This paper traces how media representations encouraged enthusiasts, youth and skilled volunteers to participate actively in science and technology during the twentieth century. It assesses how distinctive discourses about scientific amateurs positioned them with respect to professionals in shifting political and cultural environments. In particular, the account assesses the seminal role of a periodical, Scientific American magazine, in shaping and championing an enduring vision of autonomous scientific enthusiasms. Between the 1920s and 1970s, editors Albert G. Ingalls and (...) Clair L. Stong shepherded generations of adult ‘amateur scientists’. Their columns and books popularized a vision of independent non-professional research that celebrated the frugal ingenuity and skills of inveterate tinkerers. Some of these attributes have found more recent expression in present-day ‘maker culture’. The topic consequently is relevant to the historiography of scientific practice, science popularization and science education. Its focus on independent non-professionals highlights political dimensions of agency and autonomy that have often been implicit for such historical actors.The paper argues that the Scientific American template of adult scientific amateurism contrasted with other representations: those promoted by earlier periodicals and by a science education organization, Science Service, and by the national demands for recruiting scientific labour during and after the Second World War. The evidence indicates that advocates of the alternative models had distinctive goals and adapted their narrative tactics to reach their intended audiences, which typically were conceived as young persons requiring instruction or mentoring. By contrast, the monthly Scientific American columns established a long-lived and stable image of the independent lay scientist. (shrink)

In the second half of the eighteenth century, as the magazine publishing industry grew, illustrations became a fundamental element of magazines, and some of the most ambitious publishers began offering readers coloured illustrations. This article examines a series of coloured illustrations published in The Universal Magazine of Knowledge and Pleasure. Launched in 1752, this series depicts subjects from natural history, including birds, animals, and plants. These plates were a critical vehicle in adapting and circulating elite scientific publications to (...) a wide and diverse audience. As material objects, they were challenging to produce, but they were very important to the magazine’s appeal to readers. Offering wondrous visual spectacles in print, the series entwined narratives of curiosity, natural history, exotic travel, and colonialism. (shrink)

Nobody expects the Scientific Inquisition!

This article uses a discourse analytic perspective to analyse sex and relationship advice in a best-selling women’s magazine. It identifies three different interpretative repertoires which together structure constructions of sexual relationships: the intimate entrepreneurship repertoire, organized around plans, goals and the scientific management of relationships; men-ology, in which women are instructed in how to learn to please men; and transforming the self, which calls on women to remodel their interior lives in order to construct a desirable subjectivity. The article (...) considers each repertoire in turn, and also looks at how they work together in order to privilege men and heterosexuality. Discussion focuses in particular on the postfeminist nature of the advice, in which pre-feminist, feminist and anti-feminist ideas are entangled in such a way as to make gender ideologies more pernicious and difficult to contest. (shrink)

What is structuralism? The stock To explain why we should see Quine can translate the natives’ gavagai either as answer is that it is the brainas a structuralist, I would like to revive rabbit or as undetached rabbit’s part, so he child of Ferdinand de his widely discussed thought experican translate his peers’ rabbit either as Saussure, later fostered by Levi-Strauss, ment, featuring a field linguist decipherrabbit or as undetached rabbit’s part. Hence Foucault, Derrida and their allies. But I ing (...) an unknown language spoken by the cultural relativism appears to muthink we have only to confront the ausnatives somewhere in the middle of tate into an “individual relativism”, a terely scientific style of Saussure’s Course nowhere. On hearing the natives exkind of solipsistic skepticism in which de linguistique générale with that of the claiming “Gavagai!” whenever they see a we can be certain neither that we underwritings of the French structuralists to rabbit, the linguist records in his notestand the natives, nor even that we unrecognise an essential discontinuity. The book the tentative translation hypothderstand each other! French philosophers have developed esis gavagai = rabbit. Next, Quine asks us However this is not a conclusion only certain consequences of Saussure’s to imagine another linguist, who, ob- Quine would be willing to draw. He teaching; and, moreover, in a rather nonserving the same behaviour of the same does not say that we cannot understand Saussurean way. natives, proposes the hypothesis gavagai each other (nor even that we cannot un- In my recent book I put forward the = undetached rabbit’s part. Quine then conderstand the natives): that we can is conalternative thesis that the kind of strucsiders ways of deciding which of the tinually testified to by the indubitable turalism advanced by Saussure is in fact two linguists is correct, and concludes, successes of our communication. For present implicitly in the writings of to the astonishment of many readers, Quine, there is no other measure of unpeople not normally associated with the that there is no feasible way to decide; derstanding, save the smoothness and term, namely the (post)analytic phiand hence that both linguists are corfruitfulness of linguistic interaction, the losophers such as Willard Van Orman rect.. (shrink)

The article defends the unification of criteria in the style of academic writing and its transmission thru publication. It includes information of the dossier published 2003 by the University of Granada with the title: “Norm evaluation, editorial quality and diffusion of scientific magazines published by University Complutense of Madrid Press”. It focus in one of the aspects most relevant of the publications: the information the authors must have if they want the greater impact and methodological quality of their (...) publications. Along four chapters it is made a selection of parameters and criteria the scientific publications must meet, following the new national and international standards. It is applied, also, to the implementation and items of the magazine Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofìa. Finally, a selection of norms, thesaurus, and style manuals is presented, with the explicit aim of facilitate the difficult road of the scientific communication. (shrink)

The article defends the unification of criteria in the style of academic writing and its transmission thru publication. It includes information of the dossier published 2003 by the University of Granada with the title: “Norm evaluation, editorial quality and diffusion of scientific magazines published by University Complutense of Madrid Press”. It focus in one of the aspects most relevant of the publications: the information the authors must have if they want the greater impact and methodological quality of their (...) publications. Along four chapters it is made a selection of parameters and criteria the scientific publications must meet, following the new national and international standards. It is applied, also, to the implementation and items of the magazine Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofìa. Finally, a selection of norms, thesaurus, and style manuals is presented, with the explicit aim of facilitate the difficult road of the scientific communication. (shrink)

From one of Time magazine’s 100 most influential people in the world, a rousing defense of the role of science in our lives The latest developments in physics have the potential to radically revise our understanding of the world: its makeup, its evolution, and the fundamental forces that drive its operation. Knocking on Heaven’s Door is an exhilarating and accessible overview of these developments and an impassioned argument for the significance of science. There could be no better guide than Lisa (...) Randall. The bestselling author of Warped Passages is an expert in both particle physics (the study of the smallest objects we know of) and cosmology (the study of the largest). In Knocking on Heaven’s Door, she explores how we decide which scientific questions to study and how we go about answering them. She examines the role of risk, creativity, uncertainty, beauty, and truth in scientific thinking through provocative conversations with leading figures in other fields (such as the chef David Chang, the forecaster Nate Silver, and the screenwriter Scott Derrickson), and she explains with wit and clarity the latest ideas in physics and cosmology. Randall describes the nature and goals of the largest machine ever built: the Large Hadron Collider, the enormous particle accelerator below the border of France and Switzerland—as well as recent ideas underlying cosmology and current dark matter experiments. The most sweeping and exciting science book in years, Knocking on Heaven’s Door makes clear the biggest scientific questions we face and reveals how answering them could ultimately tell us who we are and where we came from. (shrink)

