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Todd Suomela

Educational Research - Adler Planetarium - 0 views

  • Throughout history, meaningful contributions to science have been made by members of the public. These citizen scientists have historically contributed by collecting data that is hard for a single scientist to collect such as weather information or the paths of migrating birds. Recently, advances in computer technology have opened new possibilities for citizen scientists to participate in science projects by helping with data analysis. We are investigating what motivates people to do this and what they learn when they do so. To do so, we are working with Galaxy Zoo and the Zooniverse family of citizen science projects.
Todd Suomela

TPM: The Philosophers' Magazine | Philosophy as complementary science - 1 views

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    "Let me now express my position more clearly and systemically: philosophy of science can seek to generate scientific knowledge in places where science itself fails to do so; I call this the complementary function of philosophy of science, as opposed to its descriptive and prescriptive functions. I propose taking the philosophy of science as a field which investigates scientific questions that are not addressed in current specialist science - questions that could be addressed by scientists, but are excluded due to the necessities of specialization."
Todd Suomela

The Public Values Failures of Climate Science in the US by Ryan Meyer - Minerva, Volume... - 0 views

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    "This paper examines the broad social purpose of US climate science, which has benefited from a public investment of more than $30 billion over the last 20 years. A public values analysis identifies five core public values that underpin the interagency program. Drawing from interviews, meeting observations, and document analysis, I examine the decision processes and institutional structures that lead to the implementation of climate science policy, and identify a variety of public values failures accommodated by this system. In contrast to other cases which find market values frameworks (the "profit as progress" assumption) at the root of public values failures, this case shows how "science values" ("knowledge as progress") may serve as an inadequate or inappropriate basis for achieving broader public values. For both institutions and individual decision makers, the logic linking science to societal benefit is generally incomplete, incoherent, and tends to conflate intrinsic and instrumental values. I argue that to be successful with respect to its motivating public values, the US climate science enterprise must avoid the assumption that any advance in knowledge is inherently good, and offer a clearer account of the kinds of research and knowledge advance likely to generate desirable social outcomes. "
Todd Suomela

Science, Superstars & Stocks: Is Everything Getting Harder? - 1 views

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    "What, if anything, is the world trying to tell us? On some level it seems that things are getting harder - it is tougher to be a dominant player in sports given global talent pools, better training, more mimicry, etc. Similarly, science in many important areas does seem stalled, with progress proceeding glacially, whether it is drug discovery, or fundamental physics, or energy."
Todd Suomela

What Happens If Science Becomes a Low-Yield Activity? « The Scholarly Kitchen - 1 views

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    "And what if science becomes - or has become - lower-yield? Is that a reason to reconsider funding policies? Rationally, looking at the cost-benefit may already have effects on resource and funding allocations. Is it unreasonable to assume that science will continue to produce large, demonstrable advances and insights of the size and importance of the major breakthroughs?"
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    I think the comments under the linked article sufficiently refute it.
Todd Suomela

PLoS ONE: A Demonstration of the Transition from Ready-to-Hand to Unready-to-Hand - 1 views

  • In Chapter III of Being and Time, Heidegger distinguishes three modes of experiencing the world. Most human activity, Heidegger argued, is absorbed, skillful engagement with entities in the world. When we are coping skillfully with the world, we experience entities around us as ready-to-hand.
  • Heidegger argues that skilled coping, when we engage with entities as ready-to-hand, is our primary way of engaging with the world. Sometimes, though, our skillful coping is temporarily disturbed. When this happens, we encounter entities as unready-to-hand. When we go from smoothly hammering to having difficulty, our experience of the previously ready-to-hand entities changes: we experience the hammer, nails and board as failing to serve their function appropriately.
  • Heidegger's third way of experiencing the world is as present-at-hand. The hammer is encountered as present-at-hand when we stop hammering and consider the hammer's shape or color or weight; when considered this way the hammer is no longer a useful tool but merely an object with various properties. Heidegger argued that readiness-to-hand is primary in two ways. First, the majority of our experience of the world is engaging with entities ready-to-hand. Second, readiness-to-hand is, from a phenomenological standpoint, ontologically primary while the other modes are derivative of it.
Todd Suomela

The Technium: The Most Powerful Force in the World - 0 views

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    Even counting vast tracks of agriculture, the technium entails fewer than one percent of the atoms on the Earth's land surface. Yet the impact which this minute fraction of technological mass and energy has on the planet is in far disproportion to its size. Measured by impact per gram or calorie, there is nothing comparable to things we invent. Technology is the most powerful force in the world.
Todd Suomela

The Technium: Chosen, Inevitable, and Contingent - 0 views

  • There are two senses of "inevitable" when used with technology. In the first case, an invention merely has to exist once. In that sense, every technology is inevitable because sooner or later some mad tinkerer will cobble together almost anything that can be cobbled together. Jetpacks, underwater homes, glow-in-the-dark cats, forgetting pills — in the goodness of time every invention will inevitably be conjured up as a prototype or demo. And since simultaneous invention is the rule not the exception, any invention that can be invented will be invented more than once. But few will be widely adopted. Most won't work very well. Or more commonly they will work but be unwanted. So in this trivial sense, all technology is inevitable. Rewind the tape of time and it will be re-invented. The second more substantial sense of "inevitable" demands a level of common acceptance and viability. A technology's use must come to dominate the technium or at least its corner of the technosphere. But more than ubiquity, the inevitable must contain a large-scale momentum, and proceed on its own determination beyond the free choices of several billion humans. It can't be diverted by mere social whims.
Todd Suomela

On the Pew Science Survey, Beware the Fall from Grace Narrative : Framing Science - 0 views

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    This traditional fall from grace narrative about science argues for the need to return to a (fictional) point in the past where science was better understood and appreciated by the public... Yet you would be hard pressed to find this type of rhetoric in the peer-reviewed literature examining public opinion about science, the role of scientific expertise in policymaking, or the relationship between science and other social institutions.
Todd Suomela

Test essay 9: Forces acting on scientists to share and not to share : Christina's LIS Rant - 0 views

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    notes on the topic of incentives for/against sharing in science
Todd Suomela

The Technium: Ordained-Becoming - 0 views

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    by Kevin Kelly
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