The challenge of the past for the future of the social sciences

Abstract Purpose – To demonstrate that the past of the social sciences contains all the elements of sociocybernetics and that those elements combined with the logic of modern interdisciplinary simulation research will meet challenges modern society poses to those sciences. Design/methodology/approach – A historical analysis, leading to an outline of advanced logic of social science research, shows the way to modern (computer) simulation research. Findings – When the theoretical principles of sociocybernetics are put into practice by doing (empirically based) simulation research, it can handle in a scientifically valid way a number of research questions modern complex society poses, such as how processes of self-organization in individuals, groups and institutes can be described and understood; self-organization of autobiographic memory of individuals can be simulated in a computer; these individual memories are related to collective memories of generations; these different generations of social researchers can work together and balance in a creative synergy between the wisdom of the past and surprising hypotheses of the future. Research limitations/implications – Social sciences researchers have to work with advanced logic of research such as is propagated in simulation research and by sociocybernetics. Practical implications – Different generations of sociocyberneticians here to work together in (empirically based) simulation research to demonstrate the usefulness of sociocybernetical theory and logic. Originality/value – Sociocybernetics is not an exotic field but a normal legitimate constituent of the social sciences. Keywords Scientificmanagement, Systems theory, Cybernetics, Feedback, Self assessment, Simulatio

Implementation research for the prevention of antimicrobial resistance and healthcare-associated infections; 2017 Geneva infection prevention and control (IPC)-think tank (part 1)

Background Around 5–15% of all hospital patients worldwide suffer from healthcare-associated infections (HAIs), and years of excessive antimicrobial use in human and animal medicine have created emerging antimicrobial resistance (AMR). A considerable amount of evidence-based measures have been published to address these challenges, but the largest challenge seems to be their implementation. Methods In June 2017, a total of 42 experts convened at the Geneva IPC-Think Tank to discuss four domains in implementation science: 1) teaching implementation skills; 2) fostering implementation of IPC and antimicrobial stewardship (AMS) by policy making; 3) national/international actions to foster implementation skills; and 4) translational research bridging social sciences and clinical research in infection prevention and control (IPC) and AMR. Results Although neglected in the past, implementation skills have become a priority in IPC and AMS. They should now be part of any curriculum in health care, and IPC career paths should be created. Guidelines and policies should be aligned with each other and evidence-based, each document providing a section on implementing elements of IPC and AMS in patient care. International organisations should be advocates for IPC and AMS, framing them as patient safety issues and emphasizing the importance of implementation skills. Healthcare authorities at the national level should adopt a similar approach and provide legal frameworks, guidelines, and resources to allow better implementation of patient safety measures in IPC and AMS. Rather than repeating effectiveness studies in every setting, we should invest in methods to improve the implementation of evidence-based measures in different healthcare contexts. For this, we need to encourage and financially support collaborations between social sciences and clinical IPC research. Conclusions Experts of the 2017 Geneva Think Tank on IPC and AMS, CDC, and WHO agreed that sustained efforts on implementation of IPC and AMS strategies are required at international, country, and hospital management levels, to provide an adequate multimodal framework that addresses (not exclusively) leadership, resources, education and training for implementing IPC and AMS. Future strategies can build on this agreement to make strategies on IPC and AMS more effective

Roundtable Discussion: The Future of New York: 1898, 1998

In this transcript of a symposium held at Fordham University School of Law on November 16, 1998 on the Future of New York, the six participants addressed the broad subject of what the future can bring as New York celebrated its centennial year. Professor Hammack spoke first. He focused on the future of “Greater New York” by discussing the creation of it, the hopes at the time and the changes that occurred since. Next, Professor Siegel addressed the challenge of the telecommunications revolution as New York faced an economic downturn, and possibly an impending national recession. He recounted some of the complexities of the revolution, decentralization of the economy as a result of telecommunications and New York’s advanced standing in the revolution resulting from early deregulation. Third, Professor Fuchs spoke about the common characterization of New York as exceptional. Reviewing the past century, she explained in what regards New York, a global city, was indeed exceptional. Looking forward, Professor Fuchs argued that a successful future was dependent on continuing a course of being exceptional, as opposed to “making New York like the rest of America,” through political innovation. Professor Jackson spoke last. He first dispelled the conception that circumstances are presently worse than they were 100 years ago and then briefly commented on the remarks of the earlier speakers. Dean Robert Himmelberg of Fordhan’s Graduate School of Arts & Sciences gave an introduction, followed by brief remarks from Professor Daniel Soyer, a member of Fordham’s History Department who organized the conference. The six participants were: (1) Robert Himmelberg (Chair); (2) Daniel Soyer (Moderator); (3) David C. Hammack (Panelist), Elbert Jay Benton Professor of History at Case Western Reserve University and Pulitzer Prize nominated author; (4) Fred Siegel (Panelist), Professor of History at Cooper Union for the Arts & Sciences in New York, author, and a Senior Fellow of the Progressive Policy Institute; (5) Ester R. Fuchs (Panelist), Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at Barnard College and Columbia University, Director of the Columbia Center for Urban Research and Policy, and author; and (6) Kenneth T. Jackson (Respondent), Jacques Barzun Professor of History and the Social Sciences at Columbia University, author and editor of the Encyclopedia of New York City