The ArgumentEuropean ethology and North American comparative psychology have been the two most prominent approaches to the study of animal behavior through most of the twentieth century. In this paper I analyze sets of popular articles by ethologist Nikolaas Tinbergen and psychologist Frank Beach, in an effort to understand the contrasting rhetorical styles of the two. Among the numerous ways in which Tinbergen and Beach differed were with respect to expressing the joy of research, the kind of scientific approach (...) adopted, their treatment of animals, their sense of history, and the types of illustrations they chose. In general, Tinbergen‘s articles placed him closer to nature and Beach‘s more in the tradition of dispassionate scientific inquiry. These differences in rhetoric may have been one factor in the greater success of ethology after World War II. (shrink)

The article defends the unification of criteria in the style of academic writing and its transmission thru publication. It includes information of the dossier published 2003 by the University of Granada with the title: “Norm evaluation, editorial quality and diffusion of scientific magazines published by University Complutense of Madrid Press”. It focus in one of the aspects most relevant of the publications: the information the authors must have if they want the greater impact and methodological quality of their (...) publications. Along four chapters it is made a selection of parameters and criteria the scientific publications must meet, following the new national and international standards. It is applied, also, to the implementation and items of the magazine Anales del Seminario de Historia de la Filosofìa. Finally, a selection of norms, thesaurus, and style manuals is presented, with the explicit aim of facilitate the difficult road of the scientific communication. (shrink)

The purpose of this article is to examine the features of media linguistics as an actual scientific field. The concepts of mass communication and mass media are distinguished. On the example of magazine interview an attempt is made to reveal the possibilities of studying this type of text from a position of media linguistics.

To comprehend the special relativity genesis, one should unfold Einstein’s activities in quantum theory first . His victory upon Lorentz’s approach can only be understood in the wider context of a general programme of unification of classical mechanics and classical electrodynamics, with relativity and quantum theory being merely its subprogrammes. Because of the lack of quantum facets in Lorentz’s theory, Einstein’s programme, which seems to surpass the Lorentz’s one, was widely accepted as soon as quantum theory became a recognized part (...) of physics. A new approach to special relativity genesis enables to broaden the bothering “Trinity” group of its creators to include Gilbert N. Lewis. Notwithstanding that the links necessarily existing between all the 1905 papers were obscured by Einstein himself due to the reasons discussed below, Lewis revealed from the very beginning the connections between special relativity and quasi-corpuscular theory of light, as he punctuated: “The consequences which one of us obtained from a simple assumption as to the mass of a beam of light, and the fundamental conservation of mass, energy and momentum, Einstein has derived from the principle of relativity and the electromagnetic theory” (Lewis G.N.& Tolman R.C. “The Principle of Relativity and Non-Newtonian Mechanics”, Philosophical Magazine, 1908). (shrink)

In October 1946 the U. S. Government summoned the representatives of Labor and Management to meet in Washington to try and find a basis for cooperation which would make possible increased productivity. For two days two hundred of the outstanding individuals in this field talked and debated. The results were hardly worth the efforts. The most appropriate summary of the “results” of these meetings was provided by Fortune magazine when it characterized the whole affair as a “meaningless squabble.“.

Solitary Travelers takes its place alongside other revisionary works that assess the contribution of women writers to nineteenth‐century fields of study and disciplines of learning identified as male and associated with science. Lila Harper foregrounds the role of travel narratives in her analysis, arguing that they facilitated access to a scientific vocation for women writers and, indeed, that some women gravitated to travel writing “in a common quest for the professional recognition which seemed to be promised within a territory (...) marked ‘natural philosophy,’ ‘natural history,’ and, finally, ‘science’” . In an interesting and well‐written introduction to her subject, Harper demonstrates her sensitivity to basic historical issues of what constituted “science” in nineteenth‐century England and makes appropriate distinctions not just between the amateur and the professional but also between science as practice, hobby, vocation, and mode of observation.Harper is interested specifically in natural history travel narratives, her introduction tells us, and she chooses for her subjects Mary Wollstonecraft, Harriet Martineau, Isabella Bird Bishop, and Mary Kingsley. In separate chapters studying each of these key figures, she uses biographical data to undergird her analyses of the rhetorical strategies that each woman invoked in her travel writing. Her thorough examination of Wollstonecraft's Short Residence in Sweden adds much‐needed dimension to a writer known mainly for her Vindication of the Rights of Man and Vindication of the Rights of Woman . Locating within Wollstonecraft's text evidence of her interest in the Scandanavian landscape and wilderness, Harper stresses her close observation of the natural world and her apparent commitment to natural history. The subsequent attention in this chapter to Wollstonecraft's relationship with Gilbert Imiay, however necessary it may be to understanding her motivations for travel and need for authority, short‐circuits the analysis of Wollstonecraft's contributions to natural history at the turn of the century.Harper's chapter on Harriet Martineau examines her “ability to shape travel writing into an investigative tool for scientific observation while substantiating her influence on others and her intellectual stature” and to this end is geared also to basic issues of rhetorical strategy and authoritative voice, particularly as they surface in Society in America , Retrospect of Western Travel , and Eastern Life, Present and Past . Martineau is arguably the most written about of the women studied in Solitary Travelers, and consequently much of the material and perspective that Harper presents will be familiar to her readers.The chapter on Isabella Bird Bishop takes note of a crucial shift in the audience of this famous traveler, who began by writing for ladies' magazines but eventually addressed an audience of geographers, explorers, and members of colonial government. Harper sees Isabella Bird Bishop and Mary Kingsley, her final subject, as driven by the ambition to gain access into “the scientific community” , but her analysis is nevertheless far more focused on the content of their respective travel books than on any more tangible activity linked to professionalized science. Harper finds in Kingsley's prose, as in that of her other subjects, evidence of her manipulation of “a feminine discourse” and a corollary concern with “masculine scientific discourse” ; more provocative to my mind is her claim that Kingsley adopted the role of “martyr … both for scientific endeavors and for the future of developing colonial Africa” .This book's chief virtue is its readability. With each of her subjects, Harper provides a comprehensive and yet relatively succinct overview of the ways they used travel to undertake work construed, however loosely, as “science.” Although she claims that Kingsley's travel writing represents the culmination of a tradition of “women's naturalist travel writing,” I found myself somewhat suspicious of the term and yearning for more nuanced investigations of generalized categories such as “masculine scientific discourse.” Although each of the women Harper studies undertook travel writing and incorporated descriptions of the natural environments she encountered into her accounts, does it necessarily follow that they were working within, even helping to construct, a tradition of “naturalist travel writing”? Kingsley would probably have been the only one of these four to identify herself as a naturalist. The introduction to Solitary Travelers seems to promise a study of women using travel to work in natural history, but the book itself looks far more broadly at the rhetoric of authority and the appeal of “science” to these women. (shrink)

