A "large and graceful sinuosity". John Herschel's graphical method

In 1833 John Herschel published a graphical method for determining the orbits of double stars. He argued that his method, which depended on human judgment rather than mathematical analysis, gave better results than computation, given the uncertainty in the data. Herschel found that astronomy and terrestrial physics were especially suitable for graphical treatment, and he expected that graphs would soon become important in all areas of science. He argued with William Whewell and James D. Forbes over the process of induction, over the application of probability, and over the moral content of science. Graphs entered into all these debates; but because they constituted a method, not a metaphysics, they were acceptable to most practicing scientists and became increasingly popular throughout the nineteenth century.     

CERN: Past performance and future prospects : III. CERN and the future of world high-energy physics

In a series of three papers, we attempt to evaluate the past scientific performance of the three main particle accelerators at the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) over the period since 1960, and to assess the future prospects for CERN and its users during the next ten to fifteen years.We concerned ourselves in the first paper (Paper I-Martin and Irvine [29]) with the position of the CERN accelerators in world high-energy physics relative to those at other large laboratories working in the field. We dealt primarily with the period from 1969 to 1978, and attempted to establish how the experimental output from the three principal CERN accelerators, taken as a whole, compared with that from other major facilities. In undertaking this comparative evaluation, we drew on the method of “converging partial indicators” used in previous studies of three Big Science specialties.In contrast, the second paper (Paper II - Irvine and Martin [24]) focused in detail on the scientific performance of each of the CERN accelerators taken individually. In particular, it asked, first, how the outputs from the CERN 28 GeV (giga or billion electron-volts) Proton Synchrotron compare with those from a very similar 33 GeV American accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory over the past two decades. Second, how great have been the experimental achievements of the Intersecting Storage Rings in world terms? And, third, how do the outputs from the CERN 400 GeV Super Proton Synchrotron and from a rival US machine at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory compare? Attempts were then made to identify the main factors responsible for determining the relative scientific performance of each CERN machine.These factors are of relevance to the subject of this third paper (Paper III), which sets out to assess the future prospects for CERN and in particular for LEP, the large electron-positron collider scheduled for completion in the latter part of 1988. What are the construction requirements (financial and technical) associated with LEP, and how easily will they be met? How does the scientific potential of LEP compare with that of other major accelerators under construction or planned around the world? In the light of the previous record of the CERN accelerators, to what extent is this scientific potential likely to be realized? What spin-off is there likely to be from LEP to accelerator physics in general? Finally, how “flexible” is LEP -in other words, what is its potential for future development? The paper concludes with a discussion of the extent to which predictive techniques can be utilized in the formulation of scientific priorities, and of the problems in current science policy-making that such techniques might help address.     

Parents and children: ideas of heredity in the 19th century

The concept of heredity played a powerful role in structuring 19th-century debates over sickness, morality, class, race, education, social change and evolution. But there was very little agreement as to which qualities were heritable and how new hereditary variants were acquired. In consequence, notions of heredity existed in a wide variety of forms, expressing anything from extreme determinism and a belief in the incorrigibility of individuals, social and racial groups, to unleavened optimism, and a faith in ultimate human perfectibility. This article explores these rich hereditarian discourses to convey an impression of a century that was at least as preoccupied with the concept of biological inheritance as we are today.     

Mendel and modern genetics: the legacy for today

The legacy of Mendel's pioneering studies of hybridization in the pea continues to influence the way we understand modern genetics. But what sort of picture did Mendel himself have of his work and its ultimate uses, and how does that picture compare with the collection of ideas and methodologies that was put forward in his name and later became known as 'Mendelism'? With genetics standing at the center of our present biomedical and biotechnological research, an examination of the history of our concepts in the field can help us better understand what we should and should not expect from current genetic claims. For that enterprise there is no better starting place than Mendel himself.     

CERN: Past performance and future prospects: I. CERN's position in world high-energy physics

