Creole science: Botanical surveys of Costa Rica, 1880–1940

During the late nineteenth century, many countries in tropical Latin America organized research institutions for the study of natural history. The political and economic élites who sponsored these institutions hoped to find new natural resources that could be sold to Europe and North America's expanding markets. The coffee, sugar and banana industries in tropical Latin America were growing rapidly, and the northern markets were hungry for tropical products. The scientists who worked at the museums hoped to meet these national goals while at the same time participating in the international scientific community. Costa Rica, one of the smallest countries in the region, was also one of the most successful at organizing a productive and vibrant natural history research community.     

Iberian colonial science

The Portuguese and Spanish empires were both global and long lasting. This essay focuses on colonial Spanish America, particularly on the practices of natural history. It also suggests that chivalric-epic ideologies permeated early modem epistemologies, including those of the French and the British. The essay criticizes the application of nineteenth-century models of empire to the understanding of the early modern composite monarchies in the New World. Finally, it explores the ways metropolitan natural philosophy was transformed in the New World kingdoms to bolster patriotic identities.     

History from the ground up: bugs, political economy, and God in Kirby and Spence's Introduction to Entomology (1815-1856)

William Kirby and William Spence's Introduction to Entomology is generally recognized as one of the founding texts of entomological science in English. This essay examines the ideological allegiances of the coauthors of the Introduction. In particular, it analyzes the ideological implications of their divergent opinions on animal instinct. Different vocational pursuits shaped each man's natural history. Spence, a political economist, pursued fact-based science that was shorn of references to religion. Kirby, a Tory High Churchman, placed revelation at the very heart of his natural history. His strong commitment to partisan sectarianism cautions against reference to a homogeneous "natural theology" that was an agent of mediation. Fissures in the "common intellectual context" reached beyond the clash between natural theologians and radical anatomists to render the intellectual edifice of natural theology structurally less sound for the future.     

周作人散文中的博物学

周作人是中国现代散文家、文学理论家、翻译家、思想家、民俗学开拓人。本文将以他的部分小品文为例,探讨其博物学与科普价值。在中国现代科普领域,周作人缘何遇冷,其作品与同时代科普作品相比有何区别,为什么在大多数人看来,周氏作品仅仅只是＂闲适小品文＂？本文试图论述,在我国现代博物学发展之初,人文与科学之间具有真诚的、深层次交流的意愿与能力;传统文化、民间习俗与现代科学之间具有相互弥补和促进的可能。把周作人那些夹杂着民俗、国学、西方博物学兴味的小品文,置于今天的环境中重新品读,会发现它们对民族、社会以及普通人的生活,都有着深切的思考和关照,能够给予当代人启示。     

Working knowledges before and after circa 1800: practices and disciplines in the history of science, technology, and medicine

Historians of science, inasmuch as they are concerned with knowledges and practices rather than institutions, have tended of late to focus on case studies of common processes such as experiment and publication. In so doing, they tend to treat science as a single category, with various local instantiations. Or, alternatively, they relate cases to their specific local contexts. In neither approach do the cases or their contexts build easily into broader histories, reconstructing changing knowledge practices across time and space. This essay argues that by systematically deconstructing the practices of science and technology and medicine (STM) into common, recurrent elements, we can gain usefully "configurational" views, not just of particular cases and contexts but of synchronic variety and diachronic changes, both short term and long. To this end, we can begin with the customary actors' disciplines of early modern knowledge (natural philosophy, natural history, mixed mathematics, and experimental philosophy), which can be understood as elemental "ways of knowing and working," variously combined and disputed. I argue that these same working knowledges, together with a later mode-synthetic experimentation and systematic invention-may also serve for the analysis of STM from the late eighteenth century to the present. The old divisions continued explicitly and importantly after circa 1800, but they were also "built into" an array of new sciences. This historiographic analysis can help clarify a number of common problems: about the multiplicity of the sciences, the importance of various styles in science, and the relations between science and technology and medicine. It suggests new readings of major changes in STM, including the first and second scientific revolutions and the transformations of biomedicine from the later twentieth century. It offers ways of recasting both microhistories and macrohistories, so reducing the apparent distance between them. And it may thus facilitate both more constructive uses of case studies and more innovative and acceptable longer histories.     

高校技术转移:从营销视角考察

从市场营销的视角考察我国高校的技术转移。探究我国高校技术转移中心的市场营销属性,讨论高校技术转移的战略营销要素的内容,给出了在高校技术转移中应用市场营销学概念和原理的管理理论和实践涵义。     

Sketching together the modern histories of science, technology, and medicine

This essay explores ways to "write together" the awkwardly jointed histories of "science" and "me dicine"--but it also includes other "arts" (in the old sense) and technologies. It draws especially on the historiography of medicine, but I try to use terms that are applicable across all of science, technology, and medicine (STM). I stress the variety of knowledges and practices in play at any time and the ways in which the ensembles change. I focus on the various relations of "science" and "medicine," as they were understood for a succession of periods--from mainly agricultural societies, through industrial societies, to our biomedical present--trying to sketch a history that encompasses daily practices and understandings as well as major conceptual and technical innovations. The model is meant to facilitate inquiry across topics and across times, including those to come.     

