Sci&Tech History

A friend of mine have difficulties in kept promises especially related with time. This habit doesn’t occur when he is taking a train or an airplane. Similar, offices also use machine with finger print or card to control their employee office hours. Suddenly, we become much more like machine than we realize. In the same time, does this phenomena indicate the chaotic side of human?

These questions delivers me to more question about self-reliance and centralization. Democracy issues delivers us to decentralization, local knowledge, conditions which been expected to support participatory and independency of every agents  involved. As stated by Adam Smith, specialization delivers productivity. In the same time, specialization without coordination and collaboration can ends up in inefficiency and overlapping. In one side, decentralization allow the agent to be creative and accomodate heterogeneity, in the other side, it is potentially make the modality stick on small scale.

Popularity: 7%

“When we look at garbage, we don’t see garbage, O.K.?” said Robert Reed, a spokesman for Norcal Waste Systems, the parent company of Sunset Scavenger and Golden Gate Disposal and Recycling Company, the main garbage collectors in the city. “We see food, we see paper, we see metal, we see glass.” (NY Times, May 7, 2008)

In Indonesia, garbage still placed as waste and expenditure rather than income. A paradigm shift about how human and nature relation should be were mostly initiated by environment organization using artist as their representation. Is this phenomena indicate scientist-replaced-by-artist symptoms? Or the dichotomy of who should do what is not relevance anymore?

Popularity: 11%

In what condition someone can get a bright idea to make a change? Moreover, how can the idea be brought into a prototype and than be commercialized? From references I have read, success innovation cames out not only by bright ideas but also by their network to make it formal/institutionalized. For example, by register it to intellectual property agency, by promote it to the customers, and by make the product easy to reach. On contrary, can the process be inversed? With high connectivity, can someone get a bright idea?

In Newton-apple case, high connectivity with physics become pre-requirement to reach consciousness about gravitation. For me, as an amateur person, fall of an apple only has a meaning ‘Yummy’

Popularity: 16%

On July, 2004, Nature published a feature entitled The Scientific Impact of Nations. The article discuss relation between citation intensity and wealth intensity represented by a positive slope. In the graphic, we can see that citation intensity has a strong relation with wealth of a nation. The question is does wealth and citation intensity work uniquely, or one of the coordinate can be substitute and also gives a positive slope? Moreover, if statistics gives a good correlation, does it work in a causal sense in reality, or the number is ‘just’ a nice coincidence?

Popularity: 23%

A study, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, involved a detailed analysis of a large social network of 12,067 people who had been closely followed for 32 years, from 1971 to 2003.

The investigators knew who was friends with whom as well as who was a spouse or sibling or neighbor, and they knew how much each person weighed at various times over three decades. That let them reconstruct what happened over the years as individuals became obese. Did their friends also become obese? Did family members? Or neighbors?

The answer, the researchers report, was that people were most likely to become obese when a friend became obese. That increased a person’s chances of becoming obese by 57 percent. There was no effect when a neighbor gained or lost weight, however, and family members had less influence than friends.

It did not even matter if the friend was hundreds of miles away, the influence remained. And the greatest influence of all was between close mutual friends. There, if one became obese, the other had a 171 percent increased chance of becoming obese, too. …

So, what do you think? ;p

Popularity: 27%

When people find difficulties in gaining food, is bio energy development still relevant? Does food or energy have a correlation with poverty? Both, rice or jatropha can be exchanged with money, but still the question arise, for whom we develop energy cultivation?

According to Michael Ableman, the global food system now faces a crisis of unprecedented levels primarily as the result of its wholesale dependency on fossil fuel. Food supplies are at their most limited levels in recent history, and the price of food continues to climb. Those who are already living in poverty and those who do not have access to land or the skills to grow food are the most at risk. Even the World Bank, which has historically refused to acknowledge agriculture in its quest to encourage industrialization among developing nations, recently stated that “farming must be central to efforts to reduce hunger and poverty.”

Can technology be the answer of food and energy match?

Popularity: 27%

What would you do, if you know something? Would you tell it to somebody else, or just keep it in a closed system, where people have to spend their money to access it? Dichotomy between closed and open knowledge system can be traced in copy right and copy left approach. Both of the approach have their reasoning, but does one better than the other?

Popularity: 39%

Does scientist has a role in nation development? This question keep haunting me recently. For example, when the nation has a food crises, should the scientist from indirect field involved in that issues or they have nothing to do with that and run business as usual? Does scientist have to aware about national issues, such as oil crisis effected Indonesia’s APBN, energy crises, poverty, famine? How about their role in academic itself?

