Secondary school students' reasoning about science and personhood

Scientific advances, genetics, neuroscience and artificial intelligence, present many challenges to religious and popular notions of personhood. This paper reports the first large-scale study on students' beliefs about the interactions between science and widely held beliefs about personhood. The paper presents findings from a questionnaire survey (  = 530) administered to English secondary school students (age 15-16) in which their beliefs and concepts regarding personhood and the position of science were investigated. The survey was motivated in part by an interview study and a previous, smaller survey which revealed that many students struggle to reconcile their beliefs with what they suppose science to say and also that some have reluctantly dismissed the soul as a 'nice story' which is incompatible with scientific facts. The results from this larger-scale survey indicate that a majority of the students believe in some form of soul. Even so, and regardless of whether or not they identified themselves as religious, most students expressed a belief that human persons cannot be fully explained scientifically, a position that some students perceived as a partial rejection of what it means to hold a scientific worldview. [Abstract copyright: © The Author(s) 2021.

LANDSAT follow-on: A report by the applications survey groups. Volume 1: Executive summary

Attempts at operational usage of the LANDSAT imagery by non NASA users are studied with particular emphasis on profitable use of the imagery, as contrasted with investigations concerned with research and development of a technology. An evaluation is given of the functional capabilities of the LANDSAT follow-on and ground systems designs in terms of user requirements and desiderata for data measurements, products, and parameters. Applications survey groups (ASGs) were formed for mineral and petroleum exploration, inland water resources, land inventory, and agriculture. The members were drawn from all segments of the user community: Federal agencies, state and local governments or agencies (or from associations of such constituencies), industry and universities. They were selected so that in aggregate they would be able to adequately assess the state-of-the-art in their technical areas and represent this in the ASG deliberations

Entrenched compartmentalisation and students’ abilities and levels of interest in science

This article explores the notion that asking and exploring so-called ‘big questions’ could potentially increase the diversity and number of students who aspire to work in science and science-related careers. The focus is the premise that girls are more interested than boys in the relationships between science and other disciplines. The article also examines the view that the practice of entrenched compartmentalisation is squeezing students’ curiosity and channelling their thinking away from creative activities such as identifying good questions to ask and devising ways to address them. Based on their findings, the authors suggest that entrenched compartmentalisation could be a barrier in schools to students’ intellectual progression and to students’, particularly girls’, interest in science

Covid-19 as an opportunity to teach epistemic insight: findings from exploratory workshops on Covid-19 and science with students aged 15-17 in England

The contributions of science and scientists to combatting Covid-19 have been at the forefront of media attention throughout 2020 and early 2021, exposing the public to the processes of science in an unprecedented manner. The pandemic has highlighted the necessity of scientists working collaboratively with other disciplines in informing thinking about a complex, evolving real-world problem. This draws attention to recent efforts, both in the UK and internationally, towards curriculum reform integrating epistemic insight (knowledge about knowledge, including about what disciplines are and how they interact), with significant implications for the teaching of science in schools. We present findings from two exploratory workshops with 15-17-year-old students in England on the role of science during the pandemic. We found that the workshops provided space for students to begin to develop epistemic insight regarding how science informs decision-making in dialogue with other disciplines. We make recommendations proposing pedagogical approaches using live, complex, real-world problems to address issues around understandings of the nature of science, misinformation, trust and participation in science

On the functional limits for sums of a function of partial sums

We derive a functional central limit theorem (fclt) for normalised sums of a function of the partial sums of independent and identically distributed random variables. In particular, we show, using a technique presented in Huang and Zhang (Electron. Comm. Probab. 12 (2007), 51--56), that the result from Qi (Statist. Probab. Lett. 62 (2003), 93--100), for normalised products of partial sums, can be generalised in this fashion to a fclt

Further genetic heterogeneity for autosomal dominant human sutural cataracts

A unique sutural cataract was observed in a 4-generation German family to be transmitted as an isolated autosomal, dominant trait. Since mutations in the gamma-crystallin encoding CRYG genes have previously been demonstrated to be the most frequent reason for isolated congenital cataracts, all 4 active CRYG genes have been sequenced. A single base-pair change in the CRYGA gene has been shown, leading to a premature stop codon. This was not observed in 170 control individuals. However, it did not segregate with the disease phenotype. This is the first truncating mutation in an active CRYG gene without a dominant phenotype. As the CRYGA mutation did not explain the cataract, several other candidate loci (CCV, GJA8, CRYBB2, BFSP2, MIP, GJA8, central pouch-like, CRYBA1) were investigated by micro-satellite markers and linkage analysis, but they were excluded based on the combination of haplotype analysis and two-point linkage analysis. The phenotype in this family is due to a mutation in another sutural cataract gene yet to be identified