Science and the French Empire

Scholarly interest in French colonial science, interpreted to include colonial medical and scientific institutions as well as personages and other "actors" in France serving colonial agendas, has been robust for some two decades. This essay characterizes the complex and interlinked historical relationships between French metropolitan and colonial science as one of asymmetric coevolution. In analyzing scholarship on diverse topics from physics and military technology to colonial botany, medicine, geography, and racial theory, it interrogates the concepts of French nation and French empire and questions the historiographical and explanatory utility of the core-periphery model. Special scrutiny falls on a trope common to historigraphical studies of the postrevolutionary era, that of a firm French nationalism enabling largely rational colonial agendas and the promotion of these agendas by highly centralized Parisian bureaucracies. The essay calls for a reading of French history inclusive of regional colonialist activities and argues for the prevalence of municipal and regional maritime, technological, scientific, and military interests in constructing the modern French empire.     

The fire ant wars. Nature and science in the pesticide controversies of the late twentieth century

This essay uses an approach borrowed from environmental history to investigate the interaction of science and nature in a late twentieth-century controversy. This debate, over the proper response to fire ants that had been imported into the American South accidentally and then spread across the region, pitted Rachel Carson and loosely federated groups of conservationists, scientists, and citizens against the U.S. Department of Agriculture. The analysis falls into three sections: an examination of the natural history of the ants; an examination of the views of the competing factions; and an examination of how those views, transformed into action, affected the natural world. Both sides saw the ants in terms of a constellation of beliefs about the relationship between nature, science, and democracy. As various ideas were put into play, they interacted with the natural history of the insects in unexpected ways--and with consequences for the cultural authority of the antagonists. Combining insights from the history of science and environmental history helps explain how scientists gain and lose cultural authority and, more fundamentally, allows for an examination of how nature can be integrated into the history of science.     

Did Kettlewell commit fraud? Re-examining the evidence

H.B.D. Kettlewell is famous for several investigations conducted in the early 1950s on the phenomenon of industrial melanism, which are widely regarded as the classic demonstration of natural selection. In a recent (2002) book-length popularization of this episode in the history of the science, science writer Judith Hooper draws attention to what she interprets as discrepancies in the results reported by Kettlewell in his first scientific papers on the subject. On the basis of correspondence among Kettlewell and his associates, a survey of scientific publications that mention outstanding questions surrounding the phenomenon, as well as interviews with his son, surviving colleagues, and scientists who have worked on industrial melanims, Hooper all but explicitly concludes that Kettlewell committed fraud. The following essay critically examines her evidence in support of this allegation, including her discussion of his character, the alleged motives, and whether fraud was even committed. None of Hooper's arguments is found to withstand careful scrutiny. The concluding section draws several conclusions about how history of science should be depicted to the public.     

Duverney's skeletons

In 1730, shortly before his death, the Paris anatomist Joseph-Guichard Duverney wrote his will, leaving his anatomical specimens to the Académie des Sciences, of which he was a member. But the will was disputed by Pierre Chirac, supervisor of the Jardin du Roi where Duverney, as professor of anatomy, had performed most of the dissections that produced the specimens. The ensuing debate between Chirac and René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, arguing for the Académie, reveals the tensions surrounding both the concept of intellectual property in this period and the collective enterprise in natural philosophy. The differing roles and audiences of the Académie and the Jardin were central to this debate. In addition, this essay explores the origins and significance of the anatomical specimens themselves and their changing role in instruction and display, as well as the transition from the cabinet of curiosities to the natural history museum.     

中草药在烟草中的应用

随着吸烟与健康问题的日益突出,如何有效降低烟草的危害性,最大限度地降低吸烟对人体的伤害已经成为烟草行业面临的主要挑战。我国拥有极其丰富的中药资源,从烟草的分类及最初应用上来看,烟草与中草药同源,烟草是一种特殊的天然植物药,根据历史记载,烟草最早应用于治病,而后才逐渐发展成为人类生活中的一种嗜好品。烟草与中草药之间存在的相通关系,也使得烟草工作人员将对烟草本身的研究,转移到以研究含有中草药的卷烟制品上来。本文即对中草药在卷烟中的作用机理及应用领域进行了综述,并对今后中草药添加剂的应用提出了方向。     

Hugo de Vries on heredity, 1889-1903. Statistics, Mendelian laws, pangenes, mutations.

