1,720,970 research outputs found
The Live Creature and Ethereal Things
No full textAstrophysics and particle physics probe the limits of the known, the limits of language and concept, and present a kind of abstraction or transcendence that can free us from commonsensical thinking. Yet they are undertaken by human beings in real world laboratories and observatories, driven, shaped and influenced by those people’s cultural backgrounds, education, funding requirements, teaching obligations, family commitments, societal norms, aspirations, rivalries and dreams. How do these human beings co-create knowledge about the structure and mechanics of the universe, and how is this process and knowledge put forth into the world?
In this essay, which forms the introduction to the edited book 'The Live Creature and Ethereal Things: Physics in Culture' (eds. Triscott, N., and Crisp, F.), I approach the subject of bringing the physics into the human experience - or bringing the human back to the centre of physics - from two angles, one a discussion of the culture of physics, questioning the notion of a ‘no culture’ of physics, the other a consideration of the expression of physics as a human, material activity into wider society. These two perspectives broadly parallel those of the artist and physicist contributors to the book. In addition, I interweave some thoughts on the value of artistic practice to physics itself and the wider cultural expression and societal role of physics
The Live Creature and Ethereal Things: Physics in Culture
No full textThe Live Creature and Ethereal Things: Physics in Culture is a collection of texts, images and conversations that present fundamental physics and the physics of the universe as human activities and cultural endeavours.
Cosmology and particle physics probe the furthest limits of the knowable and have the potential to provide transcendental aesthetic and conceptual experiences, enriching our everyday lives. These explorations of the otherworldly and the ethereal are undertaken by human beings in real world laboratories and observatories. Yet in our Western European culture, physics tends to be represented as factual, abstract, “hard”, and removed from our lived human experience. This lack of a sense of how physics unfolds through its processes, personalities and places leads to a gap in the cultural imaginary and social understanding of physics, which also impacts on those who might choose to study this complex subject or go into it as a profession.
Featuring texts, images and conversations by physicists, artists and curators, the book examines the role of personality, power and culture in physics and discusses the value of cross-pollination between the practices of contemporary art and physics. These reflections shed light on the people and material practices of physics: from the vast underground particle physics laboratory at CERN, Geneva, used by half of the world’s particle physicists, and deep underground neutrino observatories in the UK, Italy and Antarctica, to super-computers that construct astonishing visualisations of the evolution of the universe
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
Phase Velocity and F-T-L in the G.V.D.
No full textMost people take for granted the idea that ‘nothing can travel faster than light’. So typical in our minds is this belief, so fundamental, that we must have learned it very early on - and learned not to question it. When I do tell people that that statement is not entirely accurate, or rather that its only accurate in a very specific context - one in which we do not usually have access to - most do not immediately believe me. It is however with these sorts of cognitive anomalies or dissonances that we may begin to wonder or consider which other inaccuracies do we hold in our regular day to day lives
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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