In a series of three papers, we attempt to evaluate the past scientific performance of the three main particle accelerators at the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) over the period since 1960 and to assess the future prospects for CERN and its users over the next ten to fifteen years.We concern ourselves in this paper (paper I) with the position of the CERN accelerators in world high-energy physics relative to those at other large laboratories working in the field. We deal primarily with the period from 1969 to 1978, and attempt to establish how the experimental output from the three principal CERN accelerators, taken as a whole, compares with that from other major facilities. In undertaking this comparative evaluation, we draw on the method of “converging partial indicators” used in previous studies of three Big Science specialities.In contrast, the second paper (paper II Irvine amd Martin [12]) focuses in detail on the scientific performance of each of the CERN accelerators taken individually. In particular, it asks, first, how the outputs from the CERN 28 GeV (giga or billion electron-volts) Proton Synchrotron compare with those from a very similar 33 GeV American accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory over the past two decades. Second, how great have been the experimental achievements of the CERN Intersecting Storage Rings in world terms? And, third, how do the outputs from the CERN 400 GeV Super Proton Synchrotron and from a rival US machine at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory compare? Attempts are then made to identify the main factors responsible for determining the relative scientific performance of each CERN machine.These factors are of relevance to the subject of a third paper (paper III - Martin and Irvine [20]) which sets out to assess the future prospects for CERN and in particular for LEP, the large electron positron collider scheduled for completion in the latter half of the 1980s. What are the construction requirements (financial and technical) associated with LEP, and how easily will they he met? How does the scientific potential of LEP compare with that of other major accelerators under construction around the world? And, in the light of the previous record of the CERN accelerators, to what extent is this potential likely to be realized? The paper concludes with a discussion of the extent to which predictive techniques can be utilized in the formulation of scientific priorities, and of the problems in current science policy-making that such techniques might help address.     

Adverse events and placebo effects: African scientists, HIV, and ethics in the 'global health sciences'

This paper builds on the growing literature in 'postcolonial technoscience' by examining how science and ethics travel in transnational HIV research. I use examples of two controversial US-funded studies of mother-to-child transmission in Africa as case studies through which to explore quandaries of difference and inequality in global health research. My aim is not to adjudicate the debates over these studies, but rather to raise some questions about transnational research, science, and ethics that often get lost in public controversies over the moral status of such trials. Using interviews conducted with American and Ugandan HIV researchers as well as relevant material published in the popular and medical press, I argue that debates over research practice and the conditions under which practices are deemed ethically legitimate or questionable reflect the challenges faced by African researchers seeking to participate in global health science. In doing so, I show how questions of scientific legitimacy and authority are played out in debates over who decides what constitutes 'the normal' in human biological research and who can legitimately 'speak for Africa' regarding the ethics of research design and practice. I conclude that researchers from'resource-poor settings' must often walk a tightrope between claims of difference from the global North and assertions of sameness, in which a claim too forceful in either direction can undermine the ethical--and thus scientific--legitimacy of their research.     

CERN: Past performance and future prospects: II. The scientific performance of the CERN accelerators

In a series of three papers, we attempt to evaluate the past scientific performance of the three main particle accelerators at the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) over the period since 1960, and to assess the future prospects for CERN and its users during the next ten to fifteen years.We concerned ourselves in a previous paper (Paper 1 - Martin and Irvine [51] with the position of the CERN accelerators in world high-energy physics relative to those at other large laboratories working in the field. We dealt primarily with the period from 1969 to 1978, and attempted to establish how the experimental output from the three principal CERN accelerators, taken as a whole, compared with that from other major facilities. In undertaking this comparative evaluation, we drew on the method of “converging partial indicators” used in previous studies of three Big Science specialties.In contrast, this paper (Paper II) focuses in detail on the scientific performance of each of the CERN accelerators taken individually. In particular, it asks, first, how the outputs from the CERN 28 GeV (giga or billion electron-volts) Proton Synchrotron compare with those from a very similar 33 GeV American accelerator at Brookhaven National Laboratory over the past two decades? Second, how great have been the experimental achievements of the Intersecting Storage Rings in world terms? And, third, how do the outputs from the CERN 400 GeV Super Proton Synchrotron and from a rival American machine at Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory compare? Attempts are then made to identify the main factors responsible for determining the relative scientific performance of each CERN machine.These factors are of relevance to the subject of a third paper (Paper III - Martin and Irvine [52]) which sets out to assess the future prospects for CERN and in particular for LEP, the large electron-positron collider scheduled for completion in the latter part of the 1980s. What are the construction requirements (financial and technical) associated with LEP, and how easily will they be met? How does the scientific potential of LEP compare with that of other major accelerators under construction around the world? And, in the light of the previous record of the CERN accelerators, to what extent is this potential likely to be realized? The paper concludes with a discussion of the extent to which predictive techniques can be utilized in the formulation of scientific priorities, and of the problems in current science policy-making that such techniques might help address.     

基于ARCS理论的大学计算机基础层次教学改革探析

传统的层次教学模型在对教学对象分层方法上缺乏灵活性,没有重视学生的兴趣趋向和自主选择,教学内容设置与手段方法上也不能很好地适应发展的需求。以ARCS理论为基础探讨了大学新生入学后,在学习大学计算机基础的时候如何以案例激发学生的学习动机,以任务驱动提高学生的学习兴趣,维持学习动机,在实践环节因材施教实施层次教学。     

Age Touches a Nerve

Philipp Khaitovich works in Shanghai, a city that is developing at a pace as dramatic as his research field. At the CAS-MPG Partner Institute for Computational Biology, the molecular biologist is investigating how the different brain development of primates is linked to their age.     

