The 'mandarin-missionary' strategy: Robert Kennicott, Spencer Fullerton Baird and specimen collection in the Hudson's Bay Territory

In 1859, Robert Kennicott, one of the most promising specimen collectors and young naturalists in the United States, was dispatched to Hudson's Bay Territory by Spencer Fullerton Baird, the Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian. Kennicott was chosen because of previous experience in Canada, the familiarity with biota of the American Midwest, and because he had a boundless, infectious, enthusiasm for natural history that was typical among Baird's closest protégées. Kennicott was a natural scientific envoy--or missionary--to the officers of the Hudson's Bay Company, and many officers were enthusiastically 'converted' to the cause of collecting and/or overseeing the collection of natural history specimens. Due to this collaboration between Baird, Kennicott and the officers of the Hudson's Bay Company, the Smithsonian became a leading center of Canadian natural history in the Western hemisphere.     

Modes of learning and profitability in Colombian and Mexican SMEs

The aim of this study is to analyze the effects of different modes of learning on innovation and profitability in SMEs in two Latin American countries; Mexico and Colombia. The data were obtained using a sample of 250 companies in the industrial sector operating in both countries. Results show that an integrated mode of learning based on internal and external knowledge supported by technological infrastructure have positive and significant effects on the degree of innovation and the profitability in SMEs However this effect appears to be not significantly different from the traditional SMEs mode of learning based mainly on market orientation.     

拉美西语国家汉语教育的现状、问题及策略

本文在国内首次系统梳理了近年来国际汉语教育大发展背景下拉美西语国家的汉语教学现状,结合当前汉语教学实际,指出了其汉语教学存在的问题,并提出了一些有针对性的建议。     

Amateur versus professional: the search for Bigfoot

Those who would seek monsters not as metaphors, but as flesh and blood organisms have gone largely overlooked by the history of science. Starting in the 1950s and 1960s a group of amateur monster hunters and physical anthropologists began to pursue such creatures as Sasquatch, Bigfoot and the Yeti as living species. Whether or not such creatures exist, the monster hunters themselves are fascinating subjects for study, illustrating the tensions that are all too common between amateur naturalists and professional scientists.     

拉丁美洲独立之后的科学技术

拉丁美洲于19世纪初获得政治独立后,该地区的科学技术进入一个重建时期。此后拉美的科学技术具有欧洲和美国的某些共性,同时又存在着地区差异。独立后的拉美科学技术仍可分为两个时期:拉美各国步入早期资本主义发展时期,资本主义的发展刺激了拉美生产技术的提高,此时科学也在拉美出现了明显的进步;工业化初期和进口替代工业化时期,此时现代科学技术在该地区立足并开始扩展,特别是随着经济的好转和教育水平的逐渐提高,拉美的科学技术正在进一步融入国际科学技术进步的大潮中。     

Linguists and their work: Epistemic and ethical challenges

This paper aims to show how the specific ethics of scientific undertaking tightly underlies epistemic reflection upon the nature of linguistic work and its outcome. The relationship between linguistics and ethics seems evident at the level of the narrative, i.e. the language in which the basic linguistic findings are established. The article is intended as an introduction to an interplay of linguistics, epistemology and the ethics of linguistic work. The departure point for the argument is the CONTAINER perception of language by linguists, which produces the well-established distinction between internalist and externalist positions. The paper, however, invites the reader to reconsider the tension between internalists and externalists and instead argues for a more general opposition, i.e. between the non-transcendental naturalists (naturalists) and transcendental naturalists (extra-naturalists). The polarity is seen as underpinning the present-day debates, while concurrently transversing the traditionally recognised dichotomies. The distinction promises to be productive both at the level of substantive assessment of linguistic research and at the level of epistemic qualification of the outcome of a linguistic study. Sharp and uncompromising as the naturalist vs extra-naturalist dichotomy seems to hold, the paper offers ways to bridge the gap between the apparently exclusive philosophies. The proposed solution, while seemingly only aesthetic, ultimately touches an ethical dimension as it centres on the appropriate construction of the narrative of linguistic fact-finding, which promotes approximative rather than definitive statements in the scholarly discourse. The desired effect is an ethical consensus underlying the work of a linguist.     

