Alexander Russell, 1861 - 1943

1943 ◽  
Vol 4 (12) ◽  
pp. 427-428

The scientific world has suffered a great loss in the death of Dr Alexander Russell; for in the domain of electrotechnics he was an expert mathematician, while in the social world he set a splendid example of modest kindliness and unfailing good nature. He never said a hard word about any one. He was born at Ayr on 15 July 1861, entered Glasgow University in 1877 and took his M.A. degree there (in mathematics and physics) with first-class honours. He received the degree of LL.D. in 1924. He went to Caius College, Cambridge, in 1882, and was a wrangler in the Mathematical Tripos in 1886. I met him first in the ’eighties, and I still can picture to myself the bonnie tall Scotch laddie who was so friendly and so full of quiet Scotch humour. After a few years of teaching mathematics at Cheltenham College and the Oxford Military College he joined the staff of Faraday House, which was then just beginning its career, and in 1909 he became Principal, which position he filled most successfully until he retired in 1939. During this period he wrote many papers for the scientific societies and journals, in particular a series of articles in the Electrician on ‘Alternating Currents’. He finally collected these and published them in book form in two volumes. He wrote several other books, including a Life of Lord Kelvin, and he received honorary degrees from more than one university. He was president of various scientific societies, and a vice-president of the Institute of Physics. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1924. But it was not his technical but his social work that made Faraday House what it is. He had many old students all over the world, many of them holding important posts. When on leave they all came to see their old Principal, telling him their experiences and their difficulties, and always getting from him wise and valuable advice for the future. They now cherish his memory with real affection. He was President of the Physical Society of London from 1922 to 1924, and gave his presidential address on ‘Developments in physical science’ ( Proc. Phys. Soc. 35, 1).

2017 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 839-855
Author(s):  
David Shackleton

H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) has hitherto been read in two principal scientific contexts: those of evolutionary biology and thermodynamic physics. Numerous critics have situated the romance in the context of evolutionary biology and contemporary discourses of degeneration (McLean 11–40; Greenslade 32–41). Others have discussed it in the context of thermodynamic physics. For instance, Bruce Clarke has read The Time Machine as “a virtual allegory of classical thermodynamics,” and shows that its combination of physical and social entropy reflects a wider transfer within the period of concepts and metaphors from physical science to social discourses of degeneration (121–26). Neatly linking these scientific contexts with issues of form, Michael Sayeau has argued that the social and physical entropy that are themes of the romance are reflected in its narrative structure, which manifests a type of narrative entropy, and thereby raises the spectre of the end of fiction (109–46).


It would be impossible in an obituary of ordinary length to convey any idea of the many-sided activity by which Lord Kelvin was continually transforming physical knowledge, through more than two generations, more especially in the earlier period before practical engineering engrossed much of his attention in importunate problems which only he could solve. It is not until one tries to arrange his scattered work into the different years and periods, that the intensity of his creative force is fully realised, and some otion is acquired of what a happy strenuous career his must have been in early days, with new discoveries and new aspects of knowledge crowding in upon him faster than be could express them to the world. The general impression left on one's mind by a connected survey of his work is overwhelming. The instinct of his own country and of the civilised world, in assigning to him a unique place among the intellectual forces of the ast century, was not mistaken. Other men have been as great in some special department of physical science: no one since Newton—hardly even Faraday, whose limitation was in a sense his strength—has exerted such a masterful influence over its whole domain. He might have been a more learned mathematician or an expert chemist; but he would then probably have been less activity, the immediate grasp of connecting principles and relations; each subject that he tackled was transformed by direct hints and analogies brought to bear from profound contemplation of the related domains of knowledge. In the first half of his life, fundamental results arrived in such volume as often to leave behind all chance of effective development. In the nidst of such accumulations he became a bad expositor; it is only by tracing his activity up and down through its fragmentary published records, and thus obtaining a consecutive view of his occupation, that a just idea of the vistas continually opening upon him may be reached. Nowhere is the supremacy of intellect more impressively illustrated. One is at times almost tempted o wish that the electric cabling of the Atlantic, his popularly best known achievement, as it was one of the most strenuous, had never been undertaken by him; nor even, perhaps, the practical settlement of electric units and instruments and methods to which it led on, thus leaving the ground largely prepared for the modern refined electric transformation of general engineering. In the absence of such pressing and absorbing distractions, what might the world not have received during the years of his prime in new discoveries and explorations among the inner processes of nature.