To be honest, I don’t have any answer of those questions above, although there are some possible ways to make it work. The intermediaries agency. They can make a bridge from national and market necessity with scientist daily activities. Unfortunately, there are another although In my experience, the intermediaries agency keep on failing. Maybe we have lack of trust issues also that need to be solved.

Popularity: 38%

Politics stuff such as election, candidate popularity, trend analysis always include statistic to ‘read’ constituent trend. Below we can see how this relation was examined in New York times, as follows:

This is a remarkably detailed and vivid account of the political sociology of the American electorate. What is even more remarkable is that it is wrong on virtually every count.

Small-town people of modest means and limited education are not fixated on cultural issues. Rather, it is affluent, college-educated people living in cities and suburbs who are most exercised by guns and religion. In contemporary American politics, social issues are the opiate of the elites.

For the sake of concreteness, let’s define the people Mr. Obama had in mind as people whose family incomes are less than $60,000 (an amount that divides the electorate roughly in half), who do not have college degrees and who live in small towns or rural areas. For the sake of convenience, let’s call these people the small-town working class, though that term is inevitably imprecise. In 2004, they were about 18 percent of the population and about 16 percent of voters.

For purposes of comparison, consider the people who are their demographic opposites: people whose family incomes are $60,000 or more, who are college graduates and who live in cities or suburbs. These (again, conveniently labeled) cosmopolitan voters were about 11 percent of the population in 2004 and about 13 percent of voters. While admittedly crude, these definitions provide a systematic basis for assessing the accuracy of Mr. Obama’s view of contemporary class politics.

Small-town, working-class people are more likely than their cosmopolitan counterparts, not less, to say they trust the government to do what’s right. In the 2004 National Election Study conducted by the University of Michigan, 54 percent of these people said that the government in Washington can be trusted to do what is right most of the time or just about always. Only 38 percent of cosmopolitan people expressed a similar level of trust in the federal government.

Do small-town, working-class voters cast ballots on the basis of social issues? Yes, but less than other voters do. Among these voters, those who are anti-abortion were only 6 percentage points more likely than those who favor abortion rights to vote for President Bush in 2004. The corresponding difference for the rest of the electorate was 27 points, and for cosmopolitan voters it was a remarkable 58 points. Similarly, the votes cast by the cosmopolitan crowd in 2004 were much more likely to reflect voters’ positions on gun control and gay marriage.

Small-town, working-class voters were also less likely to connect religion and politics. Support for President Bush was only 5 percentage points higher among the 39 percent of small-town voters who said they attended religious services every week or almost every week than among those who seldom or never attended religious services. The corresponding difference among cosmopolitan voters (34 percent of whom said they attended religious services regularly) was 29 percentage points.

It is true that American voters attach significantly more weight to social issues than they did 20 years ago. It is also true that church attendance has become a stronger predictor of voting behavior. But both of those changes are concentrated primarily among people who are affluent and well educated, not among the working class.

Mr. Obama’s comments are supposed to be significant because of the popular perception that rural, working-class voters have abandoned the Democratic Party in recent decades and that the only way for Democrats to win them back is to cater to their cultural concerns. The reality is that John Kerry received a slender plurality of their votes in 2004, while John F. Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey, in the close elections of 1960 and 1968, lost them narrowly.

Mr. Obama should do as well or better among these voters if he is the Democratic candidate in November. If he doesn’t, it won’t be because he has offended the tender sensitivities of small-town Americans. It will be because he has embraced a misleading stereotype of who they are and what they care about.

taken from: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/17/opinion/17bartels.html?_r=2&scp=1&sq=bartels&st=nyt&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

Popularity: 49%

Score, rank and number are always become our concern rather to decide something is good or bad. The question is how this score, rank, and number been accepted and constructed? Moreover, who have the ‘right’ to do that and what aspects need to be highlighted? As mentioned earlier, Latour pointed four professionals to be taken care of: scientist, economist, moralist and politicians. In university field, answers to these question become important to decide indicators that would be used to assess university performance.

As stated in Center for Science and Technology Studies (CEST), in some countries in Europe, Australia, New Zealand there are some translation used to assess the university performance from paper publications to research collaboration with the industry. This parameter indicate a shifting paradigm among scholar from science for the science sake to science for human welfare.

Popularity: 42%