Academic-Related Perceptions, Beliefs, and Strategies of Undergraduate Agricultural Students

A student’s academic success is entwined with their perceived beliefs and strategies. However, the effects of personal factors have yet to be fully explored in undergraduate agricultural students. This study aims to investigate students’ academic efficacy (AE), academic self-handicapping (SH) and skepticism about the relevance of school for future success (SR). AE, SH and SR were measured according to three scales from the Patterns of Adaptive Learning Scales. The scales required students to rate their level of disagreement or agreement (1 = strongly disagree to 5 = strongly agree). A response rate of 24% or 303 usable responses were obtained from student in the College of Agricultural Sciences and Natural Resources at the University of Tennessee (N = 1,286). Based on the population parameter of gender, the data were weighted, because the sample population was skewed towards females. The weighted-averages were 4.17 for AE, 1.67 for SH, and 2.01 for SR. In addition, a low negative association was found between academic efficacy and self-handicapping, a negligible relationship was found between academic efficacy and skepticism about the relevance of school for future success, and a moderate relationship was found between self-handicapping and skepticism about the relevance of school for future success. This population of students do not self-handicap themselves, do not doubt the relevance of their degree, and believe they are able to meet academic expectations. The lack of skepticism about the future of students’ degrees may be due to the increasing pursuit of agricultural degrees, concurrent with a shortage of agricultural scientists. Since social cognitive theory proposes personal factors influence behavior and environmental events, these findings are promising. Therefore, instructors are encouraged to move past traditional lecture-based instruction and challenge their students at higher cognitive levels. This will allow students to realistically explore the complexities of agriculture

Tilting relationalities: Exploring the world through possible futures of agriculture

Demography has driven increases in agricultural productivity and is in the limelight once again with questions about how we intend to feed 9 billion people on the planet. The scale of this challenge and the ecological threat from collapsing resources has generated a sense of impending crisis, but remarkably little action. The frames of reference tend towards climate change and the Anthropocene, but perhaps a more fruitful approach is to reflect on developments in agriculture and agroecology to examine the scale and significance of the ecological challenges we face. In this article, we use agriculture as a nodal point through which to engage with the emerging and dislocating human–planetary relations of the contemporary world, reflecting on past, current and future notions of ‘progress’, and on how ongoing developments and experiments in making a living with others (human, non-human and more-than-human others) might offer potential pathways for positive social transformation and future flourishing. As we argue throughout the article, reassessing notions of progress does not mean the mere return to traditional forms of knowledge and practice, nor embracing a form of luddite politics absent of advances in modern science and technology. Instead, we propose this is about opening spaces where diversity, pluralism and contending perspectives and agencies are engaged on their own terms, creating and sharing alternative knowledge and ways of doing and being. Here, the role for the social sciences and humanities is not to describe or pretend to represent these emerging relationalities, but instead to enable and actively engage them. Doing this responsibly and effectively will require us to inhabit the disorienting and discomforting ruins of progress, eschewing the turn towards finalised solutions and outcomes

THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE POSTINDUSTRIAL: SPATIAL DATA INFRASTRUCTURES FOR STUDYING THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

