You Can't Go Home Again - or Can you? 'Replication' Indeterminacy and 'Location' Incommensurability in Three Biological Re-Surveys

Reproducing empirical results and repeating experimental processes is fundamental to science, but is of grave concern to scientists. Revisiting the same location is necessary for tracking biological processes, yet I argue that ‘location’ and ‘replication’ contain a basic ambiguity. The analysis of the practical meanings of ‘replication’ and ‘location’ will strip of incommensurability from its common conflation with empirical equivalence, underdetermination and indeterminacy of reference. In particular, I argue that three biodiversity re-surveys, conducted by the research institutions of Harvard, Berkeley, and Hamaarag, all reveal incommensurability without indeterminacy in the smallest spatial scale, and indeterminacy without incommensurability in higher scales

You Can't Go Home Again - or Can you? 'Replication' Indeterminacy and 'Location' Incommensurability in Three Biological Re-Surveys

Reproducing empirical results and repeating experimental processes is fundamental to science, but is of grave concern to scientists. Revisiting the same location is necessary for tracking biological processes, yet I argue that ‘location’ and ‘replication’ contain a basic ambiguity. The analysis of the practical meanings of ‘replication’ and ‘location’ will strip of incommensurability from its common conflation with empirical equivalence, underdetermination and indeterminacy of reference. In particular, I argue that three biodiversity re-surveys, conducted by the research institutions of Harvard, Berkeley, and Hamaarag, all reveal incommensurability without indeterminacy in the smallest spatial scale, and indeterminacy without incommensurability in higher scales

Communal Philosophy? A Possible Framework for Science-Society Interaction

Interaction with local communities is now labeled academia's "third mission," yet science-society rifts are still common, running deeper in marginalized communities. A first step towards bridging the gap is clarification. I review core concepts (e.g., 'outreach,' 'accessibility,' 'engagement'), sort them into two model frameworks – "Ivory Tower" and "Mutualism" – and describe their distinct structures. Both are helpful in relevant context yet their default application practically reinforces hierarchical boundaries, increases epistemic injustice, hampers science's epistemic values, and couples 'diversity' with ethnic divergence. Therefore, another model is suggested: 'Communal Academia.' I unfold how this model practically foregrounds activism, heterogeneity, and pluralistic interaction and advocate its evaluation based on heterogeneity rather than diversity measures. Imaginary and real-life examples demonstrate the practice-based advantages of this model, and the philosophical relevance of a communal approach is reflected upon

Performance of two head injury decision rules evaluated on an external cohort of 18,913 children

The Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) decision rule demonstrates high sensitivity for identifying children at low risk for clinically important traumatic brain injury (ciTBI). As with the PECARN rule, the Israeli Decision Algorithm for Identifying TBI in Children (IDITBIC) recommends proceeding directly to computed tomography (CT) in children with Glasgow Coma Score (GCS) lower than 15. The aim was to assess the diagnostic accuracy of two clinical rules that assign children with GCS lower than 15 at presentation directly to CT

Life, time, and the organism:Temporal registers in the construction of life forms

In this paper, we articulate how time and temporalities are involved in the making of living things. For these purposes, we draw on an instructive episode concerning Norfolk Horn sheep. We attend to historical debates over the nature of the breed, whether it is extinct or not, and whether presently living exemplars are faithful copies of those that came before. We argue that there are features to these debates that are important to understanding contemporary configurations of life, time and the organism, especially as these are articulated within the field of synthetic biology. In particular, we highlight how organisms are configured within different material and semiotic assemblages that are always structured temporally. While we identify three distinct structures, namely the historical, phyletic and molecular registers, we do not regard the list as exhaustive. We also highlight how these structures are related to the care and value invested in the organisms at issue. Finally, because we are interested ultimately in ways of producing time, our subject matter requires us to think about historiographical practice reflexively. This draws us into dialogue with other scholars interested in time, not just historians, but also philosophers and sociologists, and into conversations with them about time as always multiple and never an inert background

Dissecting and reconstructing time and space for replicable biological research

No abstract available

“To Infinity and Beyond!”: Inner Tensions in Global Knowledge Infrastructures Lead to Local and Pro-active ‘Location’ Information

We follow two biodiversity knowledge infrastructures that hold conceptual and practical inner tensions, and we argue that some of these diffi culties emerge from overlooking local information and different understandings of the term location. The ambiguity emerges from two basic concepts of space – exogenous and interactionist – that are both necessary yet readily suggest inconsistent practices – global standardization and local fl exibility – to organize location records. Researchers in both infrastructures fi rst standardized, digitized and globalized their records, then discovered inner tensions, and fi nally alternated between globally interoperable and locally fl exible records. Our story suggests a broader lesson: since both types of ‘location’ information are necessary; and since vast resources were already invested in globalizing knowledge infrastructures; then investing in local knowledge infrastructures and in alternating between both types of memory practices seems the most rational option, and a good way to resist epistemic injustice affl icting local knowledge in peripheral localities.Keywords: biodiversity, database, epistemic-injustic