Building for tomorrow: Assessing the temporal persistence of text classifiers

Performance of text classification models tends to drop over time due to changes in data, which limits the lifetime of a pretrained model. Therefore an ability to predict a model’s ability to persist over time can help design models that can be effectively used over a longer period of time. In this paper, we provide a thorough discussion into the problem, establish an evaluation setup for the task. We look at this problem from a practical perspective by assessing the ability of a wide range of language models and classification algorithms to persist over time, as well as how dataset characteristics can help predict the temporal stability of different models. We perform longitudinal classification experiments on three datasets spanning between 6 and 19 years, and involving diverse tasks and types of data. By splitting the longitudinal datasets into years, we perform a comprehensive set of experiments by training and testing across data that are different numbers of years apart from each other, both in the past and in the future. This enables a gradual investigation into the impact of the temporal gap between training and test sets on the classification performance, as well as measuring the extent of the persistence over time. Through experimenting with a range of language models and algorithms, we observe a consistent trend of performance drop over time, which however differs significantly across datasets; indeed, datasets whose domain is more closed and language is more stable, such as with book reviews, exhibit a less pronounced performance drop than open-domain social media datasets where language varies significantly more. We find that one can estimate how a model will retain its performance over time based on (i) how well the model performs over a restricted time period and its extrapolation to a longer time period, and (ii) the linguistic characteristics of the dataset, such as the familiarity score between subsets from different years. Findings from these experiments have important implications for the design of text classification models with the aim of preserving performance over time.     

How information systems came to rule the world: Reflections on the information systems field

Abstract

Over some seven decades, a rather mundane transition that in its thoroughness and consequences has gone largely unacknowledged, has taken place, namely the revolution in modern information systems (IS) that guide organizations in their actions. Today, it is fair to say that IS have come to rule the world. They do this literally, by the rules they embody, which dictate how much of everyday life, as it relates to individuals and organizations and the transactions they engage in, takes place around the globe. In essence, IS have become important social and economic infrastructure. Seeking an understanding of how this has come about, I review historical developments in IS, focusing in particular on accounting systems, enterprise systems, retail automation, and electronic commerce. I argue that it is transactions and their facilitation that lie at the heart of IS and its development as a field of practice. I reflect on why this has gone mostly overlooked as such. I consider where we have now arrived with transaction facilitation as infrastructure and its importance in the light of current issues. I suggest how future studies might contribute to our learning more about where we should want to be with our transaction facilitation infrastructure.     

低碳约束下甘肃省工业产业发展路径研究

全球资源与气候环境的变化使低碳经济已成为各国经济发展的必然选择,作为世界最大的CO2排放国,中国面临着巨大的减排压力。而甘肃省作为我国传统的资源型工业地区和经济发展相对落后地区,如何在保证经济发展的同时实现节能减排的目标,是其必须解决的重大问题。本文在构建包含低碳指标的工业产业发展评价指标体系的基础上,运用Weaver-Thomas模型,对甘肃省工业产业在低碳约束下的发展能力进行了分析与评价,并依此对其工业产业未来的发展路径进行了探讨。     

图灵测试：哲学争论及历史地位

图灵测试本质上是对人类智能的一种操作性定义。图灵本人充分意识到这一定义可能会遇到各种诘难,并对自己设想中的9类反对意见逐一作了辩驳。60年来围绕图灵测试的大量哲学争论,直接指向这一定义的3个核心要素,即语言、推理和模仿。古老的哲学问题,正在慢慢步入科学探讨的轨道。图灵测试的提出被公认为是人工智能学科兴起的标志,如今它虽然不能说是人工智能的终极目标,但至少是该领域的核心目标之一。以通过图灵测试为目标的智能机的研制,也向传统的智能概念提出了挑战。     

