Archive for April, 2003
“Perhaps the most important omission from ‘The Portable Sixties Reader,’ as from discussion of the `60s generally, is the impact on the culture of science and technology. True, no one ever mistook Neil Armstrong for Carlos Castaneda. But in ways profound as well as superficial, so much of the turmoil of the `60s had to do with science and technology: Jimi Hendrix’s feedback, Timothy Leary’s LSD, the Pill. Making ‘the white heat of technology’ his electoral mantra helped get Harold Wilson into 10 Downing Street. The Bond movies drew audiences as much with their fetishization of gadgetry as by 007’s derring-do. Tang earned General Foods millions by putting the Space Race on the breakfast table. People intuitively recognized science and technology as the great worldwide engine of change. What the Warren Court was to US jurisprudence, science (or at least its handiwork) was to global society.”
How very true. This is neither the first nor the last time Western Zeitgeist is characterised without S&T.
Read the rest of the review of The Portable Sixties Reader in the Boston Globe here.
[Link via Arts & Letters Daily.]
Jose van Eijndhoven och Peter Groenewegen ”The construction of expert advice on health risks”, Social Studies of Science 21 (1991): 257-78.
Londa Schiebinger ”Creating sustainable science”, Osiris 12, no. Women, gender, and science: New directions (1997): 201-16.
Stephen Hilgartner ”The dominant view of popularization: Conceptual problems, political uses”, Social Studies of Science 20 (1990): 519-39.
Daniel S. Greenberg, The politics of pure science. 2 ed. (Chicago & London, 1967; 1999).
Michael Aaron Dennis ”’Our first line of defence’: Two university laboratories in the postwar American state”, Isis 85 (1994): 427-55.
Johan Asplund, Essä om Gemeinschaft och Gesellschaft (Göteborg, 1991).
Dear Lazyweb: what about a generic stock market simulation software package? You install it in cgi-bin, configure it and then you can set up a market á la Celebdaq. Make market simulations of authors, scholars, music, or whatever you choose.
“For a moment, I honestly couldn’t answer. And in that moment, I realized how very lucky I was. That it is so difficult for me to differentiate between things done ‘for work’ and things done ‘for fun’ is a pretty amazing gift.” Elisabeth Lane Lawley writes about the joys of having a work that is also something you enjoy in your ’spare’ time.
I totally agree, having spent time last evenging - after the kids went to sleep - reading about Tönnies Gemeinschaft/Gesellschaft thinking in the form of Johan Asplund, Essä om Gemeinschaft och Gesellschaft. (By the way, the book is not really my cup of tea, and reading it makes me more and more convinced about the stupidity of Tönnies bipolar concept.) University life is freedom, getting a salary for reading books, teaching intelligent and enthusiastic students. There are, of course, drawbacks (hey - I haven’t got tenure!) but generally it is great.
Next semester, the Research policy institute will launch a new STS course. We had a meeting the other day. It’s going to be hard work developing the course, but stimulating as well. First there is a five week (or, rather, ten week long, since the course runs at half speed) general introduction to STS. We are thinking of having Krige & Pestre, Companion to science in the twentieth century as the main book, together with papers. The second part is a more case-based analysis of science, technology, research policy, industry, economics, popular culture (it all fits together!) centred on the case of space technology.
Sputnik made it evident that the US science and technology lead was not absolute. It obviously ment something for research resource allocation and university education in the west. “The alarm raised by the Soviet Union’s launch of Sputnik in 1957 inspired thousands of young Americans to become engineers, physicists, and chemists” as Science writes (14 mars) (the graph is from that article). That is probably true, but the policy shift and money pumped into technoscience was probably more important than Sputnik having ‘inspired’ individuals to study science and engineering. Sputnik rather ‘inspired’ politicans to fund science like never before. Follow the money!
The graph is interesting, though. Note the decrease in physics PhD:s after the end of the cold war (and after the onset of a more life sciences-oriented era).
Science also writes about US researh policy people wanting 9/11 to become a new ‘Sputnik event’.
Read more about Sputnik in Roger D. Launius mfl ed., Reconsidering Sputnik: Forty years since the Soviet satellite (London, 2000; 2002).
“But one of the most consistently striking things about the coverage of the conflict - and every other conflict of the modern TV era - is the way it has been dominated by an endless flow of facts, stats and graphics about military hardware, from the sort of spoddy experts usually banished to minority satellite channels aimed at men you would rather not sit next to on the tube.” Read more in “War porn” in The Guardian.
[Link via Boingboing.]
Fresh (last couple of days) satellite imagery of Bagdad is available at Digital Globe.
[Link via Hilde Corneliussen]
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