Wonderful secrets of nature. Natural knowledge and religious piety in Reformation Germany

Sixteenth-century Germany witnessed a tremendous flourishing of vernacular literature. An unprecedented number and variety of texts were produced for new groups of readers. This essay analyzes one underexplored genre of this vernacular literature: texts on the natural world. Numerous books on animals, plants, minerals, and natural marvels rolled off the German presses in this period, indicating a widespread curiosity about the natural world. These texts give valuable insight into the views of nature available to a broad lay audience, literate in German but not necessarily in Latin. They reveal a pervasive sense of nature as divinely created and a deep conviction that contemplation of the natural world would lead to greater piety. The divine and the mundane were thoroughly intertwined in vernacular natural histories. While other historians of science have seen the sixteenth century as a period of increasingly secular ways of thinking about nature, I argue for the persistence, and even the intensification, of profoundly religious attitudes toward the natural world.     

Socioeconomic Implications of Telecommunications Liberalization: India in the International Context

Telecommunications restructuring have evolved differently in Asia and Latin America. While Asian governments have moved cautiously in bringing changes to the sector, Latin American nations have implemented radical ownership and market transformations. The Indian telecommunications reform falls in between these two general regional trends. The choice of a high component of competition, increased private participation, and no privatization of the national carrier set conditions that will trigger unique socioeconomic effects. This article identifies and highlights the likely implications of the Indian reform on key economic and social issues, such as the cost of services, cross-subsidies, network interconnection, private investments, universal services, employment, and the possible rise of an information-intensive economy. It does so by comparing and contrasting the Indian experience with dominant reform strategies elsewhere in the developing world.     

The tail end of the moth: clarifying species boundaries

The search by naturalists for good characters upon which to base both classifications and determinations of species led some 19th century entomologists to put their faith in insect genitalia as a criteria by which they could differentiate between and classify forms. Karl Jordan was such an entomologist, who turned to these tiny structures as an aid to his work as a museum curator to identify, describe and classify moths and butterflies. In his writings on the subject he also demonstrated how the attempts of systematists to order the diversity of nature had profound implications for the efforts of biologists to explain the origin of that diversity. However, Jordan's plan of how to do systematics well required much more than convincing biologists of the importance of museum work. It also depended on refining the priorities of a natural history community that worked according to diverse means, priorities and methods during a tumultuous century.     

From farm and family to career naturalist: the apprenticeship of Vernon Bailey

How are scientists made? How, as young adults, have they discovered a scientific vocation and career? Through formal schooling, typically; but in the field sciences also through practical apprenticeship--through work. This essay presents the story of a frontier farm lad who became a career naturalist as a hired collector of animal specimens in the American West. Family and work are the leitmotifs of Vernon Bailey's story. It was family farming--bringing in the hay and finding the cows--that connected Bailey's love of skilled outdoor work with a desire to know nature scientifically. Traveling and working with professional naturalists, he came to see himself as a professional as well. His socialization was less a replacement than a layering of two identities, family and career.     

“国际科学书系”与达尔文主义的传播

在本文中我考察了“国际科学书系”作为出版界的一个独特的试验,在它存在的过程中是否传播了达尔文主义关于科学与宗教的关系的观念。赫胥黎、丁铎尔、斯宾塞和尤曼斯是国际科学书系创办之初的关键人物,他们都是进化论的自然主义者,对于科学与宗教的关系共同持有一种复杂的看法。虽然国际科学书系最初是一个致力于传播进化论自然主义的出版项目,但我将论证,到19世纪80年代初,当该系列最初的创办者们丧失对它的控制时,一条新的路线方针被建立起来。     

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.     

Intercommunication among physics research groups in Latin America

Communication patterns among Latin American research groups in solid state physics are analyzed using the journal articles they published during a five year span. The patterns found may be symptomatic of the stage of development of the countries involved.     