Postindustrial urban landscapes are large-scale, complex manifestations of the past in the present in the form of industrial ruins and archaeological sites, decaying infrastructure, and adaptive reuse; ongoing processes of postindustrial redevelopment often conspire to conceal the toxic consequences of long-term industrial activity. Understanding these phenomena is an essential step in building a sustainable future; despite this, the study of the postindustrial is still new, and requires interdisciplinary connections that remain either unexplored or underexplored. Archaeologists have begun to turn their attention to the modern industrial era and beyond. This focus carries the potential to deliver new understandings of the industrial and postindustrial city, yet archaeological attention to the postindustrial remains in its infancy. Developments in the ongoing digital revolution in archaeology and within the social sciences and humanities have the potential to contribute to the archaeological study of the postindustrial city. The development of historical GIS and historical spatial data infrastructures (HSDIs) using historical big data have enabled scholars to study the past over large spatial and temporal scales and support qualitative research, while retaining a high level of detail. This dissertation demonstrates how spatial technologies using big data approaches, especially the HSDI, enhance the archaeological study of postindustrial urban landscapes and ultimately contribute to meeting the “grand challenge” of integrating digital approaches into archaeology by coupling reflexive recording of archaeological knowledge production with globally accessible spatial digital data infrastructures. HSDIs show great potential for providing archaeologists working in postindustrial places with a means to curate and manipulate historical data on an industrial or urban scale, and to iteratively contextualize this longitudinal dataset with material culture and other forms of archaeological knowledge. I argue for the use of HSDIs as the basis for transdisciplinary research in postindustrial contexts, as a platform for linking research in the academy to urban decision

Weaving Indigenous and Sustainability Sciences: Diversifying our Methods (WIS2DOM) Workshop

The report is organized into five sections: Part I outlines the strengths and limitations of sustainability science in sustaining resilient landscapes; provides a brief introduction to the development of sustainability science over the past two decades; addresses the strengths identified by participants (a transdisciplinary approach, systems framework, scientific method and measurement); as well as the weaknesses (politics of science, economics of sustainability management, scalar applications of sustainability science). Part II identifies the strengths and limitations of Indigenous science in sustaining resilient landscapes; provides a brief introduction to the development of Indigenous science within the academy over the past two decades; address the strengths identified by participants (deep-spatial knowledge, long-term observations, an ethos of reciprocal appropriation); as well as the weaknesses (issues related to translation, finding common ground). Part III explores successful collaborations between Indigenous and sustainability sciences in sustaining resilient landscapes; relevant theoretical work on Indigenous science and traditional ecological knowledge are referenced alongside participants’ contributions. Part IV discusses protocols necessary for successful collaborations between Indigenous and sustainability sciences in sustaining resilient landscapes; participant discussions regarding research protocols, principles and practices are described. Part V contains recommendations to Indigenous and sustainability scientists as well as to funding agencies, including NSF, for fostering collaboration between Indigenous communities and scholars and sustainability scientists, encouraging Indigenous community research leadership with an emphasis on mentoring future Indigenous scholars, and further discussions and research into appropriate research principles, protocols, and practices in order to aid collaborations.This report summarizes the findings of the February 13-16, 2013 workshop, entitled Weaving Indigenous and Sustainability Sciences to Diversify our Methods (WIS2DOM), held in Olympia, Washington at The Evergreen State University’s Longhouse. The workshop was funded by an NSF grant from the Arctic Social Sciences Program to Drs. Jay T. Johnson and Renee Pualani Louis, University of Kansas; and Andrew Kliskey, University of Alaska-Anchorage. The purpose of the workshop was to challenge key thinkers in the areas of Indigenous and sustainability sciences to cultivate mutually conducive and appropriate principles, protocols, and practices that address our common concern to sustain resilient landscapes in the midst of rapid environmental change. The WIS2DOM workshop brought together an internationally diverse set of Indigenous academics and community scholars with non-Indigenous academics interested in advancing this discussion. Workshop participants were asked to address the following four questions in their short papers and workshop deliberations: 1. What are the strengths of these two paradigms of science in sustaining resilient landscapes? 2. What are the limitations of these two paradigms of science in successfully sustaining resilient landscapes? 3. How can these two paradigms collaborate in their efforts toward sustaining resilient landscapes? 4. What protocols will aid in the collaboration of these two paradigms toward sustaining resilient landscapes?National Science Foundatio

How to Use Challenge-Based Learning for the Acquisition of Learning to Learn Competence in Early Childhood Preservice Teachers: A Virtual Archaeological Museum Tour in Spain

