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Want to get your publications underway now?
We are now accepting submissions for the next volume of The International Journal of Science in Society. The next submission deadline is Monday 16 August 2010.
Refereeing of submitted papers will commence shortly so start the submission process early by submitting your proposal.
Paper submission guidelines are available online.
Congratulations to David Wood and Laura Stocker the winners of the International Award for Excellence in the area of science in society with their paper Coastal Adaptation to Climate Change: Towards Reflexive Governance.
Abstract: We describe an action-research methodology designed to generate a model for reflexive coastal zone governance in Australia that is collaborative, capable of responding to new information, capable of higher order learning, adaptive, anticipatory, and able to innovate trials. In Australia, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) has been responsible for interpreting and generating science about climate change impacts and the coastal zone, with a view to enabling coastal adaptation. However, while some progress has been made, our policy-makers, planners and stakeholders have been slow to develop and implement effective strategies for the coastal zone. In order to investigate the implementation gaps between science, policy and practice, the CSIRO commissioned an Australia-wide project, an aspect of which we frame in this paper. First, we examine the broad biophysical and socio-cultural context for coastal governance in Australia, then proceed to frame a novel methodology designed to enhance the knowledge-policy dialogue about coastal adaptation to climate change in Australia’s Southwest. Our action-research methodology derives from the Dutch transition management approach. It features: deliberative workshops using Google Earth as a stakeholder engagement platform; visualisation exercises using Google Earth; the development of scenarios for trials in coastal governance; and the prioritisation of these by the stakeholder groups.
Congratulations to all of the Award finalists:
From Anne Sasso, Science
Almost all important breakthroughs encounter resistance from other scientists, who have a tendency — justifiable for the most part — to defend the status quo. Some insights are resisted with such intensity that it may take decades before they’re widely accepted among scientists. For some, such as HIV, heliocentrism, and evolution, pockets of resistance remain decades or centuries after the war is won.
It follows that if you’re determined to take on audacious scientific projects, you need to be ready for the fallout. Scientists committed to incremental advances may work for decades without attracting any enmity. But as soon as your data show that you might be on to something game-changing, be prepared for a new level — and type — of challenge. Are you ready to have the top scientists in your field criticizing your work in journals and dissing you at meetings? Because history shows that the deeper your idea cuts into the heart of a field, the more your peers are likely to challenge you. Human nature being what it is, what ought to be reasoned discussion may turn personal, even nasty.
From Colin Macilwain, Nature News
Spending on science is one of the best ways to generate jobs and economic growth, say research advocates. But as Colin Macilwain reports, the evidence behind such claims is patchy.
President Barack Obama says it. Francis Collins, director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), says it. University and research leaders elsewhere are saying it, too. The number one current rationale for extra research investment is that it will generate badly needed economic growth.
“Science is more essential for our prosperity, our health, our environment and our quality of life than it has ever been before,” said Obama, addressing the National Academy of Sciences in Washington DC last year. Getting down to the details, Collins has recently cited a report by Families USA, a Washington DC-based health-advocacy group, which found that every US$1 spent by the NIH typically generates $2.21 in additional economic output within 12 months.
“Biomedical research has generally been looked at for its health benefits, but the case for it generating economic growth is pretty compelling,” says Collins. In Britain, senior scientists have called on the government to support science as a means of helping the economy out of recession. Heeding such arguments, governments in Germany, Sweden, Canada and Australia, as well as the United States, have increased research spending as part of stimulus packages designed to aid their struggling economies.
From Stefany Anne Golberg, The Smart Set
The final episode of The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey begins not in the sea but in the sky. Sideways, we soar though the clouds, glimpsing a solitary island below, far into the Pacific. As always, we hold our breath in anticipation. A couple of years before “Clipperton: The Island Time Forgot” first aired, Jacques Cousteau gave his son and trusty costar Philippe a PBY seaplane named Flying Calypso, after Cousteau’s famous boat, Calypso. It was a fatherly gesture to a son who lived in his father’s shadow. The plane was meant to distinguish Philippe, whose true love was flight.