Fundamento. La historia de la Neurocirugía en el territorio está estrechamente relacionada con la de otras especialidades como la Cirugía General y la Ortopedia. Tiene sus primeras referencias establecidas en la etapa colonial en el Hospital General, documentadas en el Boletín del Colegio Médico de Camagüey. Objetivo es resaltar la importancia que tuvieron el Hospital General y el Colegio Médico de Camagüey con su boletín en la historia de la Neurocirugía y la Ortopedia. Método. Es una investigación histórica que se (...) basa en la revisión documental y utiliza el submétodo cronológico para establecer el orden de los hechos que se describen. Desarrollo. El Hospital General a partir de su reconstrucción a finales del siglo XIX, se convirtió en el principal centro médico quirúrgico de la provincia en la época colonial. Muchos de los resultados de la actividad asistencial y científica de sus médicos apareció publicada en el Boletín del Colegio Médico de Camagüey, prestigiosa revista científica que se encargó de divulgar los resultados de la medicina camagüeyana y donde aparecen artículos que evidencian cómo cirujanos generales realizaron las primeras intervenciones neuroquirúrgicas y ortopédicas. Conclusiones. Se consideran al Hospital General y al Colegio Médico de Camagüey y su boletín, como elementos indispensables al escribir la historiografía de la Neurocirugía y la Ortopedia en el territorio. Ground: the history of Neurosurgery in this place is closely linked to other specialties like General Surgery and Orthopedics. The first documented references went back to the colonial period in the General Hospital, documented in the bulletin of the medical college in Camagüey. The objective is to highlight the importance of the General Hospital and the medical college and its bulletin in the history of Neurosurgery and Orthopedics in Camagüey. Methods: This a historical investigation that was carried out taking documented revision and using chronologic sub method to establish the order of the facts that have been described. Development: Since the reconstruction of the General hospital at the end of the XIX century, it became the main medical_ surgical center in the province during the colonial period. Many of the scientific results and medical activities were published in the bulletin of the medical college, which became a well-known scientific magazine that was in charge of publishing the medical success in Camagüey. There are articles to prove that general surgeons performed the first neurosurgical and orthopedic interventions. Conclusions: The General hospital, the medical college and its bulletin are considered crucial elements to describe the history of Neurosurgery and Orthopedics in the territory. (shrink)

This is a partial record of correspondence with an intelligent journalist who was given the task, some time in 1998, of preparing an article on pride, as part of a series of articles on so-called 'seven deadly sins' for a scientific magazine. The journalist first asked me to explain how pride could be accommodated withing the framework of ideas being developed in the Cognition and Affect Project at the University of Birmingham.

I was surprised to note the critical tone of the discussion which my friend Leonard B. Meyer recently devoted in these pages to an article on the relation of art and science that I wrote for a popular scientific magazine. For I had believed all the while that in my article I was merely presenting to a general scientific audience a watered-down version of what I thought were Meyer's own views. Evidently I was mistaken in that belief, though (...) I have been unable to fathom just where I went wrong in interpreting Meyer's earlier writings, which, more than any other source, are the provenance of my ideas about the nature of art. Gunther S. Stent, professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author of Molecular Biology of Bacterial Viruses, Phage and the Origin of Molecular Biology, Molecular Genetics: An Introductory Narrative, The Coming of the Golden Age: A View of the End of Progress, and many important scientific papers. In Concerning the Sciences, the Arts—AND the Humanities" , Leonard B. Meyer took issue with views expressed by Professor Stent in "Prematurity and Uniqueness in Scientific Discovery," published in Scientific American. (shrink)

Taking into account the critical analysis of the first scientific magazines written in Spanish during the so-called “República de las letras”, the author explores the progressive constitution of the written press as an ideal public space to express Opinion and Thought. The study looks over the formation of the abovementioned public space from a point of view of its dimension and both as a cognitive and juridic agent. In this article, the contradictions, paradoxes and limitations of that double (...) dimension are explored. The two dimensions, namely the cognitive and juridical, are examined in the context of the public opinion for both the civil society and the scientific one. (shrink)

Historia de una "Crisis": 19S4-1975 trata de exponer el recorrido temático y biográfico de una Revista Filosófica que nace en 1954 y muere en 1975. Se abordan tres núcleos temáticos: objetivos y grupo de personas colaboradores de la revista, temas y autores más frecuentes, y vaciado completo de la revista. Con ello se consigue ofrecer una panorámica de [oque fué y significó esta revista en la vida filosófica española.

El artículo propone la unificación de criterios a la hora de registrar y comunicar las citas y las referencias bibliográficas procedentes de recursos electrónicos. Se basa en la norma ISO 690-2. Se detallan las zonas, elementos, grafía y puntuación que el estudioso en filosofía debe plasmar en su trabajo de investigación.

Scientific and journalistic activities Hrushevskyi had an impact on the activation of Ukrainian national movement, not only for ethnic territory of Ukraine but also among the Ukrainian community in Moscow and St. Petersburg. For example, in 1910 the Ukrainian Moscow invited Hrushevskyi to the presidium of the Ukrainian section of society Slavic culture. Contacts between Hrushevskyi and representatives of the colony intensified after the appearance of Ukrainian colonies on the plans Russian special edition of the magazine on Ukrainian issues. (...) Discovered archival documents show that Hrushevskyi, Petliura consulted on such matters: feasibility journal during this period, thematic focus, editorial staff, Hrushevskiy part in its work. Ukrainians wanted to see his article in the first issue. For this reason, the output magazine was slightly delayed. This issue opens article "Ukraine and Ukrainians," which caused a wide resonance. Further Hrushevskyi was an active author of the magazine. There are regularly published review of his works, news of his public life, the information stays in exile and more. When autumn 1916 M.Hrushevskyi allowed to serve exile in Moscow, he soon actively engaged in social work. The main activities of Hrushevskyi at this time include: he participated in the creation of the first Ukrainian-language magazine in Moscow "Promin", publishing, cooperation with M.Gorky on the preparation of the book "Ukraine and Russia in their spiritual life." In Moscow also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the scientist primarily in the edition volume 12 of Ukrainian Life, which is mainly focused Hrushevskyi. After the February Revolution Hrushevsky was elected chairman of the Central Council and he returned to Ukraine. (shrink)

El artículo aboga por la unificación de criterios en el estilo de escritura académica y en su transmisión a través de la publicación. Recoge información del dosier presentado en el año 2003 por la Universidad de Granada titulado "Evaluación normativa, calidad editorial y difusión de las revistas científicas editadas por el Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad Complutense de Madrid". Se centra en una de las secciones más relevantes de las publicaciones periódicas: la información que deben tener los autores si (...) quieren que sus trabajos tengan mayor impacto y calidad metodológica. A lo largo de cuatro capítulos se realiza una selección de parámetros y criterios a los que deben adaptarse las revistas científicas según los nuevos usos nacionales e internacionales. Se aborda, asimismo, la implementación de los requisitos e itemes normativos a la revista Anales del seminario de historia de la filosofo. Por último se presenta una selección de normas, tesauros y manuales del estilo, con la intención expresa de allanar el dificil camino de la comunicación científica. (shrink)