知识创新管理研究热点与演进——基于“协同引证矩阵”和“时间异质性LOG模型”的分析

在知识创新为主导的时代,知识创新推动着社会经济转型、社会组织变革和科学技术发展,并成为学术界研究的重要议题。本文以文献引证研究法为基础,通过定量分析知识创新研究议题、研究热点的发展和演化,探讨了知识创新研究未来可能的研究方向和研究机会。研究结果显示,知识创新中16个具有重要价值的研究议题呈动态变化,多数研究议题完成了从战略视角到操作视角的方向性转变,且呈现出不同的发展态势,同时揭示出跨越边界的知识团队创新、开放式知识创新、知识分享与知识转移、网络化知识创新等议题在未来的研究机会。研究结论消除了有关研究中在文献回顾时定量分析较少的质疑,使引证研究法确实成为知识创新文献研究的有力支撑和补充。研究能客观地揭示专家评估法等所没有察觉到的研究议题和未来研究趋势,以减少学者们在文献回顾中繁重、重复的工作,对研究人员和管理者精准把握知识创新研究的方向和未来具有一定的借鉴和参考价值。     

Exposing the seventeenth-century optical camera obscura

Did Vermeer van Delft create some of his paintings by means of a camera obscura? This still undecided question has stirred up heated debates. For some, the mere idea is an inexcusable insult on a great artist. All this heat has drawn attention away from a rich seam of questioning: what was the seventeenth-century camera obscura really like? And did it shape the ways in which Vermeer's contemporaries viewed, imagined, understood and, for that matter, rendered the visual world?     

The rise and fall of network stars: Analyzing 2.5 million graphs to reveal how high-degree vertices emerge over time

Trends change rapidly in today’s world, prompting this key question: What is the mechanism behind the emergence of new trends? By representing real-world dynamic systems as complex networks, the emergence of new trends can be symbolized by vertices that “shine.” That is, at a specific time interval in a network’s life, certain vertices become increasingly connected to other vertices. This process creates new high-degree vertices, i.e., network stars. Thus, to study trends, we must look at how networks evolve over time and determine how the stars behave. In our research, we constructed the largest publicly available network evolution dataset to date, which contains 38,000 real-world networks and 2.5 million graphs. Then, we performed the first precise wide-scale analysis of the evolution of networks with various scales. Three primary observations resulted: (a) links are most prevalent among vertices that join a network at a similar time; (b) the rate that new vertices join a network is a central factor in molding a network’s topology; and (c) the emergence of network stars (high-degree vertices) is correlated with fast-growing networks. We applied our learnings to develop a flexible network-generation model based on large-scale, real-world data. This model gives a better understanding of how stars rise and fall within networks, and is applicable to dynamic systems both in nature and society.Multimedia Links▶ Video ▶ Interactive Data Visualization ▶ Data ▶ Code Tutorials     

Application of statistical methods to manufacturing problems

The application of statistical methods in mass production makes possible the most efficient use of raw materials and manufacturing processes, effects economies in production, and makes possible the highest economic standards of quality for the manufactured goods used by all of us. The story of the application, however, is of much broader interest.The economic control of quality of manufactured goods is perhaps the simplest type of scientific control.Recent studies in this field throw light on such broad questions as: How far can Man go in controlling his physical environment?How does this depend upon the human factor of intelligence and how upon the element of chance?     

国有企业人力资源的整合与管理

随着国际经济一体化进程的不断发展,国有企业改革也迈出了长足的步伐,如何让职工做到人尽其才,防止人才外流等一系列问题也成为国有企业所面临的迫在眉睫的难题。因此从职工思想和企业管理机制入手,深入研究国有企业的人力资源整合与管理是十分必要和非常及时的,对国有企业的长期稳定发展将具有不可估量的意义。     

脑缺血动物实验研究进展

脑缺血是严重危害人类健康的重要疾病,脑缺血的动物实验研究是研究脑缺血性疾病的重要手段。近年开展脑缺血动物实验在方法学上不断更新并取得不少新发现,但脑缺血对脑细胞功能的影响及造成脑细胞衰亡等方面的病理生理及发病机制尚未确切,需深入研究。现从脑缺血动物实验研究出发,综述近年脑缺血的动物实验模型及脑缺血的病理生理、发病机制的研究进展,祈为今后脑缺血及其相关疾病临床研究与治疗提供新的实验方法及理论依据。     

Reorienting the Mobile: Australasian Imaginaries

In this paper, I approach the question of mobiles in Asian countries by considering the case of Australia. I do so by way of a preliminary inquiry that seeks to explore the intersection between the emergence of mobiles in Australia with transformations in that country's sense of its relationship with Asia. First I discuss the history of the mobile phone in Australia, noting some important uses and representations that formed part of its social shaping. Second, I explore mobiles and the paradoxes of multiculturalism, and also how digital technologies became central to political culture and identity debates in Australia in the early to-mid 1990s. Third, I look at some important moments in the social shaping of text messaging, in which questions of cultural difference were decisive. Finally, I offer concluding remarks about future research on mobiles in Australia and how they are tied into Asian identities.