The most recent issue, Volume 1, Number 3, of  The International Journal of Science in Society includes:

• Bensalem and the Failure of Atlantis: Francis Bacon’s Moral Conditions for Utopia by Steven Matthews.
• Usability Engineering and Technology Integration in Libraries by Anthony Chow and Tim Bucknall.
• The Role of Virtues in the Practice of Clinical Medicine by James Marcum.
• The Prodigal Son: Myth and Science in Modernity by Luke Doggett.
• Internalising Survival Values into Science: Sustainability Implementation Science by Douglas Goudie.

The popular view is that technology is the handmaiden of science — less pure, more commercial. But in “The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves,” W. Brian Arthur, an economist, reframes the relationship between science and technology as part of an effort to come up with a comprehensive theory of innovation. In Dr. Arthur’s view, the relationship between science and technology is more symbiotic than is generally conceded. Science and technology move forward together in a kind of co-evolution. And science does not lead.

…

Dr. Arthur tries to explain the emergence of radical new technologies from jet engines to GPS. He correctly points out that the jet engine did not arise from the steady accretion of small improvements in piston engines nor did the modern computer burst forth as the next generation of mechanical calculator.

He points to the human propensity to solve problems as the force that leads to new generations of technology through recombination of existing technologies. Technology is “alive” in the sense that a coral reef is alive. The reef is an ecological system with many species, and technology in the broadest sense is an elaborate and constantly changing structure made up of thousands of discrete technologies, themselves composed of separate technologies.

For the complete review…

The third issue of  Volume 1 of The International Journal of Science in Society has now been published.

Volume 1, Number 3 includes:

• Recombinant Technology Improves Lives by Icy D’Silva and J. Christopher Hall.
• Class and Society in the Digital Age: The New Suzerains by Michael J. Lynch and Douglas McConatha.
• Computational Science: Not Just for Researchers Anymore by Jill Thomley and Mary Searcy.
• The Petri-dish of Poetry: Growing a Single Culture by Noel Williams and Felicity Skelton.
• Beginnings of Science Writing in America: The Declaration of Independence as a Report of Experimental Research by Joyce P. Johnston.

“I always say that electricity is a fantastic invention,” the British economist Michael Lipton once told Michael Specter, whose bristling new book, “Denialism,” explores the dangerous ways in which scientific progress can be misunderstood. “But if the first two products had been the electric chair and the cattle prod,” Mr. Lipton continued, “I doubt that most consumers would have seen the point.”

Here is what they would have done instead, if Mr. Specter, a staff writer for The New Yorker and former foreign correspondent for The New York Times, correctly captures the motifs that shape the stubbornly anti-scientific thinking for which his book is named: they would have denounced electricity as a force for evil, blamed its prevalence on venal utility companies, universalized the relatively rare horrific experiences of people who have been injured by electrical currents and called for a ban on electricity use.

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This month’s issue of WIRED features a great story by Amy Wallace: “An Epidemic of Fear: How Panicked Parents Skipping Shots Endangers Us All.” It’s an overview of the anti-vaccination movement in the United States, a topic that should be very familiar to anyone who reads Discover’s baddest astronomer. At ScienceBlogs, Orac and Abel Pharmboy gives big thumbs-up to the article.

The anti-vaccination movement is a little weird — they claim that vaccines, which are universally credited with wiping out smallpox and polio and other bad things, are responsible for causing autism and diabetes and other also-bad things, all just to make a buck for pharmaceutical companies. The underlying motivation seems to be a combination of the conviction that things must happen for a reason — if a child develops autism, there must be an enemy to blame — and a general distrust of science and technology. Certainly the pro-science point of view is fairly unequivocal; like any medicine, vaccines should be used properly, but they have done great good for the world and there are very real dangers of increased risk for epidemics if enough children stop receiving them. Good for WIRED for taking on the issue and publishing an uncompromisingly pro-science piece on it.

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Among the defining attributes of now are ever tinier gadgets, ever shorter attention spans, and the privileging of marketplace values above all. Life is manically parceled into financial quarters, three-minute YouTube videos, 140-character tweets. In my pocket is a phone/computer/camera/video recorder/TV/stereo system half the size of a pack of Marlboros. And what about pursuing knowledge purely for its own sake, without any real thought of, um, monetizing it? Cute.

And so in our hyper-capitalist flibbertigibbet day and age, the new Large Hadron Collider, buried about 330 feet beneath the Swiss-French border, near Geneva, is a bizarre outlier.

