic defense mechanisms. The recurrence of these theoretical features, which is illustrated with a number of case studies, demonstrates the surprising resilience of pseudoscience and other ‘irrational’ belief systems. These epistemological considerations are then integrated with cognitive and psychological findings on irrationality, in order to construct a broader framework for the generation and dissemination of belief systems (epidemiology of representations). I argue that the self-validating nature and internal epistemic rationale of certain ‘weird’ belief systems go some way to explaining their wide appeal and pervasiveness. We conclude that pseudosciences are worthy of philosophical investigation, and that the rumors of the death of demarcationism have been greatly exaggerated

Nurturing utopia : Jeffersonian expansionism in contexts, 1760-1810

This work is a study of what I call the Jeffersonian ideology of westward territorial expansion. It consists of five chapters, all looking at a different aspect of this ideology, and it focuses on the years 1780-1810, a period when (from a broad perspective) Jefferson can be considered to have been at the height of his political and intellectual career

Four Festivals and a City: A critique of Actor-Network Theory as an approach to understanding the emergence and development of Flagship Festivals in Kilkenny from 1964 to 2004

This thesis is a critique of the suitability of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as an approach to understanding the emergence and development of four flagship festivals in Kilkenny from 1964 to 2004. The thesis compares Kilkenny’s four catalyst festivals (The Kilkenny Beer Festival, Kilkenny Arts Week, The Confederation of Kilkenny Festival and the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival) and assesses the ability of the ANT approach to analyse the festival product, organisation, and power flow of each. It examines the ability of ANT to understand the socio-cultural impacts of the festivals on the city of Kilkenny, its tourism infrastructure and built heritage. Utilising two subtly different interpretations (Fox, 2000 and Porsander 2005) of Michael Callon’s phases of emergence (1986, 1991), ANT is used to trace the differences in the origins of these festival committees, their emergence or translation from, and into, other networks and the actor-networks that reach beyond Kilkenny. It highlights the multiple organisational variations in the festival committees that become visible through the selected approach and its suitability for interrogating the varying contexts and topologies of these city-changing festivals

A critical edition of John of Salisbury's Policraticus Books I-IV

This thesis is part of a commitment to re-edit all eight books of John of Salisbury's great treatise on politics for the Oxford University Press. The last edition, and the first critical edition, was that of C C J Webb (Oxford, 1909), which has since been accepted as the definitive text. My own examination of the manuscripts (which has been palaeographical and codicological as well as critical) has totally controverted that view and has enabled me to establish a text that, although still not perfect, represents the text as the author himself wrote it more exactly than any of the ten editions published to date. John's Policraticus, Metalogicon, Letters, and unfinished Historia Pontificalis, are used by historians as primary sources for the politics and education of the day, so that this thesis is the first stage of an enterprise that will greatly benefit the many mediaevalists and their students to whose work the Policraticus is of central or major concern. <p

Improving reliability and performance of telecommunications systems by using autonomic, self-learning and self-adaptive systems