In 2008 Science Magazine and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science hosted the first ever Dance Your PhD Contest in Vienna, Austria. Calls for submission to the second, third, and fourth annual Dance Your PhD contests followed suit, attracting hundreds of entries and featuring scientists based in the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and the UK. These contests have drawn significant media attention. While much of the commentary has focused on the novelty of dancing scientists and the function of (...) dance as an effective distraction for overworked researchers, this article takes seriously the relationship between movement and scientific inquiry and draws on ethnographic research among structural biologists to examine the ways that practitioners use their bodies to animate biological phenomena. It documents how practitioners transform their bodies into animating media and how they conduct body experiments to test their hypotheses. This ‘body-work’ helps them to figure out how molecules move and interact, and simultaneously offers a medium through which they can communicate the nuanced details of their findings among students and colleagues. This article explores the affective and kinaesthetic dexterities scientists acquire through their training, and it takes a close look at how this body-work is tacitly enabled and constrained through particular pedagogical techniques and differential relations of gender and power. This article argues that the Dance Your PhD contests, as well as other performative modalities, can expand and extend what it is possible for scientific researchers to see, say, imagine and feel. (shrink)

The growing general interest in understanding how neuroscience can contribute to explanations of our understanding and appreciation of art has been slow to find its way to philosophy of literature. Of course this is not to say that neuroscience has not had any influence on current theories about our engagement, understanding, and appreciation of literary works. Colin Martindale developed a scientific approach to literature in his book The Clockwork Muse (1990). His prototype-preference theory drew heavily on early artificial neural (...) network research. Jenefer Robinson has appealed to results from affective neuroscience in her discussion of our emotional engagement with literary works (see Robinson, 2005). More recently literary critics have tried to extend cognitive literary theory in the direction of neuroscience (Ashton, 2005; Byatt, 2006; Young, 2010). This line of research traces its origin to commentary on a 1995 a paper by Herbert Simon in the Stanford Humanities Review (Franchi and Güzeldere, 1995). So, although there hasn't been much going on that could justifiably be called a neuroscience of literature, discussions of neuroscientific research have woven their way into the fabric of some aspects of philosophy of literature and literary theory. Nonetheless, there has been a great deal of resistance to the creeping insurgence of neuroscience into both fields. I will challenge this skepticism in what follows. In section 1, I will sketch a model for research at the crossroads of philosophy and neuroscience of art and suggest how it can be applied to the philosophy of literature. In Section 2, I will introduce situation models and discuss the role they have been hypothesized play in discourse comprehension and narrative understanding outside of literature. In Section 3, I will explore some ways that situation models can contribute to discussions of narrative understanding, appreciation, and the artistically salient features that differentiate literature as a category of art from non-art literary forms like newspaper columns, magazine articles, or biographies. (shrink)

The combative metaphor of Oscience warsO has taken on a predominant position within the collective conscious, from being featured on the programs of scientific meetings to being splashed across the pages of leading national magazines and newspapers. Some in the scientific community perceive their profession to be under siege by members of the academic left, radical environmentalists, religious fundamentalists, eco-feminists, and others. This book, based on in-depth interviews with sixty members of groups with alleged Oanti-scienceO attitudes, examines (...) how pervasive and uniform these critiques are. The research is designed to examine two conflicting hypotheses: 1) that anti-science attitudes reflect a general cynicism about all major social institutions, and 2) that anti-science views are not broadly based but are reflective, instead , of the particular interests of a given social grouping. In the final analysis, Perrucci and Trachtman dig at the root of the so-called Oscience warsO by presenting evidence that the wars are not the product of an overarching suspicion of the institutions at the core of our society, but are instead the product of organized interest groups, which shape the attitudes and beliefs of their respective members. (shrink)

The tendency is strong to take the notion of “conflict of interests” for granted as if it had an invariant meaning and an ethical content independent of the historical context. It is doubtful however, from an historical and sociological point of view, that many of the cases now considered as instances of “conflicts of interests” would also have been conceived and perceived as such in, say, the 1930s. The idea of a “conflict of interests” presupposes that there are indeed interests (...) in conflict. Conversely, as long as there is a consensus among the different groups involved, they will not conceive and even less denounce a given practice as being an instance of a “conflict of interests”. In this article we will show that the content of the discussions over conflicts of interests has changed over time in close relation with the transformations of the research system. In other words: there are social conditions for the emergence of “conflicts of interests”. The changing meaning of the notion is assessed by analyzing the presence of the expression “conflicts of interests” in the magazine Science over the past century. Three different meanings emerge and their content has evolved in close link with the changing structure of the relations between the scientific community first with the State and then with industry. It moved from a situation external to the scientific community to a debate going on inside the scientific community generated by the growing relations between university and industries. (shrink)

“When Species Meet is a breathtaking meditation on the intersection between humankind and dog, philosophy and science, and macro and micro cultures.” —Cameron Woo, Publisher of Bark magazine In 2006, about 69 million U.S. households had pets, giving homes to around 73.9 million dogs, 90.5 million cats, and 16.6 million birds, and spending over $38 billion dollars on companion animals. As never before in history, our pets are truly members of the family. But the notion of “companion species”—knotted from human (...) beings, animals and other organisms, landscapes, and technologies—includes much more than “companion animals.” In When Species Meet, Donna J. Haraway digs into this larger phenomenon to contemplate the interactions of humans with many kinds of critters, especially with those called domestic. At the heart of the book are her experiences in agility training with her dogs Cayenne and Roland, but Haraway’s vision here also encompasses wolves, chickens, cats, baboons, sheep, microorganisms, and whales wearing video cameras. From designer pets to lab animals to trained therapy dogs, she deftly explores philosophical, cultural, and biological aspects of animal-human encounters. In this deeply personal yet intellectually groundbreaking work, Haraway develops the idea of companion species, those who meet and break bread together but not without some indigestion. “A great deal is at stake in such meetings,” she writes, “and outcomes are not guaranteed. There is no assured happy or unhappy ending—socially, ecologically, or scientifically. There is only the chance for getting on together with some grace.” Ultimately, she finds that respect, curiosity, and knowledge spring from animal-human associations and work powerfully against ideas about human exceptionalism. One of the founders of the posthumanities, Donna J. Haraway is professor in the History of Consciousness Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Author of many books and widely read essays, including The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness and the now-classic essay “The Cyborg Manifesto,” she received the J. D. Bernal Prize in 2000, a lifetime achievement award from the Society for Social Studies in Science. (shrink)

These are just a few examples of scientific illiteracy — inane misconceptions that could have been avoided with a smidgen of freshman science. (For those afraid to ask: pencil “lead” is carbon; hydrogen fuel takes more energy to produce than it releases; all living things contain genes; a clone is just a twin.) Though we live in an era of stunning scientific understanding, all too often the average educated person will have none of it. People who would sneer (...) at the vulgarian who has never read Virginia Woolf will insouciantly boast of their ignorance of basic physics. Most of our intellectual magazines discuss science only when it bears on their political concerns or when they can portray science as just another political arena. As the nation’s math departments and biotech labs fill up with foreign students, the brightest young Americans learn better ways to sue one another or to capitalize on currency fluctuations. And all this is on top of our nation’s endless supply of New Age nostrums, psychic hot lines, creationist textbook stickers and other flimflam. (shrink)