Eventually, we land. A menacing army of poisonous crabs mans the shoreline. The camera pans to a couple of rusted shipwrecks and some abandoned shacks, which are now perches for some booby birds. “Human beings have come and gone, leaving mute evidence of their troubled presence,” the narrator intones. This is what the remote island has to offer: some intimidating crabs, a flock of booby birds, the wreckage of failed attempts at civilization. In the final episode of The Jacques Cousteau Odyssey, the story of man and the story of nature will intertwine; melancholy, futile, but beautiful all the same.
Then, music! That triumphant theme song that trumpets, WE ARE ALL GOING ON AN ADVENTURE AND IT’S GOING TO RULE! Dah dah dah dah daaah! That music represents everything the whole world loves about Jacques Cousteau. It’s what we will blast on June 10, when we all grab a bottle of champagne and toast Jacques Cousteau on what would have been his 100th birthday.
The basic argument of intelligent design was famously set forth in the watchmaker analogy of William Paley in 1802: The complexity and functionality of a watch imply a watchmaker; analogously, the complexity and functionality of living things also imply a designer, albeit one vastly more potent than a mere watchmaker. This argument rests on a simple analogy between the design of human artifacts and the design of natural forms. For the analogy to work, we must first accept that we design our inventions with purpose and foresight. On this point, most evolutionists and creationists agree. What distinguishes these two camps is that, when accounting for the origin of living things, proponents of intelligent design summon a divine creator, whereas evolutionists credit natural selection. Thus, evolutionists share with creationists the same understanding of design; they differ only in how they invoke it.
From John Tierny, The New York Times
The House of Representatives has passed what I like to think of as Larry’s Law. The official title of this legislation is “Fulfilling the potential of women in academic science and engineering,” but nothing did more to empower its advocates than the controversy over a speech by when he was president of .
This proposed law, if passed by the Senate, would require the White House science adviser to oversee regular “workshops to enhance gender equity.” At the workshops, to be attended by researchers who receive federal money and by the heads of science and engineering departments at universities, participants would be given before-and-after “attitudinal surveys” and would take part in “interactive discussions or other activities that increase the awareness of the existence of gender bias.”
I’m all in favor of women fulfilling their potential in science, but I feel compelled, at the risk of being shipped off to one of these workshops, to ask a couple of questions:
From The Guardian
It will be a great day in the history of science if we sometime discover a damp shadow elsewhere in the universe where a fungus has sprouted. The mere fossil trace of life in its simplest form would be the crowning achievement of generations of brilliant and diligent labour. And here we are, a gaudy efflorescence of consciousness, staggeringly improbable in light of everything we know about the reality that contains us. There are physicists and philosophers who would correct me. They would say, if there are an infinite number of universes, as in theory there could be, then creatures like us would be very likely to emerge at some time in one of them. But to say this is only to state the fact of our improbability in other terms.
From John Horgan, Scientific American
Scientists are on the verge of building an artificial brain! How do I know? Terry Sejnowski of the Salk Institute said so right here on ScientificAmerican.com. He wrote that the goal of reverse-engineering the brain—which the National Academy of Engineering recently posed as one of its “grand challenges”—is “becoming increasingly plausible.” Scientists are learning more and more about the brain, and computers are becoming more and more powerful. So naturally computers will soon be able to mimic the brain’s workings. So says Sejnowski.
Sejnowski is a very smart guy, whom I’ve interviewed several times over the years about the mysteries of the brain. But I respectfully—hell, disrespectfully, Terry can take it—disagree with his prediction that artificial brains are imminent. Sejnowski’s own article shows how implausible his prediction is. He describes two projects—both software programs running on powerful supercomputers—that represent the state of the art in brain simulation. On the one hand, you have the “cat brain” constructed by IBM researcher Dharmendra Modha; his simulation contains about as many neurons as a cat’s brain does organized into roughly the same architecture. On the other hand, you have the Blue Brain Project of Henry Markram, a neuroscientist at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne.