Simulating What?

Any attempt to simulate science has first to say what science is. This involves asking three questions: 1) The Scope Question: What bit of science is the target? It is immensely confusing (as the history of these debates shows), if one simulates some little aspect of science, as in the case of BACON, and then claims that one has built a machine that can 'do science'. 2) The Micro-World Question: Is the criterion of success the reproduction of human science – with all the same findings turning up – or the simulation of something that is believed to be a scientific process with results that pertain only to the world of the simulation which do not correspond to the outcome of human science as we know it? If the latter it will be important to be sure that one is not merely developing a 'micro-world' – a world so tidied up for the purposes of simulation that it does not bear on human science. 3) The Chess Question: Even if the idea to reach the same results as has been reached by human science, does it have to be by 'the same' means in order to count as a simulation of human science? I call it the 'chess question' because Deep Blue does not play in the same way as human grand masters but is still better at winning.Science, Language, Demarcation, Micro-World, BACON, Chess

Interactional Imogen: language, practice and the body

Here I try to improve on the available answers to certain long-debated questions and set out some consequences for the answers. Are there limits to the extent to which we can understand the conceptual worlds of other human communities and of non-human creatures? How does this question relate to our ability to engage in other cultures’ practices and languages? What is meant by ‘the body’ and what is meant by ‘the brain’ and how do different meanings bear on the questions? The central answer developed here is that it is possible, given the right circumstances, for a competent human from any human group to understand the culture of any other human group without engaging in their practices though there are barriers when it comes to communication across species. This answer has important social and political consequences and consequences for the debate about artificial intelligence

An Imitation Game concerning gravitational wave physics

The 'Imitation Game' is a Turing Test played with a human participant instead of a computer. Here the author, a sociologist, who has been immersed in the field of gravitational wave physics since 1972, tried to pass an Imitation Game as a gravitational wave physicist. He already passed such a test in mid-2000s but this test was more elaborate and compared his performance with that of other kinds of physicists and with other sociologists as well as gravitational wave physicists. The test was based on 8 technical questions about gravitational wave physics asked by Professor Sathyprakash of Cardiff University. Collins marks compared well with that of the other gravitational wave physicists and were markedly better than that of other classes of respondent. Collins also marked the test and it can be seen that the way he marked was also much closer to the gravitational wave physicists than other categories. Though Collins's expertise can be shown to have degraded a little in the last ten years it seems not to have degraded a lot. This is important for his most recent book on the detection of gravitational waves from a black hole binary, this being Chapter 14 of this book, which is due to by published my MIT Press in February 2017.Comment: 11 pages, 1 tabl

Preserving a Space for Science in an Age of Democracy

How should scientific advice be incorporated into the political decision-making process? Harry Collins explores this question in his review of The Paradox of Scientific Authority

You cannot be serious! Public understanding of technology with special reference to “Hawk-Eye”

Public understanding of science, though it approaches the specialist knowledge of experts only in rare circumstances, can be enhanced more broadly in respect of the processes of science and technology. The public understanding of measurement errors and confidence intervals could be enhanced if “sports decision aids,” such as the Hawk-Eye system, were to present their results in a different way. There is a danger that Hawk-Eye as used could inadvertently cause naïve viewers to overestimate the ability of technological devices to resolve disagreement among humans because measurement errors are not made salient. For example, virtual reconstructions can easily be taken to show “exactly what really happened.” Suggestions are made for how confidence levels might be measured and represented and “health warnings” attached to reconstructions. A general principle for the use of sports decision aids is put forward. A set of open questions about Hawk-Eye is presented which, if answered, could help inform discussions of its use and accuracy

How Might We Overcome ‘Western’ Resistance to Eating Insects?

Entomophagy, the consumption of insects as a food source, occurs at a global scale with over 2 billion people seeing it as traditional. This practice does not extend into mainstream Western culture where its introduction is often met by a range of barriers, leaving entomophagy often seen as a taboo. The ‘disgust response’ of food neophobia and a lack of social and cultural contexts that reduce adoption may be overcome by strategic application of tools arising from innovation diffusion theory: relative advantage; compatibility; low complexity; trialability and observability. This chapter accessibly reviews known barriers to uptake and outlines the potential application of these concepts in promoting the wider acceptance of entomophagy

Enhancing Reflective Teaching Practices: Implications for Faculty Development Programs

Reflecting on one’s teaching practice is often an implicit goal for faculty development programs. Yet very little has been documented how programs for diverse groups of university teachers actually engage faculty in such reflection. This paper examines how theoretical constructs of reflective practice were applied in the context of an 8-month UBC Faculty Certificate Program on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (FCP). The Teaching Perspectives Inventory (TPI) was particularly useful for providing faculty cohort members with a means of looking more deeply at the underlying values and assumptions that constituted their philosophical orientations to teaching. Furthermore, a change in faculty members’ TPI scores indicate that participants reflected more comprehensively on their teaching at the end of the program, than they did at the beginning of the program. Barriers to facilitating reflection included inadequate time allocation, unclear expectations and goals for reflection activities, and varying cultural norms for reflective teaching practices within academe.Réfl échir sur sa propre pratique d’enseignement est souvent un objectif implicite des programmes de développement du corps professoral. Il existe cependant à ce jour très peu de recherches documentées sur la manière dont les programmes établis pour divers groupes d’enseignants universitaires engagent véritablement le corps professoral dans une telle réfl exion. Ce document examine la manière dont les concepts théoriques de la pratique réfl ective ont été appliqués dans le contexte d’un UBC Faculty Certifi cate Program on Teaching and Learning in Higher Education (FCP - Programme de certifi cat du corps professoral de l’UBC sur l’enseignement et l’apprentissage dans l’enseignement supérieur) de huit mois. L’Inventaire des perspectives de l’enseignement (TPI) a été particulièrement utile pour fournir aux membres de la cohorte du corps professoral les moyens d’étudier plus en profondeur les valeurs et hypothèses sous-jacentes qui ont constitué leurs orientations philosophiques sur l’enseignement. De plus, la modifi cation des scores TPI des membres du corps professoral indique que les participants ont réfl échi de manière plus détaillée sur leur enseignement à la fi n du programme qu’au début du programme. Les barrières qui empêchaient la facilitation de la réfl exion comprenaient une attribution de temps inadéquate, des attentes et objets peu clairs pour les activités de réfl exion ainsi que des normes culturelles variables pour les pratiques d’enseignement réfl ectif au sein du monde universitaire