Author(s):  
Вероника Викторовна Катермина ◽  
Анна Александровна Гнедаш ◽  
Мария Витальевна Николаева

В статье приводятся результаты комплексного анализа лингвистических паттернов коммуникации топовых российских журналистов в официальных аккаунтах социальных платформ ВКонтакте, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Целью данной статьи является изучение лингвистических паттернов, продуцируемых топовыми журналистами в своих онлайн-аккаунтах, способных задавать векторы восприятия политического контента, создаваемого главными лидерами государств, и приводящих к трансформации дискурсивных полей как в онлайн-, так и в офлайн-пространстве. Среднестатистический россиянин тратит почти половину дня на онлайн-взаимодействие, почти 50 % этого времени приходится на популярные социальные медиа, в том числе интернет-серфинг в среде официальных аккаунтов топовых журналистов. Потребление данных паттернов рядовыми пользователями / читателями, находящимися под «силовым» влиянием дискурсивного поля, становится определяющим фактором в процессе выработки и принятия индивидуальных / коллективных решений, реализация которых формирует то или иное социальное действие как в онлайн-, так и в офлайн-пространстве. Согласно данным мониторинга социальных медиа и СМИ компанией «Медиалогия», нами были выбраны аккаунты Алексея Венедиктова, Владимира Соловьева, Владимира Познера, Маргариты Симоньян и Ксении Собчак в ВКонтакте, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Эмпирической базой (дата-сеты) стали все посты, комментарии и ветки дискуссий, отражающие реакцию данных журналистов и общественности на Послание Президента РФ В. В. Путина Федеральному Собранию РФ от 15 января 2020 г. Дата-сеты были получены машинным методом сплошной выборки и подвергнуты комплексному анализу, включившему сетевой, лингводискурсивный, фолксономический анализ. В результате проведенного исследования были сделаны выводы о том, какими лингводискурсивными особенностями характеризуются посты топовых журналистов в популярных социальных сетях; как характеризуются лингвистические паттерны, продуцируемые топовыми журналистами в онлайн-пространстве; как различается контент, создаваемый журналистами в разных социальных сетях; каковы особенности этих различий в зависимости от специфики самих социальных платформ; как влияет политический контекст на лингвистические паттерны, продуцируемые топовыми журналистами в онлайн-пространстве. The article presents the results of a comprehensive analysis of the linguistic communication patterns of top Russian journalists in the official accounts of the social platforms VKontakte, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. The purpose of this article is to study the linguistic patterns which are produced by the top journalists in their online accounts and which can set vectors of interpretation of political content created by state leaders and cause the transformation of discourse fields both in online and offline spaces. The average Russian spends almost half a day on online interaction, almost 50% of this time is spent on popular social media, including surfing the top journalists’ official accounts. The linguistic patterns produced by journalists in their online accounts are capable of transforming discursive fields both online and offline. The consumption of these patterns by ordinary users / readers who are under the influence of the discourse field becomes a determining factor in the process of making individual / collective decisions, the implementation of which forms a particular social action both in online and offline spaces. According to “Mediologia” monitoring data of social and mass media, the authors selected the accounts of Aleksey Venediktov, Vladimir Solovyev, Vladimir Pozner, Margarita Simonyan, and Ksenia Sobchak in VKontakte, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. The data sets of the study are all the posts, comments, and threads of discussions that reflect the reaction of the above-mentioned journalists and the public to the Presidential Address to the Federal Assembly on 15 January 2020. The data sets were gained through a continuous sampling method and underwent a comprehensive analysis including network, linguo-discursive, folksonomic analyses. As a result of the study, the authors have drawn the conclusions on what linguistic and discursive features characterize the posts of the top journalists in popular social networks; the way the linguistic patterns produced by the top journalists in online space are characterized; the way the content created by the journalists in various social networks differs; what is the specificity of these differences depending on the specificity of the social platforms themselves; the way a political context affects the linguistic patterns produced by the top journalists in online space.