Como resultado de búsqueda y recuperación de información registrada en documentos de archivos, libros, revistas y otras fuentes, se confeccionó una obra de referencia, donde se registran pequeñas biografías de 19 camagüeyanos que se desempeñaron como médicos cirujanos, médicos y cirujanos romancistas en los siglos XVIII y XIX. Se dan a conocer los antecedentes que sirvieron de motivación a la realización del estudio y se explica el radio de acción, en el aspecto asistencial, de los que ostentaban estas categorías profesionales. (...) Los datos obtenidos a partir de las fuentes consultadas, fueron el punto de partida para la confección de un material que informa el quehacer de los profesionales de la salud de la región camagüeyana en esa época y que se espera sea de interés y utilidad a los interesados en el tema As a result of the search and collection of information registered in documents, books, magazines and other sources, a reference paper that presents the biographies of 19 Camagüeyan medical surgeons, doctors and surgeons that lived in the XVIII and XIX centuries was made. The antecedents that served as motivation to the realization of the study are made known and the action radius is explained, taking into account their role in medical assistance. This comprises all those that had the above-mentioned professional categories. The data obtained from the sources consulted, constituted the starting point for the making of a material that informs about Camagüeyan health professionals of that time. It is also expected that this scientific paper is of interest and utility for those interested in this topic. (shrink)

Patrick O'Brian, the Aubrey-Maturin Series of twenty novels (Norton, 1970-1999). My appreciation written for WIRED magazine: "I re-read this extraordinary series of novels because of the depth of portrayal of the major and minor characters, but also because they teach me so much about what science and technology were like two centuries ago. O'Brian shows you the world-that-was through the eyes of a Tory naval captain (Jack Aubrey), at sea since the age of 12, working his way up to admiral, (...) dealing with the height of 18th-century technology (sailing ships and celestial navigation). I identify more strongly with his liberally-educated, physician-scientist friend (Stephen Maturin), who went to medical school in Paris during the French Revolution. You see natural history turning into a biological science, bleeding-and-purging medicine starting to learn some physiology -- and, because Maturin is also an intelligence agent for the Admiralty, you see statecraft at work during the Napoleonic Wars. These books strongly remind you about what scientific ignorance and social conventions can do to your mindset, and how the future will likely judge us as well." -- William H. Calvin You can get them all at once, so you can: The Complete Aubrey/Maturin Series (20 volumes). Depending on amazon.com's current discount, this works out to US$15-20 each (and in hardcover). (shrink)

Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium. FemaleMan_Meets_OncoMouse explores the roles of stories, figures, dreams, theories, facts, delusions, advertising, institutions, economic arrangements, publishing practices, scientific advances, and politics in twentieth- century technoscience. The book's title is an e-mail address. With it, Haraway locates herself and her readers in a sprawling net of associations more far-flung than the Internet. The address is not a cozy home. There is no innocent place to stand in the world where the book's author figure, FemaleMan, encounters DuPont's controversial laboratory rodent, (...) OncoMouse. Haraway sees the world of contemporary technoscience as a drama. Information sciences and life sciences are at the center of the dramatic action. Scenes are set in landscapes where maps of human genetic differences are stored in databases, racialized bodies are reconfigured by morphing for photographs in popular magazines, and transgenic mice important to breast cancer research are patented intellectual property. The actors are many, and not all are human. Beginning with the Modest Witness, the key figure in the Science Revolution, Haraway shows us the trouble lurking in race and gender- marked practices for attesting to matters of fact. In later scenes, Haraway explores the kinship relations among the many cyborg creatures produced in the late twentieth-century--in nuclear research, genetic engineering, reproductive technologies, computer-mediated representational practices, and mutations in biological approaches to "race.". (shrink)

Winner, 2020 Body and Embodiment Best Publication Award, given by the American Sociological Association Honorable Mention, 2020 Sociology of Sex and Gender Distinguished Book Award, given by the American Sociological Association How the female body has been racialized for over two hundred years There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor Black women are particularly stigmatized as “diseased” and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat (...) Black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago. Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals—where fat bodies were once praised—showing that fat phobia, as it relates to Black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of “savagery” and racial inferiority. The author argues that the contemporary ideal of slenderness is, at its very core, racialized and racist. Indeed, it was not until the early twentieth century, when racialized attitudes against fatness were already entrenched in the culture, that the medical establishment began its crusade against obesity. An important and original work, Fearing the Black Body argues convincingly that fat phobia isn’t about health at all, but rather a means of using the body to validate race, class, and gender prejudice. (shrink)

In 2009, Time magazine named “biobanks” as one of the 10 ideas changing the world. These organized collections of human biological material and associated data have been identified as “vital research tools in the drive to uncover the consequences of human health and disease.” Since their inception, however, biobanks have faced ethical and legal challenges. Whether these pertain to informed consent, access by researchers, commercialization, confidentiality, or governance, biobanks must continue to address jurisdictional matters, operational difficulties, and normative frameworks that (...) strive to stay abreast of current scientific innovation. Yet, with some biobanks now having completed their recruitment objectives and with research currently being performed on their data and samples, one topic has become the focus of ongoing debates: the return of research results to participants. (shrink)

The British biologist, philosopher, and psychologist Conwy Lloyd Morgan is widely regarded as one of the founders of comparative psychology. He is especially well known for his eponymous canon, which aimed to provide a rule for the interpretation of mind from behavior. Emphasizing the importance of the context in which Morgan was working—one in which casual observations of animal behavior could be found in Nature magazine every week and psychology itself was fighting for scientific legitimacy—I provide an account of (...) Morgan’s vision for the comparative psychologist qua professional psychologist. To this end, I explore the important connection between Morgan and the evolutionary theorist, philosopher, and psychologist Herbert Spencer. It is from Spencer, I contend, that Morgan inherited a number of his key epistemological and methodological concerns about the nascent science of comparative psychology. This extends all the way to the canon, which only works as intended when paired with a Spencerian understanding of mental evolution as a progressive linear sequence. Far from being an incidental residue of a pre-Darwinian time, hierarchy was intentionally built into the very core of Morgan’s scientific comparative psychology. (shrink)

We can be certain that the body does not survive death. Once the heart stops circulating blood, the brain is no longer nourished and begins to decay. On the basis of medical evidence it would seem that, within a quarter of an hour, the personality is irreparably destroyed and the individual ceases to exist. But now there is mounting scientific evidence for a life after death. In At the Hour of Death, veteran psychical researchers Karlis Osis, Ph.D and Erlendur (...) Haraldsson, Ph.D collated compelling evidence that suggests we, as conscious beings, do survive physical death. This book is the product of extensive interviews of over 1,000 doctors and nurses who have been present when cases of "post-mortem existence" have occurred. Extensive computer analyses of their observations have been made. The results are reported in this first truly scientific investigation of the experiences of the dying at the hour of death. What these doctors and nurses have witnessed cannot be explained away by medical, psychological, cultural, or other conditioning. Yet it may answer the fundamental question of human existence. "Finally, a book that probes death and dying with modern research techniques. Osis and Haraldsson present compelling evidence that the deathbed is the gateway to another existence. The visions of the dying appear to be not hallucinations but glimpses through the windows of eternity." -Alan Vaughan, editor of New Realities Magazine "A major contribution to the scientific study of the question of post-mortem existence. -Raymond A. Moody, M.D., author of Life After Life. (shrink)

