Science Technology Society

at Rensselaer Polytechnic

at Madison

includes a list of faculty at UMN affiliated with the program

home page for Thomas Misa, current director of the Charles Babbage Institute. Contains some especially good bibliographys on science history,etc.

program in sts at Umn

young earth creationist gets PhD, what to do?

history of science, technology, and medicine

Apomediation is a new scholarly socio-technological term that characterizes the process of disintermediation (intermediaries are middlemen or "gatekeeper", e.g. health professionals giving "relevant" information to a patient, and disintermediation means to bypass them), whereby the former intermediaries are functionally replaced by apomediaries, i.e. network/group/collaborative filtering processes [Eysenbach, 2008 [WebCite] and 2007b]. The difference between an intermediary and an apomediary is that an intermediary stands "in between" (latin: inter- means "in between") the consumer and information/service, i.e. is absolutely necessary to get a specific information/service. In contrast, apomediation means that there are agents (people, tools) which "stand by" (latin: apo- means separate, detached, away from) to guide a consumer to high quality information/services/experiences, without being a prerequisite to obtain that information/service in the first place. The switch from an intermediation model to an apomediation model has broadimplications for example for the way people judge credibility, as hypothesized and elaborated in more detail elsewhere [

at Berkeley

And though we may be away from those holographic representations, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey will soon be entering its third phase, in an attempt to create the biggest 3D map of the universe created so far.