1971 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 323-358 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. M. Macleod

The development of government participation in the support of research is one of the most significant characteristics of nineteenth-century science. As public money became available for science, the social framework of research underwent a profound transformation. This process of transformation is not easy to define, but the response of scientific societies and institutions sometimes provides significant clues.


Author(s):  
Daniel Juan Gil

In the seventeenth century, the hope for resurrection starts to be undermined by an emerging empirical scientific world view and a rising Cartesian dualist ontology that translates resurrection into more dualist terms. But poets pick up the embattled idea of resurrection of the body and bend it from a future apocalypse into the here and now so that they imagine the body as it exists now to be already infused with the strange, vibrant materiality of the “resurrection body.” This “resurrection body” is imagined as the precondition for the social identities and forms of agency of the social person, and yet the “resurrection body” also remains deeply other to all such identities and forms of agency, an alien within the self that both enables and undercuts life as a social person. Positing a “resurrection body” within the historical person leads seventeenth-century poets to use their poetry to develop an awareness of the unsettling materiality within the heart of the self and allows them to reimagine agency, selfhood, and the natural world in this light. In developing a poetics that seeks a deranging materialism within the self, these poets anticipate twentieth-century “avant-garde” poetics. They do not frame their poems as simple representation nor as beautiful objects but as a form of social praxis that creates new communities of readers and writers that are assembled by a new experience of self-as-body mediated by poetry.


Author(s):  
Alex Rosenberg

Each of the sciences, the physical, biological, social and behavioural, have emerged from philosophy in a process that began in the time of Euclid and Plato. These sciences have left a legacy to philosophy of problems that they have been unable to deal with, either as nascent or as mature disciplines. Some of these problems are common to all sciences, some restricted to one of the four general divisions mentioned above, and some of these philosophical problems bear on only one or another of the special sciences. If the natural sciences have been of concern to philosophers longer than the social sciences, this is simply because the former are older disciplines. It is only in the last century that the social sciences have emerged as distinct subjects in their currently recognizable state. Some of the problems in the philosophy of social science are older than these disciplines, in part because these problems have their origins in nineteenth-century philosophy of history. Of course the full flowering of the philosophy of science dates from the emergence of the logical positivists in the 1920s. Although the logical positivists’ philosophy of science has often been accused of being satisfied with a one-sided diet of physics, in fact their interest in the social sciences was at least as great as their interest in physical science. Indeed, as the pre-eminent arena for the application of prescriptions drawn from the study of physics, social science always held a place of special importance for philosophers of science. Even those who reject the role of prescription from the philosophy of physics, cannot deny the relevance of epistemology and metaphysics for the social sciences. Scientific change may be the result of many factors, only some of them cognitive. However, scientific advance is driven by the interaction of data and theory. Data controls the theories we adopt and the direction in which we refine them. Theory directs and constrains both the sort of experiments that are done to collect data and the apparatus with which they are undertaken: research design is driven by theory, and so is methodological prescription. But what drives research design in disciplines that are only in their infancy, or in which for some other reason, there is a theoretical vacuum? In the absence of theory how does the scientist decide on what the discipline is trying to explain, what its standards of explanatory adequacy are, and what counts as the data that will help decide between theories? In such cases there are only two things scientists have to go on: successful theories and methods in other disciplines which are thought to be relevant to the nascent discipline, and the epistemology and metaphysics which underwrites the relevance of these theories and methods. This makes philosophy of special importance to the social sciences. The role of philosophy in guiding research in a theoretical vacuum makes the most fundamental question of the philosophy of science whether the social sciences can, do, or should employ to a greater or lesser degree the same methods as those of the natural sciences? Note that this question presupposes that we have already accurately identified the methods of natural science. If we have not yet done so, the question becomes largely academic. For many philosophers of social science the question of what the methods of natural science are was long answered by the logical positivist philosophy of physical science. And the increasing adoption of such methods by empirical, mathematical, and experimental social scientists raised a second central question for philosophers: why had these methods so apparently successful in natural science been apparently far less successful when self-consciously adapted to the research agendas of the several social sciences? One traditional answer begins with the assumption that human behaviour or action and its consequences are simply not amenable to scientific study, because they are the results of free will, or less radically, because the significant kinds or categories into which social events must be classed are unique in a way that makes non-trivial general theories about them impossible. These answers immediately raise some of the most difficult problems of metaphysics and epistemology: the nature of the mind, the thesis of determinism, and the analysis of causation. Even less radical explanations for the differences between social and natural sciences raise these fundamental questions of philosophy. Once the consensus on the adequacy of a positivist philosophy of natural science gave way in the late 1960s, these central questions of the philosophy of social science became far more difficult ones to answer. Not only was the benchmark of what counts as science lost, but the measure of progress became so obscure that it was no longer uncontroversial to claim that the social sciences’ rate of progress was any different from that of natural science.


