什么是世界一流大学

世界上很多发展中国家正致力于探索如何建立世界一流的大学。然而,对“世界一流”这个概念至今还没有一致的解释。本文尝试对这一概念进行可操作化的定义,首先在概括有关世界一流大学的发言和文章的基础上,回顾世界一流大学的有关特点;其次,本文通过建立回归模型,分析影响大学排名的决定因素。如果排名靠前的大学可以被认为是达到了世界水平,那么对排名的决定因素进行分析将可以预测世界一流大学的决定因素。     

Reading Instruments: Objects, Texts and Museums

Science educators, historians of science and their students often share a curiosity about historical instruments as a tangible link between past and present practices in the sciences. We less often integrate instruments into our research and pedagogy, considering artefact study as the domain of museum specialists. We argue here that scholars and teachers new to material culture can readily use artefacts to reveal rich and complex networks of narratives. We illustrate this point by describing our own lay encounter with an artefact turned over for our analysis during a week-long workshop at the Canada Science and Technology Museum. The text explains how elements as disparate as the military appearance of the instrument, the crest stamped on its body, the manipulation of its telescopes, or a luggage tag revealed the object’s scientific and political significance in different national contexts. In this way, the presence of the instrument in the classroom vividly conveyed the nature of geophysics as a field practice and an international science, and illuminated relationships between pure and applied science for early twentieth century geologists. We conclude that artefact study can be an unexpectedly powerful and accessible tool in the study of science, making visible the connections between past and present, laboratory and field, texts and instruments.     

Letters to the editor

This study examines editorial photography in nine major erotica magazines to determine how pictures vary as a function of the social class, gender and sexual preference of the intended readership. The analysis reveals that upwardly‐mobile, heterosexual men are treated to idealized images, whereas working‐class, heterosexual men are presented with more mundane yet highly‐sexualized images. Heterosexual women are provided with photographs of nude males in a low‐sexual context. Magazines for homosexual men present images, except for gender, very similar to those created for upwardly‐mobile, heterosexual men. These patterns are discussed from a functionalist perspective to show how erotica magazines contribute to social‐order maintenance.