Problematic perceptions about race damage our society. These attitudes can seem impossible to overcome, but philosophers Dr Jennifer Mensch, at Western Sydney University in Australia, and Dr Michael Olson, at Marquette University in the US, beg to differ. They are compiling a collection of 18th-century philosophical and scientific texts that helped shape the way people saw race across the Western world, and were used to justify colonisation. They believe that by exposing these historical roots of racism, opportunities to improve (...) societal attitudes to race will become easier to identify. -/- This article was produced by Futurum Careers, a free online resource and magazine aimed at encouraging 14-19-year-olds worldwide to pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, maths and medicine (STEM), and social sciences, humanities and the arts for people and the economy (SHAPE). (shrink)

rom Flesh Gordon to Alex in Wonderland , title parodies have been a stock-in-trade of low comedy. We may not anticipate a tactical similarity between the mayhem of Mad magazine's movie reviews and the titles of major scientific works, yet two important nineteenth-century critiques of Darwin parodied his most famous phrases in their headings.

(1) In the first part of this paper, I review Chomsky's meandering journey from the formalism/mentalism of Syntactic Structures, through several methodological positions, to the minimalist theory of his latest work. Infected with mentalism from first to last, each and every position vitiates Chomsky's repeated claims that his theories will provide useful guidance to later theories in such fields as cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience. With the guidance of his insights, he claims, psychologists and neuroscientists will be able to avoid (...) costly dead-end lines of research. -/- (2) This never happened. As I have shown, this never could have happened. (See Johnston, 2018). What has happened, instead, is that current neurolinguistic research (with the arguable exception of the now-dated Lemma Model of Willem Levelt) proceeds without reference to Chomsky. It also wholeheartedly rejects the mentalism of the associated Language of Thought theory of Jerry Fodor. (See Johnston, 2018). -/- (3) I make this argument in the first part of this paper. I would also like to point out that most of my argument was developed in 1972, when I was a graduate student. I know of no other sustained criticisms of Chomsky at that time, and certainly none along the lines I had developed back then. -/- (4) In the second part of this paper, I present my own account of the methodology of science. When I was a graduate student, philosophy of science was dominated by an attempt to describe a methodology common to all the specific sciences, i.e. Hempel’s deductive-nomological model. These days, Hempel’s emphasis on the methodological unity of science has been rejected by such “dis-unity” philosophers of science as Ian Hacking, Patrick Suppes and Nancy Cartwright (see Cat, 2021). -/- (5) I view this change as the swing of a pendulum or, to change the metaphor, a journey from one end point of a continuum to another. As the level of abstraction at which one tries to describe scientific method is raised, the descriptions become increasingly general. Whether or not unity-of-science theories become so general as to be vacuous, is ultimately a subjective judgment. And so I expect that philosophers will eventually become tired of increasingly specific “close to the workbench” descriptions of how scientists work, and begin to turn back to methodological “big pictures”, finding in them powerful abstractions rather than empty irrelevancies. -/- (6) In the second part of this paper, I present my own account of the methodology of science, which I would situate somewhere between the “unity” and “dis-unity” accounts. However, I am not a scientist. My own views about scientific method have three origins: -/- (6a) my work as a graduate student from 1966 until I passed my comprehensive exams in 1973 (at a different university); -/- (6b) reading every issue of Scientific American from 1972 until nearly 2000, (at which point I continued to read it only sporadically, since I concluded that, around that time, it had evolved from a serious science magazine to a popular science magazine); and -/- (6c) my three-year immersion in the cognitive neuroscience of language after I retired, based on repeated study of and note-taking for (Banesh & Compton, 2018), (Kemmerer, 2015), several other books and, finally, numerous articles not hidden behind a paywall. -/- So, as always with my writings: caveat emptor. (shrink)

Physicist Alan Sokal achieved a moment of fame by announcing that he had succeeded in publishing an article in the cultural studies journal Social Text, which was 'sprinkled with nonsense' about developments in quantum gravity physics that supposedly converge with post- modernist themes. Sokal announced his hoax in an article in the liter ary magazine Lingua Franca. This touched off an intense flurry of commentary. Many commentators praised Sokal for exposing shoddy editorial standards in the cultural studies field, while others (...) denounced him for committing scientific fraud. With few exceptions, both Sokal's celebrants and detractors accepted his claim that he did not believe what he said in the Social Text article. Under the circumstances, it is puzzling that they took seriously what he said in Lingua Franca, and did not con sider that he was once again 'successfully pretending to be himself'. In this paper, I suggest that the Lingua Franca article also achieved a parody, and that those who took Sokal seriously were once again taken in by the voice of scientific authority. (shrink)

What are scientists working on today? What do they worry about? What do they think about the working of the brain, climate change, animal experimentation, cancer, and mental illness? Is science progressing or in retreat? Is this century humankind's last? These are just some of the compelling and provocative questions tackled here by twelve of the world's leading scientists and scientific thinkers. In engaging and lucid discussion, they clarify many of the most urgent scientific challenges and dilemmas facing (...) science today. Essential reading for anyone interested in popular science, What Scientists Think is edited and written by Jeremy Stangroom of the highly successful The Philosopher's Magazine and includes a foreword by Marek Kohn, author of A Reason for Everything: Natural Selection and the British Imagination. (shrink)

Against Memetics Przeciw Memetyce (Against Memetics) Article is a critical analysis of theoretical foundations of memetics from the perspective of 2010. In my study, I mainly discuss assumptions adopted by Polish memeticians (papers published mostly in the magazine „Teksty z Ulicy. Zeszyty memetyczne”). The article concerns “biological foundations” of memetics adopted by the researchers, which causes a transfer of the biology’s conceptual paradigm exactly to the field of memetics, since a) the research methodology of memetics has been based on achievements (...) of virology (sic!); whereas, b) memetics itself has been called a scientific theory and; therefore, c) the subject of memetics has been determined and that is the evolution of culture. What is more, the article discusses the issue of so-called qualia. Joining the theory of memesreplicators with qualia is risky; nevertheless, it is not completely unjustified; especially, as memeticians attribute features of qualia to memes. Finally, the deliberations on memes and memetics are directed towards semiotics assuming the understanding of a group of memes as a code of a specific semantic deposit SD, which forms ℝ relation in a specific knowledge representation RW. (shrink)

