Through the years, Majorana's life - and his mysterious disappearance in particular - inspired manifold representations. The wide range of links to science, philosophy and literature have allowed deep reflections crossing the borders of genre: from theatre to fiction, from essays to novels and cartoons. Reconstructing the character of Majorana by thinking back to all the interpretations he has been given allows us to place him in a wider and more organic context, which goes beyond the functional aspects of fiction. In this wider prospective, we can clearly see why the still unresolved Majorana
This article will discuss and comment some of the results obtained by the application of the questionnaire "Public perception of Science and Technology". The questionnaire is a translated and adapted Portuguese version from the original in Spanish produced by the group Centro de Estudios sobre Ciencia, Desarrollo y Educación Superior of Buenos Aires, Argentina.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Carlos VogtRafael de Almeida EvangelistaMarcelo Knobel
n June, the 23rd of last year, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) published its Draft Report on the Environment, a report on environmental quality. The EPA is an autonomous federal agency known for its reliability on environmental studies and safeguards. Its Draft Report is considered by Science, the journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), the nation’s most scientifically reliable analysis on environmental quality. The latest Draft Report makes no reference whatsoever to the changes in global climate.
In the field of scientific communication in Europe, science centres have gained increasing importance over the last ten years. Italy, beyond the City of Science in Naples, is also planning the set up of more science centres throughout the country. Their hands-on style makes them something between a museum and a fun fair and, beyond the issue of merit, no doubt the success of many science centres also depends on the fun offered. It is important then to be able to assess to what extent people can actually make use of the proposed themes. This report tries to point out the dialogue opportunities
Compared to expert-to-expert - or peer-to-peer - communication, the language of popular science is characterised by a wider use of figurative devices. This applies to all forms of verbal and non-verbal communication. Specialized texts are characterised by a restricted and rigorous lexicon both in spoken and - even more so - in written language. Namely, a widespread use of terms which are monosemic, unambiguous and non context-dependent terms, and a minimum amount of natural linguistic choices. The few polysemic, ambiguous and context-dependent words encountered in a scientific text are highly
In the last few years, a continuous series of food alerts have caught the attention of the media and the public in Europe. First, eggs and pork contaminated with dioxins; then, "mad cow" disease, while, all along in the background, a battle against genetically modified plants has been in progress. These food alerts have had complex repercussions on the perception of risks associated with food production. Experts have often been divided over these issues, and the uncertainty of scientific data has been indicated on more than one occasion as one of the factors that influence risk perception
In a brief article published by Science last October, British scientists stated that the expression "Public Understanding of Science" (PUS), which was traditionally employed in Anglosaxon societies to refer to the issue of the relationship between science, technology and society, is out-of-date. It should be replaced by "Public Engagement with Science and Technology" (PEST), a new acronym that clearly invites to reconceptualise the relationship between science and the public. The new approach involves the engagement of the public or rather the publics of science, through dialogue, in
In recent weeks, Britain’s Better Regulation Task Force report on scientific research regulation asked the Government to evaluate the risks associated with the development of Nanosciences and Nanotechnologies. The Government was also asked to prove its implementation of a specific policy to protect human, animal and environmental safety, were it to be threatened by the development of this emerging field of knowledge. These requests may sound rather alarming. However, objectively speaking, the precautionary attitude of the Better Regulation Task Force does not differ greatly from that of the U
The purposes of the STUDIO 3D evaluation were to collect information about the impact upon student learning as a result of participating in the STUDIO 3D Project, as well as to elicit information for program improvement. Areas of inquiry include recruiting and retention, impact on project participants, tracking student impacts, and the project as a whole.
Knight-Williams collaborated with five aquaria to solicit the reactions of a random sample of their aquaria members to the PBS broadcast of the Shape of Life series. The collaborating aquaria were located in geographically diverse regions of the country and included: The Seattle Aquarium, Cabrillo Marine Aquarium, Dauphin Island Sea Lab, Shedd Aquarium, and New York Aquarium. The report focuses on questionnaire data provided by both the non-viewer respondents and by viewers of two or more episodes from the series.
Multi-site evaluations are becoming increasingly common in federal funding portfolios. Although much thought has been given to multi-site evaluation, there has been little emphasis on how it might interact with participatory evaluation. Therefore, this paper reviews several National Science Foundation educational, multi-site evaluations for the purpose of examining the extent to which these evaluations are participatory. Based on this examination, the paper proposes a model for implementing multi-site, participatory evaluation.
This article describes the Multimedia Arts Education Program (MAEP), an ongoing, intensive after school computer-mediated art technology program begun in 1996 by the Tucson Pima Arts Council (TPAC) in Tucson, Arizona. This five-semester program targets at-risk middle school youth from disadvantaged families. Students worked with professional artist/teachers, learning to do computer graphics and publishing, language arts and word processing, computer animation and video production.