This article presents the research results in relation to an interdisciplinary teaching innovation project—Teaching and Learning of Social Sciences and Teaching and Learning of Natural Sciences—with Early Childhood Preservice Teachers (ECPT) at the University of Alcalá (Spain) in the pandemic context by COVID-19 during 2020–2021 (N 55): 52 women (94.55%) and 3 men (5.45%) from 20 to 22 years of age. The main research problem is to know if the ECPT improves the learning to learn competence after a challenge-based learning (CBL) linked to virtual tour in a museum. The main objective was to improve the learning to learn competence, during a virtual tour at the Community of Madrid Regional Archaeological Museum (MAR) (Alcalá de Henares, Spain) for a reflective training of students to understand problems of the past and present and future global challenges, promote collaborative and multidisciplinary work, and defend ethics and leadership. In order to ascertain the level of acquisition of this competence in those teachers who were being trained, their self-perception—pretest–posttest—of the experience was assessed through a system of categories adapted from the European Commission. ECPT worked, in small groups and using e/m-learning tools, ten challenges and one storytelling cooperatively with university teachers to solve prehistoric questions related to current situations and problems. Subsequently, two Early Childhood Education teachers from a school in Alcalá de Henares reviewed the proposals and adapted them for application in the classroom of 5-year-old boys and girls. The results show an improvement in this competence in Early Childhood Preservice Teachers: total score pre-post comparison paired-samples Wilcoxon test result shows a statistically significant difference (p > 0.001); an evaluation rubric verified the results of self-perception. Second, we highlight the importance of carrying out virtual museum tours from a challenge-based learning for the development of big ideas, essential questions, challenges, and activities on socioeconomic, environmental, and emotional knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Third, this experience shows the insufficient educational adaptation of the virtual museum tour to the Early Childhood Education stage from a technological and didactic workshops point of view, but there is a diversity of paleontological and archaeological materials and a significant sociocritical discourse.This work was developed within the framework of the following funded teaching innovation project: Challenge-based learning at the Community of Madrid Regional Archaeological Museum: a proposal for teacher training applied to the classroom 5 years old (UAH/EV1212) (University of Alcalá, Spain). In addition, it had the support of the R + D HETEIC project: Heritage education for the territorial and emotional intelligence of citizens. Analysis of good practices, design, and intervention in compulsory education (EDU 2015-67953-P) (Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities/FEDER

Climate Mitigation or Technological Revolution? A Critical Choice of Futures

Mankind currently is not only facing a major environmental challenge, it is embarking on a hugely risky enterprise — that of climate mitigation. This unprecedented global adventure is an attempt to change the nature and shape of human society on the grounds that our traditional market system has failed us. The current enterprise is hugely risky because it is based not on what has happened but on what we are told by “climate-mitigation engineers” might happen. The argument in this essay is simple but powerful, and can be outlined in the following five propositions: • The science of climate change is challenging but compelling, based as it is on an impressive and growing body of expert empirical research. What it shows is that recent climate change is human induced. Hence, further climate change and its mitigation are problems primarily for the social not natural sciences. • The “science” of climate mitigation is nonexistent, because orthodox social science has failed to model the dynamics of human society. And it is the dynamics of human society that will largely determine future climate change. • Orthodox economics, which has attempted to fill the void, has failed completely. Economic theory is suitable only for the analysis of small, shortrun issues that can be accommodated within a static framework — such as the price of a cup of tea; whereas the issue of climate mitigation is one of the biggest and most important issues humanity will ever face, it is long-run in nature, and it can only be adequately handled within a dynamic framework. As orthodox economics has been unable to develop a realist general dynamic theory, its practitioners have been forced to employ simplistic historicist models when analyzing future climate change. • What we need is a new science of human dynamics. The basis for this new science is provided by the author’s dynamic-strategy theory. It is a realist theory in the sense that it has been derived from a long-term, systematic observation of the fluctuating fortunes of both human society over the past 2 million years (myrs) and life over the past 4,000 myrs. • Economists have massively underestimated the costs of their proposed climate mitigation program aimed at stabilizing greenhouse-gas concentrations, because they have employed the inadequate static cost–benefit methodology. This essay takes a very different approach. By estimating the dynamic costs — essentially the costs of suppressing the imminent technological revolution that can only be identified in a realist dynamic framework — I have found that total costs will be almost 100 times greater than current estimates by the year 2100. This puts a comprehensive mitigation program totally out of the question. What, then, is to be done? This essay provides the answer.climate mitigation, technological revolution, human dynamics, economic intervention, dynamic costs and benefits