Drawing on feminist and queer epistemologies, this article is concerned with the post-feminist media’s construction of girls’ sexual subjecthood. Broadly defined as a biopolitical ideal, post-feminism is here related to a set of principles of the neoliberal art of government. It will be argued that these principles ethically sustain the exponential mainstreaming of a post-feminist hermeneutics of adolescence and its programme of governmentality. The article also links post-feminism to a particular methodology of subjectification, ultimately locating its hermeneutics of adolescence within (...) the pornographic and pharmacological imperatives of contemporary capitalism. On the empirical level, the analysis explores how techno-scientific discourses and bodily figurations (namely brains and hormones) enter the discursive apparatus of a Portuguese girls’ magazine, giving ideological ground to a distinctive production of adolescent body-subjects. Post-feminist media markets are finally discussed as a significant segment of the capitalist industrialisation of sexual difference that frames the general problematic of this study. (shrink)

A recent cover of the German news magazine Der Spiegel announced: “Victory over Genes. Smarter, healthier, happier: How we can outwit our genome” (2010). The magazine’s article, instead, emphasizes the importance of epigenetics. According to Florian Maderspacher (2010), who reprinted the cover in his editorial in Current Biology, the relief or “schadenfreude” about the apparent victory over genes—which the cover, the article, and commentaries to it reveal—is, in part, a German phenomenon. It echoes “a latent anti-scientific attitude in parts (...) of the German public,” which for historic reasons is particularly strong with regard to genetics: “After all, the idea that people’s properties—good or bad—are determined by .. (shrink)

Educationalists introduce students to literature search strategies that, with rare exceptions, focus chiefly on the location of primary research reports and systematic reviews of those reports. These sources are, however, unlikely to adequately address the normative and/or metaphysical questions that nurses frequently and legitimately interest themselves in. To meet these interests, non‐research texts exploring normative and/or metaphysical topics might and perhaps should, in some situations, be deemed suitable search targets. This seems plausible and, moreover, students are encouraged to ‘read widely’. (...) Yet accepting this proposition creates significant difficulties. Specifically, if non‐research scholarly sources and artistic or literary (humanities) products dealing with normative/metaphysical issues were included in what are, at present, scientifically orientated searches, it is difficult to draw boundaries around what – if anything – is to be excluded. Engaging with this issue highlights problems with qualitative scholarship's designation as ‘evidence’. Thus, absurdly, if qualitative scholarship's findings are labelled evidence because they generate practice‐relevant understanding/insight, then any literary or artistic artefact (e.g. a throwaway lifestyle magazine) that generates kindred understandings/insights is presumably also evidence? This conclusion is rejected and it is instead proposed that while artistic, literary, and qualitative inquiries can provide practitioners with powerful and stimulating non‐evidential understanding, these sources are not evidence as commonly conceived. (shrink)

Les technologies hypermédias ont le potentiel de multiplier les sources d'information et de favoriser une communication scientifique plus ouverte à la discussion et au débat. Cependant, la lecture des documents hypermédias entraîne des difficultés, telles que la désorientation, pour de nombreux lecteurs. Nous avons évalué un ensemble d'hypertextes publiés par des revues de vulgarisation scientifique à la lumière des recommandations ergonomiques issues d'études expérimentales. Il en ressort que la plupart des publications offre une lisibilité médiocre, ignorant souvent les recommandations publiées. (...) Ensuite, notre étude expérimentale réalisée avec 59 lecteurs d'un dossier de vulgarisation, en version papier et hypertexte, nous a permis de confirmer le premier constat et d'identifier des sources de difficulté. Les lecteurs de l'hypertexte avaient une moindre compréhension du dossier et une plus grande perception de charge cognitive, bien que leur satisfaction soit aussi forte que celle des lecteurs du papier. La présente expérience montre des résultats significatifs en faveur de la version papier, mais pas de rejet a priori de la technologie. Nous présentons quelques suggestions pour améliorer la lisibilité des revues en ligne.Hypermedia can potentially increase the number of information sources and improve scientific communication by facilitating public debate. However, reading hypermedia documents can lead to difficulties such as disorientation for a number of readers. We investigated a corpus of hypermedia reports from online science magazines in the light of ergonomic recommendations based on results from experimental studies. We found that most publications showed poor levels of readability and did not follow the published recommendations. An experiment involving 59 readers and one popular science report from our initial corpus published in print and hypertext versions confirmed our first observations and allowed us to identify sources of difficulty. Hypertext readers showed poorer comprehension performance and higher perception of cognitive load. However satisfaction levels were high for hypertext and paper readers. The present study shows significant results in favor of the print format, but bias against technology from readers. We conclude with some suggestions to improve the readability of online science magazines. (shrink)