Floridi and Spinoza on global information ethics

Floridi’s ontocentric ethics is compared with Spinoza’s ethical and metaphysical system as found in the Ethics. Floridi’s is a naturalistic ethics where he argues that an action is right or wrong primarily because the action does decrease the ?entropy’ of the infosphere or not. An action that decreases the amount entropy of the infosphere is a good one, and one that increases it is a bad one. For Floridi, ?entropy’ refers to destruction or loss of diversity of the infosphere, or the total reality consisting of informational objects. The similarity with Spinoza is that both philosophers refer to basic reality as a foundation for normative judgments. Hence they are both ethical naturalists. An interpretation of both Floridi and Spinoza is offered that might begin to solve the basic problems for any naturalistic ethics. The problems are how a value theory that is based on metaphysics could maintain normative force and how normative force could be justified when there appear to be widely differing metaphysical systems according to the many cultural traditions. I argue that in Spinoza’s and presumably in Floridi’s system, there is no separation between the normative and the natural from the beginning. Normative terms derive their validity from their role in referring to action that leads to a richer and fuller reality. As for the second problem, Spinoza’s God is such that He cannot be fully described by mere finite intellect. What this translates to the contemporary situation of information ethics is that there are always bound to be many different ways of conceptualizing one and the same reality, and it is the people’s needs, goals and desires that often dictate how the conceptualizing is done. However, when different groups of people interact, these systems become calibrated with one another. This is possible because they already belong to the same reality.     

Inspiration in the harness of daily labor. Darwin, botany, and the triumph of evolution, 1859-1868

Charles Darwin hoped that a large body of working naturalists would embrace evolution after the Origin of Species appeared in late 1859. He was disappointed. His evolutionary ideas at first made painfully little progress in the scientific community. But by 1863 the tide had turned dramatically, and within five years evolution became scientific orthodoxy in Britain. The Origin's reception followed this peculiar trajectory because Darwin had not initially tied its theory to productive original scientific investigation, which left him vulnerable to charges of reckless speculation. The debate changed with his successful application of evolution to original problems, most notably orchid fertilization, the subject of a well-received book in 1862. Most of Darwin's colleagues found the argument of the Origin convincing when they realized that it functioned productively in the day-to-day work of science-and not before. The conceptual force of the Origin, however outwardly persuasive, acquired full scientific legitimacy only when placed "in the harness of daily labour".     

国际最低收入保障计划转移效果研究及启示

自现代福利制度建立以来,减缓贫困和缩小收入差距一直是贯穿一国政府社会政策目标的主线。不论发达国家还是发展中国家,都十分重视对低收入者提供收入援助,建立起了适合自己国情的最低收入保障计划。有鉴于此。对发达国家的社会救助制度、拉丁美洲“有条件的现金转移”项目的贫困减少和收入差距缩小效果研究进行梳理、归纳和总结。从而对中国城乡居民最低生活保障制度的转移效果评估提供有益的借鉴。     

Determinants of ICT Usage among Low-Income Groups in Colombia,Mexico, and Peru

The authors examine the determinants of information and communications technology (ICT) usage among low-income people in three developing countries: Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. Using two composite indicators, they focus on cross-country differences and similarities in ICT usage across gender, age, education, and income levels. The authors’ analysis indicates that the single most important factor limiting the digitalization of low-income people in all three countries was lack of education. The impact of income itself was low although positive. Their findings also suggest that comprehensive measures that mix standard ICTs with very advanced ones can be misleading.     

建构跨学科的中国环境与资源社会学

环境社会学与自然资源社会学是关于社会与自然界相互关系的两个主要研究传统。目前关于这两个分支学科的讨论主要是局限在美国学术界内,而其对于其它国家环境和社会研究学科建设的借鉴作用尚未引起足够的重视,这正是本文在中国的学术背景中提出环境社会学与自然资源社会学相互融合问题的原因所在。环境社会学在中国正处于重要的学科建设阶段,垮学科的中国环境与资源社会学在投身中国"资源节约型、环境友好型"社会的建设中完全有希望实现环境社会学与自然资源社会学的实质融合。     

Openness to international markets and the diffusion of standards compliance in Latin America. A multi level analysis

This study contributes to the debate on the role of openness to international markets for the diffusion of compliance with international standards in developing countries. Relying upon aggregated data for 1995-2005, as well as upon firm-level and secondary data from the Chilean salmon farming industry, the determinants of ISO 9000 and ISO 14001 diffusion at country, industry, and firm level, in Latin American are analysed. Our evidence suggests that openness to international markets acts at different levels. At both the country and industry level, it creates awareness and access to new knowledge therefore providing economic incentives or penalisations for evaluating certification. This effect competes and complements the deliberated efforts and policies in explaining diffusion of certification. At firm level, however, openness to international markets alone does not provide sufficient opportunities to acquire the knowledge required to comply with these standards. In this case, standards’ compliance depends on firm's capability to use relational and search assets, as well as on national and industrial efforts and policies to spread standards’ usage.