作者：
TATUM, JSScience
Technology and Society Program Michigan Technological University Houghton MI 49931 U.S.A.
Ethnographic study of the rapidly growing home-power movement, a movement involving electric power production at the home site mostly from photovoltaic systems, reveals strong associations with environmental values an...
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Ethnographic study of the rapidly growing home-power movement, a movement involving electric power production at the home site mostly from photovoltaic systems, reveals strong associations with environmental values and with a desire to reformulate work roles and the human interactions of community life. As a part of this movement, both the adoption of radical energy efficiency measures and the choice of electricity supply systems more than twice as expensive as traditional sources go well beyond traditional models of consumer behavior. These characteristics of the movement suggest important questions about energy policies that rely on the assumption that traditional patterns of energy-related behavior are close to optimal and need only be examined at the margins. The decision making processes of movement participants also suggest a more formidable capacity for integrating the complex implications of energy choices into coherent action than is generally ascribed to ordinary consumers. In all of these respects, the movement appears to have implications for energy policy making out of proportion to the number of home-power homes (about 25,000) in place in the U.S. as of August 1989.
作者：
JOHNSON, BB1. Science
Technology and Society Program Michigan Technological University 49931 Houghton Michigan USA
Nuclear and chemical waste facilities can be successfully sited, despitenimby responses, if siting programs account for the sources of public concern. Irrational fear is not the main source; instead, waste managers mu...
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Nuclear and chemical waste facilities can be successfully sited, despitenimby responses, if siting programs account for the sources of public concern. Irrational fear is not the main source; instead, waste managers must deal with perceived inequities in the distribution of benefits and costs, and concern about facility safety. Benefit-cost inequities may be dealt with in part by keeping wastes where they are generated, through political restrictions, or by providing economic compensation and political incentives (for example, a local veto). Assuring people of facility safety includes allowing local control (monitoring, health assessment, regulation), and enhancing trust of facility managers through such means as rectifying past mistakes, individual-oriented education campaigns, and negotiation of compensation packages with local residents. These means should reduce —without eliminating—public opposition to local siting of nuclear and chemical waste facilities.
One of the most famous papers ever presented at a history of science meeting was 'The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton's Principia given by the Soviet physicist Boris Hessen at the Second International Congress ...
One of the most famous papers ever presented at a history of science meeting was 'The Socio-Economic Roots of Newton's Principia given by the Soviet physicist Boris Hessen at the Second International Congress of the History of science, held in London in 1931. Although many scholars at the Congress were impressed by Hessen's thesis that intellectual achievements such as Newton's are best explained by examining the social context out of which they arose, oddly enough no one thought to apply this sort of analysis to Hessen's achievement An examination of Soviet Russia in 1931, a time of great political and economic stress, shows that both Soviet physics and Hessen personally were under very unusual pressures. Hessen's main concern in previous months had been to protect Einstein's relativity theory from attacks by vulgar Marxist ideologists. Hessen 's paper on Newton was carefully crafted to support this defensive effort and simultaneously was aimed at strengthening Hessen's own political situation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
作者：
BOWERS, RScience
Technology and Society Program Clark Hall Cornell University Ithaca (USA)
Information on basic research in the physical sciences is not readily available inscience Indicators — 1976, but it can be synthesized from many chapters of the report. The indicators show that there has been a great...
Information on basic research in the physical sciences is not readily available inscience Indicators — 1976, but it can be synthesized from many chapters of the report. The indicators show that there has been a greater decline in real support by the federal government for the physical sciences than for engineering, the social sciences, or the life sciences. Additional information is needed on the response to this reduction in funding. The author concludes by calling for an accounting of the costs and benefits to basic research of reduced funding and suggests items which should be included in such an accounting.
作者：
MARX, L1. Program in Science
Technology and Society Massachusetts Institute of Technology 02139 Cambridge Massachusetts USA
Recent anxieties about the deterioration of the global environment have had the effect of intensifying the ambiguity that surrounds the social roles of scientists and engineers. This has happened not merely, as sugges...
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Recent anxieties about the deterioration of the global environment have had the effect of intensifying the ambiguity that surrounds the social roles of scientists and engineers. This has happened not merely, as suggested at the outset, because the environmental crisis has made their roles more conspicuous. Nor is it merely because recent disasters have alerted us to new, or hitherto unrecognized, social consequences of using the latest science-based technologies. What also requires recognition is that ideas about the social role of modern science and engineering are embedded in, hence mediated by, larger views of the world. Within such American worldviews, moreover, the status of science and engineering is closely bound up with their perceived effect upon the environment. In the dominant culture, accordingly, the respect given to scientists and engineers is in large measure dependent on their ability to play the central role assigned to them in the historical narrative about progress. As the ostensible heroes of that popular story, they are expected to lead the way in realizing the promise of prosperity and general well-being. The environmental crisis surely has diminished the credibility of that story, thereby causing the social role of science and engineering to seem more dubious — more ambiguous. To be sure, the crisis also may have the effect, for very different reasons, of increasing the power and responsibility of organized science. But the late twentieth-century task of damage control cannot possibly elicit anything like the respect accorded to organized science by the earlier belief in progress. It also is important to recall, finally, that the narrative of progress itself has undergone a disillusioning transformation. The early Enlightenment version of the story depicted scientists and engineers working in the service of a social and political ideal that all people could share. But the later technocratic concept of progress, with its sterile instrumentalist
The article discusses the growth of the global Christian media. It reveals that the number of Christian radio and television stations in the world quadrupled in the last quarter of the twentieth century to more than 4...
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The article discusses the growth of the global Christian media. It reveals that the number of Christian radio and television stations in the world quadrupled in the last quarter of the twentieth century to more than 4,000 outlets in 2004 with nearly 2.5 billion estimated listeners. Chief among the outlets are international religious broadcasters (IRB). It asserts that IRB represented one of the most important missionary advances of the twentieth century.
In the late seventies, every account of the causes and effects of the economic dislocations in the advanced countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was an exercise in speculation....
In the late seventies, every account of the causes and effects of the economic dislocations in the advanced countries of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) was an exercise in speculation. Today there is a growing consensus among industrialists, government officials, and academic observers that changes in the conditions of competition in mass markets for standard goods are at the root of the crisis, and that the reorientation of industry toward the production of more specialized goods by more flexible technologies and more skilled workers will be one of the principal outcomes. But the easier it becomes to describe the general dynamic of the crisis, the more obvious it becomes that the key to its resolution in any one place lies in the particularities of local politics, broadly defined as the balance of power and ideas shaping cooperation between labor and capital and the organization of economic interests in relation to the state. All of these determine where firms look for solutions to their problems. And where they look for solutions limits what they find. In some countries, such as Italy and Japan, the accidents of past history lead industry to stumble on workable solutions to the changed market conditions; and as success leads to success, a new model of industrial order seems to emerge almost spontaneously from everyday practice. In other countries, and Austria I will argue is one, past successes have created habits of thought and institutional routines that make it difficult to take full advantage of the many favorable conditions that do exist for a transition to a more flexible, competitive form of industry. By connecting a general discussion of the economic crisis to an analysis, however preliminary and incomplete, of Austria's reaction to it, this article aims to illuminate the changing preconditions of national competitive advatage. It begins with a telescopically compressed account of the structural origin of the cris
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