1,720,993 research outputs found
Axiomaticism in science development.
No full textThis study represents a theoretical synthesis of the history of exact science. The persistent epistemological regularities identified in the study includes: (1) The Principle of Axiomaticism, or the Heraclitean-Confucian Principle. Every branch of physics and mathematics culminated in an axiomatized format. In fact, axiomatization and scientific underst and ing are equivalent. The historical roots of axiomaticism are traced; its congeniality with Aristotle's "teleological economy" is pointed out; so is its identity with Ernst Mach's "economy of mental effort." (2) The Principle of the Expansive Pools of Measurables. Knowledge in physics has been accumulated by way of empirical and intellectual manipulations of a number of physical measurables. The progress of physics corresponds to the "expansions" of "a pool of measurables," in one, or two, or all three possible manners. (3) The Principle of "Saving the Appearances." This ancient idea is now formulated as a principle in contrast to another ancient idea of "thinking up the true causes." In generalizing Pierre Duhem's work, this study shows that competition between these two attitudes has been persistent. (4) The Prinicple of Quasi-Deterministic Accumulation of Physical Science. Physical sciences are characterized by rigid internal logic. Did the historical building-up of physical sciences follow accidental courses? The answer is no, although neither was it historically deterministic. Since the accumulations of related positive results of sciences are sequential and orderly, they are described as quasi-deterministic. The study has been conducted with the observation that the whole history of physics serves well to illustrate all these historical regularities. The success of this viewpoint is evinced in a profound presentation of the Copernican Revolution, the Newtonian Synthesis, and the Chemical Revolution. As an epistemological exposition of the history of science, this study uses its own definition of science. In the beginning chapter, a thorough and exact definition of science is proposed, on the one h and , as an antidote to the movement that declares that "science is not all that scientific" and , on the other h and , as a successor to a number of definitions formulated by authors since antiquity. The study, however, concedes incompleteness in collecting and analyzing past definition of science.PhDScience historyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161851/1/8812969.pd
Order out of chaos: Automobile safety, technology and society, 1925 to 1965.
No full textThis dissertation examines the way experts in the United States, using the rhetoric of science and the rationale of safety, controlled access to and shaped the character of the automobile and road as a technological system. Mass automobile ownership in the 1920s freed individuals from the tyranny of timetables and the prison of rural isolation. But to many observers, the annual tens of thousands of traffic fatalities and the millions of collisions and injuries were grim evidence that Americans had become too free and were mixing dangerously, including across the lines of race, gender, ethnicity, class, and age. The study centers on four groups of experts: traffic engineers, traffic police, forensic psychiatrists, and driving educators. This network of safety experts established driver control as the cornerstone their effort. Laws governing driver behavior were developed by traffic engineers and enforced by increasingly sophisticated police forces. Police treated traffic transgressions as vice crimes and as the cause of most accidents. Drivers deemed accident-prone were sent to forensic psychiatrists who measured their physical, emotional, and intellectual suitability for road security. A quantitative and qualitative analysis of court clinic records shows that these evaluations were biased against the oldest and youngest drivers, as well as African Americans and the foreign born. The work of early safety experts was instrumental in establishing the belief that imbuing drivers with a proper attitude toward society would reduce collisions. Their Progressive ideology sought to balance individual freedom with social control. Progressive educators therefore used driver education not only to make automobile travel safer but as a powerful tool for adjusting young people to modern life. This study offers further evidence that large-scale technological systems embody the societal outlook of their creators. History shows that safety policy is only partly motivated by lifesaving. It provides a new approach to automotive history which emphasizes both the new freedoms and the new controls brought on by automobility. Finally, it shows that safety policy has been, and still is, controlled by a narrow collection of experts working with a particular view of the relationship between the individual and society.PhDAmerican historyGeographyHealth and Environmental SciencesPublic healthSocial SciencesTransportationUrban planningUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/130646/2/9811020.pd
Medicine and government in early modern Wuerttemberg.
No full textIn the fourth decade of the eighteenth century, a group of physicians in the employ of Wurttemberg's government attempted to restructure the legal framework for the practice of the healing arts in the duchy. This dissertation analyzes the conditions that led to the attempted reform and the reasons for its failure. It seeks to discern the forces shaping the medical profession in the later eighteenth century, and to contribute to knowledge of the function of institutions in retarding and in accelerating innovation. The investigation begins in the later seventeenth century, when morale was low among physicians and there was little hope for employment except as a member of the public health apparatus. At the upper levels of the medical bureaucracy, some Leibmedici and Hofmedici were growing dissatisfied with traditional patronage practices that frequently assigned familial and political association a higher value than medical knowledge and experience. At the bottom of the medical hierarchy, the Physici in the towns were faced with intransigent and conservative local notables who also employed a patronage system to fill public health positions. Using materials from government and university archives, the dissertation depicts the practice of medicine in early modern Wurttemberg. Here, as in other European polities, abuses by untrained healers were rife and health practitioners exceed the traditional bounds of their competence. Public health physicians were unable to control "medicastering" not only because of their relatively small numbers and limited resources, but also because attempts to impose regulation met with resistance from local magistracies who resented central government interference with the affairs of the commune. Analysis of the legislative reform of 1740 and its ultimate defeat reveals the vision of the ideals of health care espoused by university educated public health physicians, and also why the political and social dynamics of early modern Wurtemberg precluded its acceptance by other professional bureaucrats. Finally, the dissertation discusses the great portent of the medical code adopted in 1755 for the direction of medicine in the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, and debates briefly the significance of the notion of "professionalism" as applied to early modern medicine.PhDScience historyEuropean historyUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/161881/1/8813019.pd
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
koamabayili/VECTRON-author-checklist: VECTRON author checklist
No full textWe have done our best to complete the author checklist relating to the use of animals in the hut study. Note that the objective for the hut study was to evaluate the IRS treatment applications for residual efficacy against Anopheles mosquitoes, including the local An. coluzzii mosquito population. Cows were only used to attract mosquitoes into the huts and no tests were carried out directly on the cows. The author checklist is intended for use with studies where experiments are carried out on animals, which is why we have had such difficulty in completing this for the hut study, as many of the questions do not relate to how the cows were used
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