scholarly journals Behind the Exhibit Displaying Science and Technology at World's Fairs and Museums in the Twentieth Century

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
The United States ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Science Museums ◽  
Public Display ◽  
Scientific Heritage ◽  
International Exhibitions

The latest in the Artefacts series, Behind the Exhibit examines scientific heritage and narratives behind public display of scientific artifacts in national and international exhibitions and science museums throughout the twentieth century. Developed from the Artefacts XX conference, convened 20–22 September 2015 at the Leonardo da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology in Milan, during Expo Milan 2015, this volume brings together museum curators and historians of science and technology to present case studies from the United States, Europe, Russia, and Japan. What emerged is a study of the tension between basic science and technological applications, the multilayered role of history, the appearance and disappearance of artifacts, and the search for a balance between entertainment and education.

scholarly journals Debating as an educational method to science and citizenship

2007 ◽  
Vol 06 (03) ◽  
pp. C08
Author(s):  
Sara Calcagnini
Keyword(s):  
Da Vinci ◽  
Science And Technology ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
The Other ◽  
Science Museums ◽  
Educational Method ◽  
The Real ◽  
The Public ◽  
Aims Of Science ◽  
The One

If one of aims of science today is to respond to the real needs of society, it must find a new way to communicate with people and to be acquainted with their opinions and knowledge. Many science museums in Europe are adopting new ways to actively engage the public in the debate on topical scientific issues. The Museum of Science and Technology "Leonardo da Vinci" in Milan (partner of the SEDEC project) has thus experimented some formats for dialogue with teachers and with the public in general. Our experience shows that museums can be places where science and the public on the one hand and democracy on the other meet.

scholarly journals The Ginevra de’ Benci Effect: Competence, Morality, and Attractiveness Inferred From Faces Predict Hiring Decisions for Women

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michela Menegatti ◽  
Sara Pireddu ◽  
Elisabetta Crocetti ◽  
Silvia Moscatelli ◽  
Monica Rubini
Keyword(s):  
Da Vinci ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Hiring Decisions ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
Hiring Decision ◽  
Multiple Dimensions ◽  
Attractive Face

The present study examined the role of morality, competence, and attractiveness as perceived from faces in predicting hiring decisions for men and women. Results showed that for both female and male applicants, facial competence significantly predicted the hiring decision directly and indirectly, through the mediation of the overall impression. Decisions concerning female applicants were, however, significantly predicted by multiple dimensions—that is, facial morality, facial competence, and attractiveness—with the mediation of the overall impression. Facial competence was the only significant predictor of impression and, in turn, hiring decision about men. These findings resonate the motto Virtutem forma decorat, “Beauty adorns virtue,” painted by Leonardo da Vinci on the reverse side of the portrait of Ginevra de’ Benci, and suggest that women’s chances of getting a job are less than those of men whenever they do not show a moral and competent and attractive face.

Planning or Improvisation

2020 ◽  
pp. 116-120
Author(s):  
Alasdair Roberts
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
The United States ◽  
Unintended Consequences ◽  
Governance Strategies ◽  
The Face ◽  
Imperfect Knowledge

This chapter assesses the role of planning in the design of governance strategies. Enthusiasm for large-scale planning—also known as overall, comprehensive, long-term, economic, or social planning—boomed and collapsed in twentieth century. At the start of that century, progressive reformers seized on planning as the remedy for the United States' social and economic woes. By the end of the twentieth century, enthusiasm for large-scale planning had collapsed. Plans could be made, but they were unlikely to be obeyed, and even if they were obeyed, they were unlikely to work as predicted. The chapter then explains that leaders should make plans while being realistic about the limits of planning. It is necessary to exercise foresight, set priorities, and design policies that seem likely to accomplish those priorities. Simply by doing this, leaders encourage coordination among individuals and businesses, through conversation about goals and tactics. Neither is imperfect knowledge a total barrier to planning. There is no “law” of unintended consequences: it is not inevitable that government actions will produce entirely unexpected results. The more appropriate stance is modesty about what is known and what can be achieved. Plans that launch big schemes on brittle assumptions are more likely to fail. Plans that proceed more tentatively, that allow room for testing, learning, and adjustment, are less likely to collapse in the face of unexpected results.

Geology Emerges as a Science

2021 ◽  
pp. 6-33
Author(s):  
Elisabeth Ervin-Blankenheim
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Charles Lyell ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Forms Of Life ◽  
Principles Of Geology ◽  
The Way

This chapter and the next one cover the way in which geology came to be a science in its own right, spanning the early centuries of geology. Lives of crucial individual scientists from the sixteenth century to the beginning of the twentieth century are discussed by relating the stories and discoveries of each, commencing with Leonardo da Vinci and continuing with the European geologists, including Nicholaus Steno, Abraham Werner, James Hutton, Charles Lyell, and early fossilists such as Etheldred Benet. Steno, Werner, Hutton and Lyell, and other early geologists revealed and wrote about the basic principles of geology, painstakingly untangling and piecing together the threads of the Earth’s vast history. They made sense of jumbled sequences of rocks, which had undergone dramatic changes since they were formed, and discerned the significance of fossils, found in environments seemingly incongruous to where the creatures once lived, as ancient forms of life. They set the stage for further research on the nature of the Earth and life on it, providing subsequent generations of geologists and those who study the Earth the basis on which to refine and flesh out the biography of the Earth.