Meine Dissertation beschaeftigt sich mit autonomen, selbst-lernenden und selbst-adaptiven Systemen. Prinzipiell muss ein autonomes und selbst-lernendes System seinen eigenen Status, sowie die externen Operationen kennen, muss Systemveraenderungen erkennen koennen und muss in der Lage sein sich selbst zu adaptieren. Verbesserung der Zuverlaessigkeit von Multimedia Kommunikation: Im Zuge des Testens eines kommerziellen VoIP Servers wurde deutlich, dass das SIP Protokoll, welches fuer die Initiierung von VoIP Telefonaten verwendet wird, in einem sehr offenen Standard definiert ist. Fuer eine korrekte SIP Nachricht sind nur einige wenige Informationen notwendig. Es gibt allerdings eine enorme Anzahl an optionalen Informationen, die ebenfalls innerhalb einer SIP Nachricht verwendet werden koennen. Diese Tatsache fuehrt dazu, dass VoIP Geraete eine enorme Anzahl an unterschiedlichen SIP-Dialekten verwenden, die aus der riesigen Anzahl an unterschiedlichen Parameterkombinationen entstehen. Dies kann zu dem Problem fuehren, dass Telefone die dasselbe Protokoll verwenden, trotzdem nicht in der Lage sind\ud miteinander zu kommunizieren. Deshalb wird ein autonomes, selbst-lernendes SIP-Uebersetzungstool praesentiert, welches die Rate der faelschlich vom Server abgewiesenen SIP Nachrichten drastisch reduziert, indem ankommende Nachrichten analysiert und eventuell veraendert werden. Autonome Adaption von Systemparametern, um die Systemperformance zu verbessern: Die Performance eines kommerziellen Systems, welches Daten von unterschiedlichen mobilen Geraeten sammelt und verarbeitet, ist aufgrund des hohen ankommenden Datenaufkommens extrem wichtig. Ankommende Datentickets wandern durch ein Warteschlangensystem, wo in jedem durchlaufenen Knoten unterschiedliche atomare Aktionen durchgefuehrt werden. Dieser Aufbau ermoeglicht es, die einzelnen Knoten zu parallelisieren, in dem mehrere Auspraegungen der Knoten auf unterschiedlichen CPU-Kernen gestartet werden. Mit Hilfe eines Systems, welches analytische Ansaetze, Messungen und Simulationen verwendet, wird die optimale Softwarekonfiguration fuer eine bestimmte Hardware automatisiert gefunden. Dadurch passt sich die Software immer exakt an die aktuelle Hardware und an das aktuelle Datenaufkommen an. Die Performance des Gesamtsystems kann so drastisch verbessert werden.My dissertation will be about autonomic, self-learning and self-adaptive sys- tems. Usually an autonomic and self-learning system must be able to know its own status and the external operations, must be able to monitor system changes and must be able to self-adapt to them. Within this area my disser- tation will present two case studies of autonomic and self-learning systems. Improving reliability of multimedia communication: While testing a commercial VoIP server it became obvious that the SIP proto- col, used to initiate VoIP calls, is defined in a very open standard. That fact results in a great number of different SIP dialects, leading to the problem that some VoIP devices (hard and soft phones) may not be able to communicate with each other, even though they use the same protocol. Therefore an au- tonomic, self-learning SIP translator will be presented, that will decrease the rate of rejected SIP messages. Automatic adaptation of system parameters to improve system performance: The performance of a commercial system that collects data from various mo- bile devices is critical, because of the high amount of incoming data. There- fore performance tests will be initiated and automatically evaluated. Through self-learning techniques the system will self-adapt to the environment and the hardware on which the system is currently running, with the goal to improve the systems performance

Hands-on Science. Advancing Science. Improving Education

The book herein aims to contribute to the advancement of Science to the improvement of Science Education and to an effective implementation of a sound widespread scientific literacy at all levels of society. Its chapters reunite a variety of diverse and valuable works presented in this line of thought at the 15th International Conference on Hands-on Science “Advancing Science. Improving Education

A Post-ANT Study of the Translation of a Performance Management System

This dissertation consists of three individual research papers that push the boundaries on the ontology, epistemology, and methodology of the actor-network-theory (ANT) pertaining to its mobilization in sociological and organizational accounting research. All three papers anchor on an ethnographic field study wherein a team of two consultants developed a new performance management system (PMS) in a subsidiary of a state-owned enterprise (SOE) in China. Chapter 1 introduces the overarching theses in this dissertation, which are characterized by the ontological boundaries of ANT that the three papers push and the new dimensions of accounting research it opens by pushing such boundaries. Paper 1 (Chapter 2) explores the ways in which accounting enacts multiple reality in the organization by mobilizing the notion of multiple reality contributed by Actor-Network Theorists Annemarie Mol (1999, 2002) and others (Dugdale, 1999; Law, 2002; Law & Singleton, 2005), and seek to extend our understanding of the roles of accounting by explicating how accounting practices enact, circulate, sustain, and erode multiple reality; how the multiple reality coexisted, relied on, opposed to, and were outside and inside one another; as well as how accounting translation is executed when the reality is multiple. Paper 2 (Chapter 3) probes the theoretical and methodological dilemma posed by ANTs flat ontology: how to approach institutionalized contexts with the vocabulary of ANT. Through examining the roles that SOE context plays in the translation processes of accounting technology, I identify context roles in the actor-network as black boxes, discursive resources, devices of interessement, and performative actants. Drawing on the Bakhtinian notions of genre and intertextuality, the third paper (Chapter 4) examines the role that linguistic gaps can play during the introduction and formation of management accounting practices. These linguistic gaps involve the cross-language gap between different languages, the generic gap between speech genres suitable for particular purposes or communicative situations, and the performative gap between text and verbal performance. These gaps, on the one hand, contribute to the incompleteness of performance measures by enabling interpretive and performative spaces; and on the other hand, can be mustered as a rhetorical strategy by actors to persuade and recruit others during the formation of accounting objects. Chapter 5 concludes the dissertation by bringing a critical spirit into ANT-inspired accounting research