After the Bolshevik Revolution, Russia's new pioneers perceived the commensurate criticalness of instructing science to the masses so as to spread edification and fortify the essential fundamentals of Marxism. Then again, it was not until the initial Five Year Plan and the social transformation of 1928-32 that a radical break from Russia's tsarist past was checked. Here, James T. Andrews presents a far reaching history of the early Bolshevik promotion of science in Russia and the previous Soviet Union. Andrews Initially concentrates on the development of exploratory social orders in late Imperial Russia. Prerevolutionary science popularizers and affiliations kept on functioning until 1928, their attempt communicating to the "prominent Imagination" and resounding with the investments of normal Russians. Tragically, after Stalin seized force, researchers were lessened to serving industry and the propagandistic finishes of Stalinism. Andrews has mined materials from long ago untouched Russian documents, daily papers, logical diaries of the time, and surveys to demonstrate how Soviet natives formed the projects of science popularizers and even the motivation of communists. Underscoring the need to fare thee well when dissecting recorded and political phenomena. Andrews reasons that nothing was straightforward or supreme in Soviet Russia.
Wednesday 1 October 2014
Friday 1 March 2013
Science
Science is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes
knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the
universe. In an older and closely related meaning, "science" refers
to the body of reliable knowledge itself, of the type that can be logically and
rationally explained. Since classical antiquity science as a type of knowledge
was closely linked to philosophy.
In the early modern era the words
"science" and "philosophy" were sometimes used
interchangeably in the English language.[citation needed] By the 17th century,
natural philosophy was considered a separate branch of philosophy. However,
"science" continued to be used in a broad sense denoting reliable
knowledge about a topic, in the same way it is still used in modern terms such
as library science or political science.
Monday 16 July 2012
Science funding: Science for the masses
The US National Science Foundation's insistence that every research project addresses 'broader impacts' leaves many researchers baffled. Corie Lok takes a looks at the system.
Research-funding agencies are forever trying to balance two opposing forces: scientists' desire to be left alone to do their research, and society's demand to see a return on its investment.
The European Commission, for example, has tried to strike that balance over the past decade by considering social effects when reviewing proposals under its various Framework programmes for research. And the Higher Education Funding Council for England announced last year that, starting in 2013, research will be assessed partly on its demonstrable benefits to the economy, society or culture.
But no agency has gone as far as the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which will not even consider a proposal unless it explicitly includes activities to demonstrate the project's 'broader impacts' on science or society at large. "The criterion was established to get scientists out of their ivory towers and connect them to society," explains Arden Bement, director of the NSF in Arlington, Virginia.
Unfortunately, good intentions are not enough to guarantee success, says Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a physicist at the University of Texas in Dallas who is active in popular science writing and other forms of outreach.
Leslie-Pelecky remembers a pilot project she carried out in 2001, when she was at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. In many ways, it was typical of the kinds of things that NSF-funded researchers do to fulfil their broader-impacts requirement. She took three female graduate students on weekly visits to local classrooms, where they spent 45-minutes leading nine- and ten-year-old children in practical activities designed to teach them about electricity and circuits. The visitors also talked about their lab work and careers. In addition, Leslie-Pelecky did something less typical of broader-impacts efforts: she brought along education researchers to study the effect of this interaction on the children's perception of scientists.
Those assessments were startling, she says. After three months, most of the students said that they still weren't sure who these young 'teachers' were – except that they couldn't possibly be scientists. In their minds, scientists were unfriendly, grey-haired old men in white lab coats1.
"And that's what I worry about with broader impacts," says Leslie-Pelecky. "There are a lot of people putting time and effort into [these sorts of activities] and they have no idea if they're making any difference or not."
Many NSF-funded researchers find the foundation's definition of broader impacts to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, broad, and frustratingly vague. Among the examples of activities listed in the foundation's proposal guide are: developing educational materials for elementary, high-school and undergraduate students; involving these students in the research where appropriate; creating mentoring programmes; maintaining and operating shared research infrastructure; presenting research results to non-scientific audiences such as policy-makers; establishing international, industrial or government collaborations; developing exhibits in partnership with museums; forming start-up companies; and giving presentations to the public.
Because it lacks conceptual clarity, the broader-impacts requirement often leaves researchers unsure about what to include in their proposals, and leads to inconsistencies in how reviewers evaluate applications. "Broader impacts were designed to be open, but openness confuses a lot of people," says Luis Echegoyen, the division director for NSF chemistry.
To make matters worse, the NSF has made little attempt to systematically track how its broader-impacts requirements are being met, or how much grant money is being spent in the process. Nor does it have a system in place to evaluate the effectiveness of the various projects.
These problems with the broader-impacts requirement have been confirmed over the past decade in studies from the National Academy of Public Administration and elsewhere. In March, the NSF's oversight body, the National Science Board, launched a task force to examine how broader impacts can be improved. Chaired by Alan Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, the task force is not expected to make its recommendations until 2011. In the meantime, a small number of academic institutions are already exploring ways to make broader-impacts efforts work better.
After all, says Ralph Nuzzo, a chemist and materials scientist at the University of Illinois in Urbana–Champaign, most US scientists have come to accept — even if grudgingly — that it is probably a good idea to demonstrate the wider implications of their work. "People want to do the right thing," says Nuzzo. "It's just hard to know what that is."
