Real friends: how the Internet can foster friendship

Dean Cocking and Steve Matthews’ article “Unreal Friends” (Ethics and Information Technology, 2000) argues that the formation of purely mediated friendships via the Internet is impossible. I critique their argument and contend that mediated contexts, including the Internet, can actually promote exceptionally strong friendships according to the very conceptual criteria utilized by Cocking and Matthews. I first argue that offline relationships can be constrictive and insincere, distorting important indicators and dynamics in the formation of close friends. The distance of mediated friendships mitigates this problem by promoting the courage to be candid. Next, I argue that the offline world of largely oral exchanges is often too shallow and hasty to promote deep bonds. The deliberateness of written correspondence acts as a weight to submerge friendships to greater depths and as a brake to enhance attentiveness to and precision about one’s own and one’s friend’s character. Nonetheless, close friendships may fail to develop on the Internet. Insofar as this failure occurs, however, it would be for reasons other than those identified by Cocking and Matthews.     

Phronetic expertise in evidence use: a new perspective on how research can aid educational policy development

The notion of evidence-informed policy making and the arguments in its favour are well established. At the same time, however, regular evidence use is yet to become a routine way of life for educational policy makers, particularly within the UK. This paper engages with the notion of expertise in evidence use, and with Flyvbjerg’s idea of phronesis. It also details how the phronetic approach can be adopted by policy makers and the potential implications for the policy development process. Given the issues that abound with current attempts to embed and enact evidence-informed policy making, the phronetic approach presents an alternative and viable way of both perceiving how evidence is currently used and also establishing enhanced levels of evidence use. In particular, the paper spotlights a need for current thought in this area to move away from rational and linear perspectives to encourage policy makers continuously to incorporate the most recent evidence into their thinking, and to make well-rounded decisions. The mechanisms required to facilitate phronetic expertise are examined as are the cultural issues that need to be addressed.     

College Chemistry: how a textbook can reveal the values embedded in chemistry

This paper explores the norms, values and ethical attitudes that Linus Pauling wanted to convey to his students in his famous textbook College Chemistry. In this classic textbook, Pauling aimed to introduce beginners into the world of chemistry by presenting chemistry as a systematic science based on a collection of empirical data and a recent theoretical framework. In doing so, he expressed his epistemic and didactic choices clearly. College Chemistry therefore offers an ideal opportunity to examine some of the norms at the core of chemistry's 'moral economy'.     

Intangibles: theory,categories, and the Kozminski matrix

Analyzing the strategic significance of a firm's intellectual capital separates tangible assets from intangible assets, and demands close attention to how the latter are valued. Conventional methods based on cost or market value are of little relevance. Ultimately, the analysis turns on who makes the estimate and to what end. We argue for a third source of estimates, the same managers whose application of strategic assets sets the value-adding processes of the firm in motion. This is a constructivist approach that raises important theoretical and methodological questions about the nature of the firm and its value-creating capabilities. Objective measures cannot grasp these capabilities, and current efforts to establish such metrics are deeply counter-productive. We propose the ‘business model’ as the firm-specific natural language within which the future value of the intangible assets can be estimated.     

BRCA patients and clinical collectives: new configurations of action in cancer genetics practices

Since the late 1980s, in France and in a number of other countries, cancer genetics testing has become a clinical reality, particularly for hereditary breast and ovarian cancer. BRCA tests allowing for the assessment of an increased cancer risk among patients and their healthy relatives are now being routinely performed as part of clinical practice. Based on fieldwork on French clinical cancer genetics and on the French Cancer Genetics Collaborative Network, this paper examines the configuration of entities, actors and activities mobilized by the performance of BRAC testing, and argues that the development of clinical molecular genetic practices is predicated upon the development of new forms of collaborative work that lead to a transformation of the content and organization of medical activities and judgements. The paper analyses three major collective configurations - local multidisciplinary collectives, data collectives and new clinical collectives - and argues that they not only provide the material conditions needed to carry out the relevant activities, but also articulate a series of distinctive bio-clinical interventions. These interventions provide an interface with research activities, produce the epidemiological measurements and tools that are a sine qua non for clinical work in this field, and, most importantly, establish the conventions that underlie practices, which define the criteria that turn tools and novel entities into operational components of clinical settings. It thus appears that in the field of clinical cancer genetics, bioclinical collectives, as a locus of expertise, have replaced the individual judgement of the practicing clinician.     

'Face value': new medical imaging software in commercial view

Based on three ethnographic vignettes describing the engagements of a small start-up company with prospective competitors, partners and customers, this paper shows how commercial considerations are folded into the ways visual images become 'seeable'. When company members mount demonstrations of prototype mammography software, they seek to generate interest but also to protect their intellectual property. Pivotal to these efforts to manage revelation and concealment is the visual interface, which is variously performed as obstacle and ally in the development of a profitable product. Using the concept of 'face value', the paper seeks to develop further insight into contemporary dynamics of seeing and showing by tracing the way techno-visual presentations and commercial considerations become entangled in practice. It also draws attention to the salience and significance of enactments of surface and depth in image-based practices.     

Enacting silence: Residual categories as a challenge for ethics,information systems,and communication

Residual categories are those which cannot be formally represented within a given classification system. We examine the forms that residuality takes within our information systems today, and explore some silences which form around those inhabiting particular residual categories. We argue that there is significant ethical and political work to be done in exploring residuality.     

新形势下如何做好病人的心理护理

新形势下，随着健康理念和医学模式的转变和人们生活压力的增大，疾病的机理不仅有内部的作用，还有外部的作用，当机体受到外界复杂因素刺激时，也可致病。不单药物、手术等是治疗疾病的手段，而心理疏导等措施也可治病。因此，所关注的病人不仅是身体的疾病，更要关注病人的心理疾病。因此，对心理社会方面进行评估，使病人在良好的心理状态下康复，有利于提高护理质量。     

企业联盟知识共享动因、障碍及克服

针对企业间的知识共享问题,从企业联盟的角度首先分析了企业联盟知识共享动因和影响企业联盟知识共享的主要障碍,并提出了克服障碍的相应对策,包括着重促进企业联盟隐性知识的共享、培养联盟伙伴间良好的信任度、完善企业联盟的共享服务平台、加强企业联盟自身的管理和建立企业联盟知识共享与保护的平衡机制等。     

Science, the public, and social elites: how the general public, scientists, top politicians and managers perceive science

This paper finds that the Croatian public's and the social elites' perceptions of science are a mixture of scientific and technological optimism, of the tendency to absolve science of social responsibility, of skepticism about the social effects of science, and of cognitive optimism and skepticism. However, perceptions differ significantly according to the different social roles and the wider value system of the observed groups. The survey data show some key similarities, as well as certain specificities in the configuration of the types of views of the four groups--the public, scientists, politicians and managers. The results suggest that the well-known typology of the four cultures reveals some of the ideologies of the key actors of scientific and technological policy. The greatest social, primarily educational and socio-spatial, differentiation of the perceptions of science was found in the general public.     

Yes, now we can: Technological change and the exploitation of entrepreneurial opportunities

The paper investigates how technological change in an industry influence which individuals will identify and exploit entrepreneurial opportunities. We propose that the introduction of new development tools will change knowledge-barriers to entry because they enable the abstraction of specialized knowledge that was previously needed for development. Empirically we test the argument using data from the web design industry in a Nordic country during the period 1992–2003. We compare the education and experience of founders before and after the introduction of web administration tools in 1998 and find a significant difference, which supports the main thesis of our argument.