Feelings of discontent and the promise of middle range theory for STS: Examples from technology dynamics

This article critically discusses the state of STS, expressing feelings of discontent regarding four aspects: policy relevance, conceptual language, too much focus on complexity, theoretical styles. Middle range theory is proposed as an alternative, promising avenue. Middle range theories focus on delimited topics, make explicit efforts to combine concepts, and search for abstracted patterns and explanatory mechanisms. The article presents achievements in that direction for technology dynamics, particularly with regard to the role of expectations, niche theory and radical innovation, and the multi-level perspective on sociotechnical transitions

Observing Dynamos in Cool Stars

The main aim of this paper is to introduce the most important observables that help us to investigate stellar dynamos and compare those to the modeling results. We give an overview of the available observational methods and data processing techniques that are suitable for such purposes, with touching upon examples of inadequate interpretations as well. Stellar observations are compared to the solar data in such a way, which ensures that the measurements are comparable in dimension, wavelength, and timescale. A brief outlook is given to the future plans and possibilities. A thorough review of this topic was published nearly a decade ago (Berdyugina 2005), now we focus on the experience that have been gathered since that time.Comment: 47 pages, accepted for publication in Space Science Review