Criteria Against Ourselves

In the social sciences, we usually think of criteria as culture-free standards that stand apart from human subjectivity and value. The author argues in this article, however, that conflicts over which criteria to apply usually boil down to differences in values that are contingent on humanchoices.The demand for criteria reflects the desire to contain freedom, limit possibilities, and resist change. Ultimately, all standards of evaluation rest on a research community’s agreement to comply with their own humanly developed conventions. The author ends by considering the personal standards that he applies to works that fall under the new rubric of poetic social science

The Crres/Spacerad Heavy Ion Model of the Environment (CHIME) for Cosmic Ray and Solar Particle Effects on Electronic and Biological Systems in Space

We present a new time-dependent model of the interplanetary heavy ion environment and a new set of software based on this model to calculate energy deposit (LET) spectra and resulting single event upset rates. © 1994 IEE

The 'impossible vanity': uses and abuses of empathy in qualitative inquiry

Empathy is a notoriously slippery term. While within current discourses of qualitative research, empathy is widely held to be `a good thing' (as the appropriate ethical relation between the researcher and participant) there may perhaps be more suspicion about its use as an analytical method in research practices, and in the use of rhetorical strategies in research narratives whose aim is to evoke empathy in the reader, both of which may be regarded as bordering on manipulation and thus arguably ethically ambiguous. This article sets out to examine empathy as both a tool and goal of qualitative research, surfacing and questioning some of the tacitly held assumptions that underpin the appeal to empathy and exploring these in the context of my research into institutional identities