1984 ◽  
Vol 50 ◽  
pp. 1-22 ◽  
Author(s):  
G. J. Wainwright

Fifty years ago on 17 February 1934 the Prehistoric Society of East Anglia held its annual business meeting in Norwich. Professor Breuil was elected President for that year, Professor Miles Burkitt as Vice-President and Dr J. G. D. Clark as Honorary Editor. Other elections at that meeting included Mr Stuart Piggott to Council and O. G. S. Crawford to membership of the Society. It had been founded in 1908 when on 17 October a circular had been issued by W. G. Clarke of Norwich and W. D. Dutt of Lowestoft to over 100 interested people inviting them to form an East Anglian Society of Prehistorians. That circular and a selection of replies to it still exist in the records of the Society that have recently been rediscovered. Dr W. A. Sturge of Icklingham Hall agreed to become the first President and, having received 72 favourable replies, an inaugural meeting was held on Monday 26 October 1908 at Norwich.For the better part of three decades the Society maintained an active, if somewhat parochial, role in the development of British Prehistory. Its interests were East Anglian in orientation and with little exception directed to the study of palaeolithic man and the flint implements that might (or might not) be ascribed to human activity.By 1930, however, some members of the Society were contemplating change. As C. S. Phillips (1980, 113) has pointed out, it was the only body in Britain devoted entirely to Prehistoric studies, but whilst its membership had originally been local to East Anglia, by the fourth decade of the century it was expanding outside the region.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 283-301
Author(s):  
Ali Khadivar ◽  
Mahmoud Samaie ◽  
Moussa Ahmadian

Abstract The research articles(RAs) as the dominant genre of academic writing can be accounted as the sites of reproduction of unequal power relations and dominance. Through critical discourse analysis of epistemological and ontological underpinnings and subsequently methodological aims and values of positivist paradigm as social structures, this article aims to foreground power and ideology stricken latent aspects of empiricist RAs. Research as a social practice mediates between the social structures and the RAs as social events. Textual analysis of practical arguments presented mostly in the pedagogical implications part revealed that the scientific world views manifest themselves as the premises of these arguments. The premises can provide reasons for actions (Searle’s,2010, social ontology theory). The reasons can signify the empiricist interests as the global concerns. They exclude the rival paradigms or ways of understanding the world. These world views maintain the dominance of Western societies on global academic and social discourses.


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