Learning Activities in Physics Using Students Worksheet Based on Predict-Observe-Explain (POE)

This research aims to describe students learning activities through the implementation of students worksheets based on POE. This study was descriptive qualitative research. The research was conducted in one of the Islamic Senior High School in Bantul, Yogyakarta on Circular Motion material. The research subject was determined through random sampling. The number of subjects in this research consisted of 26 students in the first year. Data were collected using an observation sheet in 3 meetings observed by two persons and the interview. The results of the analysis obtained are expressed in terms of percentages and then interpreted in the form of scientific narratives. Data analysis results show that the students’ worksheet based on POE can be used to enhance students’ learning activities, especially in visual activities, oral activities, writing activities, motor activities, and mental activities with the most dominant activities is writing activities, and the weakest one is oral activities. Students feel that using students’ worksheets based on predict-observe-explain makes them involved directly in the demonstration or the practicum, can create their curiosity, make they even more seriously in the study, increase the interest in studying physics and help each other with their friends. But, the students’ confidence and speaking ability must be the concern, so students are not reluctant to share their idea in front of the class.

Climate change communication on 4chan’s /pol/ board 2015-2019: An automated content analysis

4chan.org is a popular imageboard Web site based on an unrivalled culture of anonymity. In the past, 4chan has often gained the public spotlight for its role in harbouring alt-right extremism, antisemitism and white supremacism, particularly within the controversial board /pol/, a forum dedicated to political discussions with over 140,000 posts per day and millions of unique monthly users globally. In response to a growing interest in online communication on climate change, this paper applies automated content analysis through probabilistic topic modelling to analyse how the online discourse around climate change has evolved on this platform over a five-year period between 2015 and 2019. Analysing a sample of 216,525 /pol/ posts, this study finds that, despite its reputation as a platform dominated by hate speech, discussions on climate change among /pol/ users remain primarily based on scientific content. However, this appears to be on a reversing trend, as discussions on race and nationalism are steadily overtaking scientific narratives. This paper also finds that a specific type of nationalism, labelled as climate nationalism is on the rise on this platform. Lastly, this study shows that interest in the status of scientific consensus on climate change, often considered a staple of discussions on climate change, is progressively falling in relevance.

How to Tell the Story?

In this paper I investigate the problems of data collection, data analysis and the final communication of the results of our research, when doing social science that we, ourselves, are part of. Central to this are the concepts life world, language games and stories and narratives. How do we collect stories and narratives in the field, how do we construct scientific narratives that are both reliable and valid? And finally, how do we, as researchers present our newly constructed narrative to a – hopefully – interested audience? That is, how do you, as a consumer of scientific narratives, read what I have been writing? Finally, I will discuss the problem of handing over research results to the people that we are doing research with. This is all done within a framework of a pragmatic constructivist paradigm.

To What Inanimate Matter Are We Most Closely Related and Does the Origin of Life Harbor Meaning?

The question concerning the meaning of life is important, but it immediately confronts the present authors with insurmountable obstacles from a philosophical standpoint, as it would require us to define not only what we hold to be life, but what we hold to be meaning in addition, requiring us to do both in a properly researched context. We unconditionally surrender to that challenge. Instead, we offer a vernacular, armchair approach to life’s origin and meaning, with some layman’s thoughts on the meaning of origins as viewed from the biologist’s standpoint. One can observe that biologists generally approach the concept of biological meaning in the context of evolution. This is the basis for the broad resonance behind Dobzhansky’s appraisal that “Nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. Biologists try to understand living things in the historical context of how they arose, without giving much thought to the definition of what life or living things are, which for a biologist is usually not an interesting question in the practical context of daily dealings with organisms. Do humans generally understand life’s meaning in the context of history? If we consider the problem of life’s origin, the question of what constitutes a living thing becomes somewhat more acute for the biologist, though not more answerable, because it is inescapable that there was a time when there were no organisms on Earth, followed by a time when there were, the latter time having persisted in continuity to the present. This raises the question of where, in that transition, chemicals on Earth became alive, requiring, in turn, a set of premises for how life arose in order to conceptualize the problem in relation to organisms we know today, including ourselves, which brings us to the point of this paper: In the same way that cultural narratives for origins always start with a setting, scientific narratives for origins also always start with a setting, a place on Earth or elsewhere where we can imagine what happened for the sake of structuring both the problem and the narrative for its solution. This raises the question of whether scientific origins settings convey meaning to humans in that they suggest to us from what kind of place and what kinds of chemicals we are descended, that is, to which inanimate things we are most closely related.