Technology’s Retreat: The Decline of Rural Telephony in The United States, 1920-1940

1987 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 295-327
Author(s):  
Claude S. Fischer
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Diffusion Of Innovation ◽  
Technology Diffusion ◽  
Social Role ◽  
The United States ◽  
Knowing How ◽  
The Social

One million fewer American farms had telephones in 1940 than in 1920; the instrument was disconnected in at least a third of the farm homes that once had it. Knowing how and why this “devolution” (Mattingly and Aspbury, 1985) occurred can expand our understanding of the social role of technology, diffusion of innovation, and more generally, twentieth-century modernization in America.

POLITICAL ATHEISM: THE SECULARIZATION AND LIBERALIZATION OF AMERICAN PUBLIC LIFE

2018 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 249-277 ◽  
Author(s):  
DAVID SEHAT
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Republican Party ◽  
Public Reason ◽  
Public Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Overlapping Consensus ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
The Past

The United States is a deeply Christian country, but over the last sixty years American public culture has become increasingly detached from religious concerns. Christian activists, when not speaking within the Republican Party, have had to assert their privilege in a way that they never had to do in the past. In spite of their efforts, the role of Christianity in culture and politics has seen a more or less continuous decline. This essay examines how and why that process occurred. It puts forward a schematic narrative that relies on the concepts of public reason, the avant-garde, and an overlapping consensus to explain how different people came together in the mid-twentieth century to secularize and liberalize American public life.

Brainstorming Revisited

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 50-69
Author(s):  
Claudia Mareis
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
The United States ◽  
World War ◽  
Creativity Research ◽  
Human Creativity ◽  
Self Actualization ◽  
History Of

This article discusses a particular strand in the history of creativity in the mid-twentieth century shaped by an instrumental, production-oriented understanding of the term. When the field of creativity research emerged in the United States after World War II, debates around creativity were driven not only by humanist intents of self-actualization but also by the aim of rendering individual creative potentials productive for both society and economy. Creativity was thus defined in terms of not mere novelty and originality but utility and productivity. There was a strong interest, too, in methods and techniques that promised to systematically enhance human creativity. In this context, the article looks at the formation of brainstorming, a group-based creativity method that came into fashion in the United States around 1950. It discusses how this method had been influenced by concepts of human productivity developed and applied during World War II and prior to it. Using the brainstorming method as a case in point, this article aims not only to shed light on the quite uncharted history of creativity in the mid-twentieth century, but also to stress the conducive role of allegedly trivial creativity methods in the rise of what sociologist Andreas Reckwitz has identified as the “creativity dispositif”: a seemingly playful, but indeed rigid, imperative in post-Fordist and neoliberal societies that demand the constant production of innovative outcomes under flexible, yet self-exploitative working conditions.

scholarly journals Anatomy of a Dispute: Leonardo, Pacioli and Scientific Courtly Entertainment in Renaissance Milan

2004 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 115-135 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Azzolini
Keyword(s):  
Fifteenth Century ◽  
Da Vinci ◽  
Leonardo Da Vinci ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Social Advancement

AbstractHistorians have recently paid increasing attention to the role of the disputation in Italian universities and humanist circles. By contrast, the role of disputations as forms of entertainment at fifteenth-century Italian courts has been somewhat overlooked. In this article, the Milanese "scientific duel" (a courtly disputation) described in Luca Pacioli's De divina proportione is taken as a vantage point for the study of the dynamics of scientific patronage and social advancement as reflected in Renaissance courtly disputes. Pacioli names Leonardo da Vinci as one of the participants in the Milanese dispute. In this paper I argue that Leonardo's Paragone and Pacioli's De divina proportione are likewise the outcome of the Milanese "scientific duel." By challenging the traditional hierarchy of the arts, they both exemplify the dynamics of social and intellectual promotion of mathematicians and artists in the privileged setting of Renaissance courts, where courtly patronage could subvert the traditional disciplinary rankings.

The Imprisonment Boom of the Late Twentieth Century

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mona Lynch ◽  
Anjuli Verma
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Racial Disparities ◽  
The United States ◽  
Federal State ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century ◽  
Culturally Embedded

This essay reviews trends since the early 1980s in the number of inmates confined in American prisons as well as possible factors contributing to the massive increase in prison admissions (ranging from highly functionalist structural accounts to more culturally embedded midrange ones). Defining features of the late twentieth century imprisonment boom are discussed, encompassing global notoriety; persistent racial disparities; the role of felony drug filings, convictions and sentences in fueling both the scale and racial disparities of imprisonment; and regional and jurisdictional variations in trends across three planes: federal-state, interstate, and intrastate. Finally, the recent “stabilization” of incarceration rates in the United States is described and possible implications considered.

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