Research-funding agencies are forever trying to balance two opposing forces: scientists' desire to be left alone to do their research, and society's demand to see a return on its investment.
The European Commission, for example, has tried to strike that balance over the past decade by considering social effects when reviewing proposals under its various Framework programmes for research. And the Higher Education Funding Council for England announced last year that, starting in 2013, research will be assessed partly on its demonstrable benefits to the economy, society or culture.
But no agency has gone as far as the US National Science Foundation (NSF), which will not even consider a proposal unless it explicitly includes activities to demonstrate the project's 'broader impacts' on science or society at large. "The criterion was established to get scientists out of their ivory towers and connect them to society," explains Arden Bement, director of the NSF in Arlington, Virginia.
Unfortunately, good intentions are not enough to guarantee success, says Diandra Leslie-Pelecky, a physicist at the University of Texas in Dallas who is active in popular science writing and other forms of outreach.
Leslie-Pelecky remembers a pilot project she carried out in 2001, when she was at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. In many ways, it was typical of the kinds of things that NSF-funded researchers do to fulfil their broader-impacts requirement. She took three female graduate students on weekly visits to local classrooms, where they spent 45-minutes leading nine- and ten-year-old children in practical activities designed to teach them about electricity and circuits. The visitors also talked about their lab work and careers. In addition, Leslie-Pelecky did something less typical of broader-impacts efforts: she brought along education researchers to study the effect of this interaction on the children's perception of scientists.
Those assessments were startling, she says. After three months, most of the students said that they still weren't sure who these young 'teachers' were – except that they couldn't possibly be scientists. In their minds, scientists were unfriendly, grey-haired old men in white lab coats1.
"And that's what I worry about with broader impacts," says Leslie-Pelecky. "There are a lot of people putting time and effort into [these sorts of activities] and they have no idea if they're making any difference or not."
Many NSF-funded researchers find the foundation's definition of broader impacts to be, perhaps unsurprisingly, broad, and frustratingly vague. Among the examples of activities listed in the foundation's proposal guide are: developing educational materials for elementary, high-school and undergraduate students; involving these students in the research where appropriate; creating mentoring programmes; maintaining and operating shared research infrastructure; presenting research results to non-scientific audiences such as policy-makers; establishing international, industrial or government collaborations; developing exhibits in partnership with museums; forming start-up companies; and giving presentations to the public.
Because it lacks conceptual clarity, the broader-impacts requirement often leaves researchers unsure about what to include in their proposals, and leads to inconsistencies in how reviewers evaluate applications. "Broader impacts were designed to be open, but openness confuses a lot of people," says Luis Echegoyen, the division director for NSF chemistry.
To make matters worse, the NSF has made little attempt to systematically track how its broader-impacts requirements are being met, or how much grant money is being spent in the process. Nor does it have a system in place to evaluate the effectiveness of the various projects.
These problems with the broader-impacts requirement have been confirmed over the past decade in studies from the National Academy of Public Administration and elsewhere. In March, the NSF's oversight body, the National Science Board, launched a task force to examine how broader impacts can be improved. Chaired by Alan Leshner, chief executive of the American Association for the Advancement of Science in Washington DC, the task force is not expected to make its recommendations until 2011. In the meantime, a small number of academic institutions are already exploring ways to make broader-impacts efforts work better.
After all, says Ralph Nuzzo, a chemist and materials scientist at the University of Illinois in Urbana–Champaign, most US scientists have come to accept — even if grudgingly — that it is probably a good idea to demonstrate the wider implications of their work. "People want to do the right thing," says Nuzzo. "It's just hard to know what that is."
Sunday 18 September 2011
Science (from Latin: scientia meaning "knowledge") is a systematic enterprise that builds and organizes knowledge in the form of testable explanations and predictions about the universe. An older and closely related meaning still in use today is that of Aristotle, for whom scientific knowledge was a body of reliable knowledge that can be logically and rationally explained (see "History and etymology" section below).
Since classical antiquity science as a type of knowledge was closely linked to philosophy. In the early modern era the two words, "science" and "philosophy", were sometimes used interchangeably in the English language. By the 17th century, "natural philosophy" (which is today called "natural science") had begun to be considered separately from "philosophy" in general. However, "science" continued to be used in a broad sense denoting reliable knowledge about a topic, in the same way it is still used in modern terms such as library science or political science.
In modern use, science is "often treated as synonymous with ‘natural and physical science’, and thus restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws, sometimes with implied exclusion of pure mathematics. This is now the dominant sense in ordinary use." This narrower sense of "science" developed as a part of science became a distinct enterprise of defining "laws of nature", based on early examples such as Kepler's laws, Galileo's laws, and Newton's laws of motion. In this period it became more common to refer to natural philosophy as "natural science". Over the course of the 19th century, the word "science" became increasingly associated with the disciplined study of the natural world including physics, chemistry, geology and biology. This sometimes left the study of human thought and society in a linguistic limbo, which was resolved by classifying these areas of academic study as social science. Similarly, several other major areas of disciplined study and knowledge exist today under the general rubric of "science", such as formal science and applied science.
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