The essay describes the development of Hugo de Vries's thinking on heredity from the publication of his Intracellulare Pangenesis in 1889 to the publication of Die Mutations-theorie, Volume 2, in 1903. De Vries's work in the 1890s can be characterized as an attempt to defend his theory of pangenes, especially the fundamental and controversial idea that different characters have different material hereditary carriers. Hybridization experiments served his goal. Recently discovered research notes on hybridization from 1896 suggest that, though he was unaware of Mendel's work, De Vries used the laws of dominance and recessiveness, segregation, and independent assortment to explain the 75:25 ratio in the second generation. He had discovered these laws by applying insights from probability theory to his research. In Die Mutationstheorie De Vries combined central concepts of intracellular pangenesis and his mutation theory by modifying the meanings of important terms and introducing new states of pangenes. In his attempts to describe Mendelian crossings in terms of pangenes and mutations, he became entangled in a number of contradictions. Some of his remarks suggest that he was aware that the Mendelian laws and his own theories of pangenes and mutations could not be made consistent.     

Redrawing the map: science in twentieth-century China

This essay argues that science in twentieth-century China is a rich topic that can be productively integrated into research and teaching on the history of modern science. It identifies major issues of science in twentieth-century China and demonstrates that they can prove useful to any scholar who wishes to consider science in a comparative and trans/international context. The essay suggests two important steps for a fruitful investigation into the topic of science in twentieth-century China: first, revising the historiographic assumptions and categories that underlie much of the conventional historical narrative of modern science; and, second, breaking free from the tunnel history of national science. To illustrate these points, the essay examines a series of case studies of science in modern China and discusses the relevance of such subjects as scientific nationalism, Maoist mass science, and transnational scientific networks for the understanding of science in the twentieth-century world.     

Placing performance

This introductory essay discusses the origins of current interest in performances and performativity in the history of science as an outcome of the concern with understanding science as practice that emerged from the 1980s onward. The language of performance, it suggests, provides useful analytic tools for historians of science because it focuses our attention on the bodies of practitioners, their embodied practices, and their presentation of self to different audiences. It provides a new approach to understanding the politics of knowledge production and dissemination. Lastly, the essay suggests, the emphasis on performance invites us to develop new, nontextual strategies for representing our own researches.     

社会网络对个体创造力的作用机理研究

针对社会网络与个体创造力研究中存在的争论,将个体创造力分为改进型创新与探索型创新两种类型,提出了一个同时考察网络结构与网络内容对个体双E创新影响的理论模型。并从如何保证个体持续创造力的角度探讨了网络的动态演化,提出小世界网络结构对同时保证个体较高的创新绩效和持续的创新能力具有重要意义,伴随着小世界网络的涌现过程,个体的创造力将持续增强。     

Embedded ethics: some technical and ethical challenges

This paper pertains to research works aiming at linking ethics and automated reasoning in autonomous machines. It focuses on a formal approach that is intended to be the basis of an artificial agent’s reasoning that could be considered by a human observer as an ethical reasoning. The approach includes some formal tools to describe a situation and models of ethical principles that are designed to automatically compute a judgement on possible decisions that can be made in a given situation and explain why a given decision is ethically acceptable or not. It is illustrated on three ethical frameworks—utilitarian ethics, deontological ethics and the Doctrine of Double effect whose formal models are tested on ethical dilemmas so as to examine how they respond to those dilemmas and to highlight the issues at stake when a formal approach to ethical concepts is considered. The whole approach is instantiated on the drone dilemma, a thought experiment we have designed; this allows the discrepancies that exist between the judgements of the various ethical frameworks to be shown. The final discussion allows us to highlight the different sources of subjectivity of the approach, despite the fact that concepts are expressed in a more rigorous way than in natural language: indeed, the formal approach enables subjectivity to be identified and located more precisely.     

管窥微观信息经济学

This essay examines the origin and development of micro-economics of information from the perspective of the development history of western economies. It considers the emergence and development of micro-economies of information as a challenge to the traditional economics. Based on this, the essay expounds the focal point of the research on micro-economics of information and its significance to China' s reform of economic system and the informatization of economy.     

迈克尔逊实验真的帮了爱因斯坦吗?

迈克尔逊-莫雷实验是科学史上极为著名的实验,对于它在爱因斯坦的狭义相对论创立中的地位与作用,一直存在较大的争议。霍尔顿及其支持者认为,该实验对狭义相对论的创立几乎没有起作用,也有一些学者对此提出了异议。本文在全面比较争论双方的论据之后认为,霍尔顿等人提出的证据更多,论证也更为充分。就目前的研究而言,迈克尔逊实验的确没有对爱因斯坦创立狭义相对论起直接的、重要的作用。     

Gender, politics, and radioactivity research in interwar Vienna: the case of the Institute for Radium Research

This essay explores the significance of political and ideological context as well as experimental culture for the participation of women in radioactivity research. It argues that the politics of Red Vienna and the culture of radioactivity research specific to the Viennese setting encouraged exceptional gender politics within the Institute for Radium Research in the interwar years. The essay further attempts to provide an alternative approach to narratives that concentrate on personal dispositions and stereotypical images of women in science to explain the disproportionately large number of women in radioactivity research. Instead, the emphasis here is on the institutional context in which women involved themselves in radioactivity in interwar Vienna. This approach places greater importance on contingencies of time and place and highlights the significance of the cultural and political context in a historical study while at the same time shedding light on the interrelation between scientific practices and gender.