Sci&Tech History

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: 30%

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: 28%

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: 32%

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: 27%

In history, there are several similar events occurred independently. For example, Leibniz developed the calculus independently of Newton, at almost in the same time. Wallace developed the theory of natural selection independently of Darwin, though later. Because of a paper by Wallace, Darwin found the energy to write Origin of Species so he would receive credit as the theory’s original developer. In the field of financial economics, Capital Asset Pricing Model was developed independently by no fewer than three people, Sharpe (1964), Lintner (1965), and Mossin (1966), at almost the same time.

Is ‘the truth’ discovered with no possibilities to fail or these discoveries were just a coincidence?

Popularity: 26%

Open Method of Coordination (OMC) is an intergovernmental means of governance in Europe Union, based on the voluntary cooperation of its member states. In its implementation, OMC is divided into two steps: initiated by ‘the government’, a top-down approach, and the second, initiated by its member states towards experimental dynamic with the involvement of local and regional actors. The idea of OMC is how to make a ‘learning’ community based on voluntary to share idea to others.

In Indonesia, OMC is planned to be used in research institution network. The OMC include a database system with some blank space to be filled by the research institutions and hoped to accelerate research collaboration among actors. Some of my skeptical point of view: are our society ready to change their passive paradigm into active?

Popularity: 27%

From Genevieve teil & Bruno Latour, “the hume machine: can association networks do more than formal rules?”

Is there something beyond text? What do someone refer when they talk about in-formation? Is it in our mind or it is related with the reality? Does degree tell something about meaning?

Popularity: 24%

How can someone judge rather something is good or bad? Moreover, how can we quantify it? Latour (1987), Callon & Muniesa (2003), proposed three-step process of calculation:

1. In order to be calculated, the entities taken into account have to be detached. A finite number of entities are moved, arranged and ordered in a single space. This single space has to be conceived of in a very broad sense: it is the ‘account’ itself but also, by extension, the surface of which the entities to calculate are moved, then compared and manipulated on the basis of a common operating principle.
2. The entities considered are associated with one another, subjected to manipulations and transformations, still in a very material sense.
3. A third step is necessary to obtain an accomplished calculation: a result has to be extracted.

These steps can be used when you go to the traditional market and decide to buy something. First you see some goods interested you, and then you start to negotiate with the retailer. An accomplished calculation occur when you have finished the negotiation rather you buy the goods with certain price or decided not to buy the goods.

Popularity: 24%

Most collaborations between companies and academic researchers are initiated by industry scientists looking for specific technologies or expertise, notes Anthony Boccanfuso, executive director of the Washington, D.C.-based University-Industry Demonstration Partnership (UIDP), a consortium aimed at improving collaboration between universities and industry. But that doesn’t mean university researchers have to sit and wait for the phone to ring. If you are looking for industry funding, it helps to be proactive.

In many cases, researchers interested in private-sector funding need look no further than their own campuses. Many research institutions already host industry-funded programs. At their most ambitious, these programs are massive, multicenter research consortia that recruit dozens or even hundreds of industry partners. Albany NanoTech, a multibillion-dollar research complex affiliated with the College of Nanoscale Science and Engineering at the University at Albany in New York state, involves more than 250 corporations, many of which provide major funding for university faculty members. (http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_development/previous_issues/articles/2008_03_14/caredit_a0800040)

In Indonesia, research is still driven by market and science itself. In the university, engagement between scientist and industry can be found in some MOU, but who drive the research agenda? Do they have the same bargaining position?

Popularity: 29%

“Rigid technologies don’t translate successfully from the North to the South.”
(Akrich, 1992)

Often, wells are drilled by NGOs purely on the basis of geological survey. However, in a country like Zimbabwe such wells do not always work. Even though the water that the well produces may be abundant and clear, and even though the new well may be nearer for its (intended) users than an older one that it is meant to replace, you may see a path traced out in the sand that leads around it. If the village women do not want to use the well, if it has been bored without consulting the nganga or was put into operation without his consent, the well is dead. Sometimes literally. There are instances in which a well was bored without the nganga’s approval and, contrary to all measurements, turned out to be dry. Not a drop of water. And unfortunately, boring wells without consulting the nganga has happened all too often, especially when NGOs or governments are determined to keep the sitting and boring of the well entirely in their own hands (UNICEF Zimbabwe, interviewed by de Laet and Mol).

What Akrich, and later, de Laet and Mol said shows that technology can’t be diffuse rather been translate. In translation process, the technology found it new shape, and social construction.

Popularity: 33%