The L.H.C., which operates under the auspices of the European Organization for Nuclear Research, known by its French acronym, cern, is an almost unimaginably long-term project. It was conceived a quarter-century ago, was given the green light in 1994, and has been under construction for the last 13 years, the product of tens of millions of man-hours. It’s also gargantuan: a circular tunnel 17 miles around, punctuated by shopping-mall-size subterranean caverns and fitted out with more than $9 billion worth of steel and pipe and cable more reminiscent of Jules Verne than Steve Jobs.

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Circling my way not long ago through the Vasily Kandinsky show now on display in the suitably spiral setting of the Guggenheim Museum, I came to one of the Russian master’s most illustrious, if misleadingly named, paintings: “Several Circles.”

Those “several” circles, I saw, were more like three dozen, and every one of them seemed to be rising from the canvas, buoyed by the shrewdly exuberant juxtapositioning of their different colors, sizes and apparent translucencies. I learned that, at around the time Kandinsky painted the work, in 1926, he had begun collecting scientific encyclopedias and journals; and as I stared at the canvas, a big, stupid smile plastered on my face, I thought of yeast cells budding, or a haloed blue sun and its candied satellite crew, or life itself escaping the careless primordial stew.

To Read More…

From The Sunday Times

Scientists have grown meat in the laboratory for the first time. Experts in Holland used cells from a live pig to replicate growth in a petri dish.

The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.

They initially extracted cells from the muscle of a live pig. Called myoblasts, these cells are programmed to grow into muscle and repair damage in animals.

To Read More…

Speaking in Morocco on 3 November, Clinton said the new envoys will help “to fulfill President Obama’s mandate to foster scientific and technological collaboration” and to “develop the capacity to meet economic, social, and ecological challenges.” She announced the selection of Egyptian-born Ahmed H. Zewail, a chemistry Nobelist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena; Algerian-born Elias Zerhouni, a radiologist who stepped down last fall as director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH); and biochemist Bruce Alberts, former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and current editor-in-chief of Science. Clinton said that the State Department is also bolstering its scientific and environmental expertise at embassies around the world.

The second issue of Volume 1 of The International Journal of Science in Society has now been published.

Volume 1, Number 2 contains:

• Flexibility, Ethics and Self in Drug Research: One Cowgirl’s Tale by Carol Ann de Launey.
• Enabling Ageing in Place through Visitor Recognition and Monitoring Technology by Angus Dickey, Jacob Slonim and Michael McAllister.
• Myths of Science: How Children know about Science in Inquiry Projects by Winnie Wing-mui So and Mei Zhong.
• The Incommensurability of Nature and Beauty of Thought: Goethe’s Scientific Method by Renata Schellenberg.
• Antimicrobial Resistance Testing of “Staphylococcus” Isolates with Spiral Gradient Endpoint Technology by Olasunmbo Ajayi, Leonard Williams, Jacob Oluwoye and Jacqueline U. Johnson.
• Science in Technology and the Progression of Ideas through Innovation by Karel Grezl, John Lucas, Nick Ebrill and John Rodger.
• Quantitative Reasoning Applied to Modern Advertising by Joseph Ganem.
• Preschool Children’s Informal Knowledge of Renewable Energy (RE) and Energy Efficiency (EE): Implication to Creating a Curriculum that Integrate Both RE And EE in the Preschool by Hashimah Mohd. Yunus, Munirah Ghazali and Nor Hashimah Hashim.
• One Mathematical Perspective of Economics, Ecology and Society: Some Natural Necessities in Elementary Interdisciplinary Mathematical Education by Martin E. Walter.
• The Learning Issues in Engineering Statics by Habibah Haron, Awaluddin Mohd Shaharoun and Hafizah Harun.
• The Ocean Tracking Network: Explorations in Global Scientific Change by Richard Apostle.
• Oaths for Scientists and Other Scholars: The Case for Developing a Common ‘Scholar’s Oath’ by Thomas Clanton.
• Science and Scientists in the U.S. Environmental Policy Process by Brent S. Steel, Denise Lach and Rebecca Warner.
• Lessons from Evolution of ?-Amylase Inhibitor Gene in Common Bean (Phaseolus Vulgaris) for the Public Concerns about Genetic Engineering of Crop Plants by David W.M. Leung and Hossein Alizadeh.
• The Cultivation of Scientific Ideas in a Student-centered Environment by Irena Hysi and Orion Ciftja.
• A Coach-based Skill Assessment of Instructors in ‘Learning at the Workplace’ Distance Education Program by Wachara Eamratsameekool.