...If, in some places, backward science determines the remaining period by the lack of optimism only by the number 123456789, then our progressive science expands it to 987654321, which is eight times more advanced than theirs. However, due to the inherent caution of scientists, both sides do not specify the measuring unit of reference — year, day, hour or minute are meant. Leonid Leonov. Collected Op. in ten volumes. Volume ten. M.: IHL, 1984, p.583. -/- The modern men being as (...) a rule is proceeding in three relatively autonomous, but immanently coexisting, and each penetrating dialectically through other, and each contesting even cruelly with other, and each more or less dominating on other, differently in various societies, worlds: the first one of the barbarity, the second one the culture, the third one the civilization... Barbarity is the mode of coexistence of autonomous human societies based on the unlimited will to act so as subject wants to do without any limitations of his activities... Culture is the mode of coexistence of autonomous human societies based on the most ancient testaments, customs, traditions etc of the highestly sacrified appearence... Civilisation is the mode of coexistence of autonomous human societies based on the reasoned or legitimated by social contracts, by profits, by expediency and so more constitutions, institutions etc... -/- Andrei Melnikov-Pechersky in his epic "In the Woods" says that there was a movement among the Old Believers in Russia, or a current that proclaimed Kostroma the new and, it seems, the only true Jerusalem, in an apocalyptic sense, of course, which in its spiritual scale was probably not inferior to the Bogomils, shakers, Mormons, or else and the whole Reformation in potential. In Western Europe, every more or less convex nuance of the history of a state or region (even if it is a small San Marino) is overgrown with almost a dozen institutions, not always state ones, by the way, in which almost every sneeze and step of very ambivalent historical subjects in a broad sense is studied. Especially in the young, but very pretentious America of the United States, which embodies all world justice. In our country, for example, even many leading humanitarian specialists do not realize the spiritual value of the Ipatievsky MONASTERY. The Russian writer Boris Shiryaev, who died quite a long time ago and in a very far abroad, devoted a special part of his documentary and artistic epic of wanderings "The Inextinguishable Lampada" to an entertaining and instructive, tragic fate of a kind of village monarchy in some Villages of the Kostroma province (I could not identify the area, and, frankly, I did not really try) in the early years The Soviet government. At the same time, all Russians learn about the French emperor Napoleon almost with their mother's milk how many percent of cyanide potassium was found in his hair, they reflect on Lermontov's "Airship" (probably, just not to "memorize" the imposed "Borodino" by heart). The events, of course, are incomparable, but the fact is significant. The outstanding national artist (if not to say a thinker of the Chesnyakov level) Grigory Pavlovich Kusochkin was glorified wherever, in whatever catalogues he was not included. Paris, London, New York, St. Petersburg, Moscow... To look at some smear of luminaries like Picasso or Modigliani, international tourist routes are organized in the restaurant toilet using the finest marketing technologies, and we did not even know Grigory Pavlovich by sight until, thank God, a series of TV shows on all Russian channels was dedicated to him in one gulp. Why is this happening? Is it a consequence of poverty or the result of the conscious policy of the ruling elite of the country and the world? The regions of the Kostroma Region are Austria, Switzerland, Bavaria, Armenia, Moldova, and Georgia... Georgia! I served in the army there. In this small but very great country, judging even by the appearance of its President Shevardnadze, although it is smaller than the Kostroma region, there are so many different, but Georgian-speaking peoples! Kakhetians, Meskhetians, Imereti, Iveretians, Mingrelians, Khevsurs... Adjarians (mostly Georgian-speaking Muslims) even have their own autonomy. And some peoples are not Georgian—speaking at all — South Ossetians, Abkhazians, Kurds, Armenians, Greeks, even Assyrians. In the Kostroma Region, and in any Russian "province" — not much less: there are plenty of the same Georgians or Armenians everywhere, quite moderate, loyal, and so on. Having, as a rule, their own officially registered associations within the framework of cultural autonomy. Well done! And Israel! He is the only one with all his "illegal" (and I am for the fact that every nation knows better where its ancestral lands are) territories half the size of the Kostroma region. The total number of Jews worldwide, according to the "Soviet Encyclopedic Dictionary" in 1987, is about 14 million. Meanwhile, the fate of Israel is being preoccupied (it is very instructive how he achieved this!) all the united nations of the world. In the Kostroma Region and its diaspora, it seems to everyone, and especially to its semi-migrant, Varangian leadership. I don't care if they build a public atomic bomb here in the form of a nuclear power plant or not. Because they do not know the value of this land, the greatness of its spirit. Kostroma is a holy land. I will immediately make a reservation that by Kostroma I mean not only the modern region, but the entire area that has ever historically been associated with Kostroma. The USSR is also a part of the great historical Russia. In this sense, even the entire era of the Russian Romanov Empire is the Kostroma region. Or: many toponymic objects of our native land are called mysteriously beautiful: Sharya, Shunga, Shekshema, Sholezhka, - we need to find out what kind of peoples — and where are they now? — we left such euphonious archetypal combinations, because these are our Kostromsky peoples, these are our Kostroma people. Or, say, the classic of American and world sociology Pitirim Alexandrovich Sorokin writes in his autobiographical scientific novel "The Long Way" that he studied at the Khrenovskaya (what a strong word!) teachers' seminary of Kostroma province, but in an administrative row for propaganda activities, gendarmes were taken by sledge to the prison of the city of Kineshma - is this not a fact for Kostroma, and primarily for him, local history, although Kineshma has long been attributed to the Ivanovo region, and Pitirim Alexandrovich is buried on the other side of the planet?! I have not the slightest doubt that Kostroma provided spiritual food, gave birth to and nurtured a huge intellectual diaspora with extremely valuable material on a national, global scale. And this is both in direct and indirect order, in the form of a chain reaction. Apparently, it is easy for an intelligent person to grow up in Kostroma, but it is impossible to live, and somewhere on the contrary. Therefore, it is not surprising that the geneticist academician D. K. Belyaev, who was born in the village of Protasov near Nerekhta, very close to Kostroma, glorified Moscow and Siberia with his discoveries and practical results, which immeasurably enriched the Soviet state treasury with foreign exchange income from the sale of the most valuable fur grown according to the biotechnology developed by him in a much shorter time than it usually turns out in nature. And in Kostroma, most likely, few people know who he is and what he is famous for. I will focus in more detail on one of the aspects of his great life. This happened back in the so-called pre-Perestroika times. In a series of his speeches, Dmitry Konstantinovich, based on the results of his and colleagues' research, emphasized, in his opinion, the determining role of the biological factor in shaping the content of human essence, of course, only in a philosophical, conceptual aspect. For some reason, this was opposed by a geneticist, as they say, persecuted at one time by the "senile" in selectionism (including human nature) by the Michurino-Lysenkoists, academician N. P. Dubinin, which personally remains incomprehensible to me until now. With a grateful curtsey to Academician Dubinin and his point of view, the famous French humanist, member of the Politburo of the French Communist Party Lucien Sav appeared on the pages of the Communist magazine. The material was clearly titled: "Problems are not only scientific, but also political." He very indecently attributed the views of academician Belyaev to "a reactionary ideology that tries to put genetics at its service, and more broadly, biology, in order to present all kinds of social inequalities of all kinds as inherent in nature itself"(1). I would like to see any ideology that does not try to "put this or that at its service," much less something worthwhile... A little later, the editorial of the Communist hit the "biologizers", and soon Dmitry Konstantinovich was gone. In short, it is only on the example of our fellow countrymen that you can write interesting, world-class essays on science and its history, but instead our scientists should fit their global potencies into a page and a half (good yet. if not entirely at their own expense), and then for at least three years to guess whether they will be published or not. Now it no longer surprises me how at one time, when, after reading the listener card I filled out, the sweetest girl from the IPKPON office at USU congratulated me for something. It turned out that the dean of the Faculty of Philosophy of USU, doctor, professor, Honored Scientist, and now academician Konstantin Niko-laevich Lyubutin is a countryman, Kostromsky, or rather Manturovsky by origin, as I write below in the notes — we are Kostromendors. To him, my fellow citizen in the most subtle micropatriotic dimensions, I owe a lot in my professional and social development, even in survival. Because that's how it often turns out: you can be born here, sometimes you can live here... It's very hard. Maybe the Kostroma origin of an outstanding Russian historian of philosophy, organizer of science and education, educator and friend of a galaxy of people devoted to the Motherland and the cause is not a great milestone in the history of the region, but name me at least a dozen Russian cities on the scale of Kostroma, from where such intellectual ones would come out into the world and light luminaries like ours. No matter who you take from the world significance of the pillars of national (and world, and foreign, - even the great Rabbi of Lubavitcher spent three years in exile in a Campfire, — I learned from some foreign voices) history, literature, culture in general, technology, science and so on - you will always find someone, which is very directly related to Kostroma. Pushkin, Lermontov, Gorky. Alexander Nikolaevich Ostrovsky, Pisarev, Uspensky, Katenin, Florensky, Savrasov, Kustodiev, Dyagilev, Mikhalkov, Alexander Alexandrovich Zinoviev; writers, artists, entrepreneurs, revolutionaries, inventors, politicians... In some world-famous for its classic Russian provincialism, Kologriv has been storing, figuratively speaking, unique sketches, if not of Leo-Nardo da Vinci himself, then certainly of his school, almost since the seventeenth century. And not only that. Nevertheless, the well-known Chukhloma to the Fatherland, in addition to thinkers of the rank of Rozanov and Zinoviev (where should domestic philosophers mature and not be born, if not in Chukhloma, Manturov or Khrenknowswhere?), gave an actor of amazing, national, originality — Mikhail Pugovkin, who can not be confused with anyone, a role that no one will repeat. (shrink)