Scientific Narratives in Contemporary Egyptian Pocket Novel Series

Popular literature occupies a significant part of the publishing market in Egypt and has had quite a large group of admirers for many decades. It is noteworthy that, in this sector, the series of Egyptian pocket stories published by the Modern Arab Association occupy a special position. It should be noted that the authors of the stories are heavily inspired by the latest scientific discoveries in many fields. In their works, medical facts, advanced technologies and genetic engineering not only set the background for the adventures of the characters, but are often the key elements of the plot and literary composition, as shown in this article.

Generalized word shift graphs: a method for visualizing and explaining pairwise comparisons between texts

A common task in computational text analyses is to quantify how two corpora differ according to a measurement like word frequency, sentiment, or information content. However, collapsing the texts’ rich stories into a single number is often conceptually perilous, and it is difficult to confidently interpret interesting or unexpected textual patterns without looming concerns about data artifacts or measurement validity. To better capture fine-grained differences between texts, we introduce generalized word shift graphs, visualizations which yield a meaningful and interpretable summary of how individual words contribute to the variation between two texts for any measure that can be formulated as a weighted average. We show that this framework naturally encompasses many of the most commonly used approaches for comparing texts, including relative frequencies, dictionary scores, and entropy-based measures like the Kullback–Leibler and Jensen–Shannon divergences. Through a diverse set of case studies ranging from presidential speeches to tweets posted in urban green spaces, we demonstrate how generalized word shift graphs can be flexibly applied across domains for diagnostic investigation, hypothesis generation, and substantive interpretation. By providing a detailed lens into textual shifts between corpora, generalized word shift graphs help computational social scientists, digital humanists, and other text analysis practitioners fashion more robust scientific narratives.

The bad expert

We focus on two cases in which participants narrate and perform a new culture of expertise by constructing a bad expert, a reviled or dangerous figure of scientific credibility gone wrong. We show that a key mechanism in the construction of expertise cultures is the use of antithesis performances, which are performances of scientific and professional credibility that rely on telling stories about a scientific enemy or ostracized Other. By performing the antithesis of the bad expert, actors help generate turning points in expertise, allowing new cultures of expertise to emerge. Our two case studies are: (1) feminist therapeutic expertise related to domestic violence, and (2) the revival of psychedelic medicine. In explicating these cases, we link the jurisdictional model of expertise (from the sociology of professions) with the network model of expertise (from science and technology studies): Cultural factors such as scientific narratives and embodied performances link together expert domains and forge new boundaries around expert practice.

The Case of Literature

This book offers a radical reassessment of the modern European literary canon. The book's reinterpretations of Goethe, Schiller, Büchner, Döblin, Musil, and Kafka show how literary and scientific narratives have determined each other over the past three centuries, and it argues that modern literature not only contributed to the development of the human sciences but also established itself as the privileged medium for a modern style of case-based reasoning. The book traces the role of narrative fiction in relation to the scientific knowledge of the individual from eighteenth-century psychology and pedagogy to nineteenth-century sexology and criminology to twentieth-century psychoanalysis. The book demonstrates how modern authors consciously engaged casuistic forms of writing to arrive at new understandings of literary discourse that correspond to major historical transformations in the function of fiction. It argues for the centrality of literature to changes in the conceptions of psychological knowledge production around 1800; legal responsibility and institutionalized forms of decision-making throughout the nineteenth century; and literature's own realist demands in the early twentieth century.

Beyond the Right of Access: A Critique of the Legalist Approach to Dissemination of Climate Change Information in Kenya

Kenya has strengthened its climate change governance by developing national level instruments. Principle 10 of the Rio Declaration requires countries to ensure that each individual has appropriate access to public environmental information. Kenya has anchored the right to information in its constitution and the 2016 Access to Information Act. However, this legalist approach has left a translation gap since climate change information is availed in a form and language that is largely inaccessible to the public. To address the gap, this study reviewed the effectiveness of dissemination and access to climate change information among Kenyans as a measure of the country’s fidelity to the decisions of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and other Multilateral Environmental Agreements, to which it is party. The study, guided by the diffusion of innovations theoretical framework and the encoding/decoding model, adopted a qualitative research design. Desk research and in-depth interviews were used to collect data. Results revealed that the current dissemination practices of climate change information in Kenya were not effectively reaching grassroots communities due to socio-economic and language barriers. The study recommends repackaging the information into vernacular and non-scientific narratives that resonate with the daily experiences of local Kenyan communities.