Informing, teaching or propagandising? Combining Environmental and Science Studies for undergraduates

This article discusses experiences in the integrated teaching of Environmental Studies and Science Studies in a generalist curriculum at a university campus in Scotland. At the University of Glasgow Crichton Campus, a mixed curriculum has been developed to combine coherently Environmental and Science Studies, perhaps the first such curriculum in the UK and equally uncommon in America. The Crichton curricum is intentionally multi-disciplinary, drawing closely on the successful nineteenth-century Scottish model exported to America. This generalist approach, emphasising broad philosophical principles, informs the courses and their inter-relationships

Science Studies

How can we understand the intensifying interactions of science and society? It is the interdisciplinary field called science studies that provides us with a rich inventory of analytical approaches. They help us explore science as a practice, a subsystem, a culture, and an institution. Their joint observation: Science today is part and parcel of what has come to be known as 'knowledge society'. More than ever, knowledge production and consumption are in need of incessant monitoring and sophisticated reflection. Nine exemplary studies that inquire into, or are themselves examples of the dynamics of scientific knowledge, are included here: They cover issues as diverse as eugenics, climate research, and the role of historiography, and make use of different tools such as evolutionary reasoning, metaphor, and bibliometrics. Finally, they ponder the need for science to go public (PUS) as well as for society to regulate knowledge and to restructure universities as building blocks of our science system. Their joint message: Science studies can and should assume an active role in observing, reflecting, and communicating the intricate encounters of science and society today

Informing, teaching or propagandising? Combining Environmental and Science Studies for undergraduates

This article discusses recent experiences in the integrated teaching of Environmental Studies and Science Studies in a generalist curriculum at a new university campus in Scotland. At the University of Glasgow Crichton Campus over the past three years, a new mixed curriculum has been developed to combine coherently Environmental and Science Studies, perhaps the first such curriculum in the UK and equally uncommon in America. The Crichton curricum is intentionally multi-disciplinary, drawing closely on the nineteenth-century Scottish model successful exported to America. This generalist approach, emphasising broad philosophical principles, informs the courses and their inter-relationships

National conference on health inequities in India : transformative research for action

The conference sessions included: Structural drivers of health inequities; Health issues and challenges of ‘socially constructed’ vulnerable groups; Studies on the health of Adivasis and tribal communities from different parts of India; Policy interventions for health equity, and; Role of social movements and civil society organizations in addressing health inequity. This report covers the conference and provides summaries and details of sessions. Health systems are dynamic and evolving, and research provides an integral feedback loop into the way health systems are shaped and grow

Supporting science studies for children with long term health problems using Nefreduca

Children with long term health problems cannot always maintain their schooling and keep up with the curriculum (Prevatt et al., 2000; McDougall et al., 2004). They also spend prolonged periods in hospital where access to science teaching is very limited (Sobrino, Lizasoain & Ochoa, 2001). In order to address this problem, the Nefreduca project was designed to develop a short science curriculum for children in Spain with chronic kidney disease. The Nefreduca project was designed to develop a series of open source science inquiry based web learning materials for children with chronic kidney disease. In this paper the learning design strategies employed to build the Nefreduca platform are described , together with how the students' conceptions of the Kidney's role in the nutrition process were extended whilst trialling the Nefreduca materials. The students' notions of the kidney also changed after using the Nefreduca programme. Their answers illustrated a deeper understanding of the urine production process, it's constituency; and its connection to the blood filtration that occurs in the kidney. These findings suggest that the Nefreduca activities could serve as appropriate teaching material for scaffolding the students' mental models of the kidney

The shortcomings of semi-local and hybrid functionals: what we can learn from surface science studies

A study of the adsorption of CO on late 4d and $5d$ transition metal (111) surfaces (Ru, Rh, Pd, Ag, Os, Ir, and Pt) considering atop and hollow site adsorption is presented. The applied functionals include the gradient corrected PBE and BLYP functional, and the corresponding hybrid Hartree-Fock density functionals HSE and B3LYP. We find that PBE based hybrid functionals (specifically HSE) yield, with the exception of Pt, the correct site order on all considered metals, but they also considerably overestimate the adsorption energies compared to experiment. On the other hand, the semi-local BLYP functional and the corresponding hybrid functional B3LYP yield very satisfactory adsorption energies and the correct adsorption site for all surfaces. We are thus faced with a Procrustean problem: the B3LYP and BLYP functionals seem to be the overall best choice for describing adsorption on metal surfaces, but they simultaneously fail to account well for the properties of the metal, vastly overestimating the equilibrium volume and underestimating the atomization energies. Setting out from these observations, general conclusions are drawn on the relative merits and drawbacks of various semi-local and hybrid functionals. The discussion includes a revised version of the PBE functional specifically optimized for bulk properties and surface energies (PBEsol), a revised version of the PBE functional specifically optimized to predict accurate adsorption energies (rPBE), as well as the aforementioned BLYP functional. We conclude that no semi-local functional is capable to describe all aspects properly, and including non-local exchange also only improves some, but worsens other properties.Comment: 12 pages, 6 figures; to be published in New Journal of Physic

Nanotechnology Publications and Patents: A Review of Social Science Studies and Search Strategies

This paper provides a comprehensive review of more than 120 social science studies in nanoscience and technology, all of which analyze publication and patent data. We conduct a comparative analysis of bibliometric search strategies that these studies use to harvest publication and patent data related to nanoscience and technology. We implement these strategies on 2006 publication data and find that Mogoutov and Kahane (2007), with their evolutionary lexical query search strategy, extract the highest number of records from the Web of Science. The strategies of Glanzel et al. (2003), Noyons et al. (2003), Porter et al. (2008) and Mogoutov and Kahane (2007) produce very similar ranking tables of the top ten nanotechnology subject areas and the top ten most prolific countries and institutions.nanotechnology, research and development, productivity, publications, patents, bibliometric analysis, search strategy

The problem with economics: naturalism, critique and performativity

A critical review of debates on the performativity of economics from the vantage point of a general anthropology of modern economic reason.Performativity; Naturalism; Critique; Economics; Science Studies; Anthropology; Thought Experiments