‘Your very obliging correspondence’: the Royal Society and the provincial Republic of Letters in Georgian Lincolnshire

It has been said that the Royal Society of the eighteenth century was in decline. The ground-breaking experimentation of the Restoration period was long gone, to be followed by talk rather than action, and the pages of Philosophical Transactions were filled with papers by provincial clergymen on natural curiosities and antiquities. But the links between the Royal Society and the Spalding Gentlemen's Society (SGS)—founded in 1712 and still in existence as the country's longest-lived provincial learned society—show a connection not just between city and country, but between scientific and antiquarian research, fields that had not yet assumed their distinct modern forms. A fruitful correspondence existed between the two societies for several decades in the first half of the century, and a number of Fellows (including Newton) became honorary members of the SGS. In this article, I show that the SGS did not simply rely on its metropolitan connections for intellectual sustenance, but rather, that this joint association allowed it to flourish as a dynamic society that cultivated international networks.

Continuous Monitoring of Tree Responses to Climate Change for Smart Forestry: A Cybernetic Web of Trees

Trees are long-lived organisms that contribute to forest development over centuries and beyond. However, trees are vulnerable to increasing natural and anthropic disturbances. Spatially distributed, continuous data are required to predict mortality risk and impact on the fate of forest ecosystems. In order to enable monitoring over sensitive and often remote forest areas that cannot be patrolled regularly, early warning tools/platforms of mortality risk need to be established across regions. Although remote sensing tools are good at detecting change once it has occurred, early warning tools require ecophysiological information that is more easily collected from single trees on the ground.Here, we discuss the requirements for developing and implementing such a tree-based platform to collect and transmit ecophysiological forest observations and environmental measurements from representative forest sites, where the goals are to identify and to monitor ecological tipping points for rapid forest decline. Long-term monitoring of forest research plots will contribute to better understanding of disturbance and the conditions that precede it. International networks of these sites will provide a regional view of susceptibility and impacts and would play an important role in ground-truthing remotely sensed data.

Indicators To Evaluate Research Efficiency in Higher Education Institutions

The comparison of efficiency between Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) based on quantitative and absolute data, is it may not be the most honest way to establish efficiency levels. This study aims to propose indicators for evaluating efficiency in research to compose the management report of intangible assets in HEI. A search was performed in the SCOPUS bibliographic base to identify the intellectual production of the Federal University of Sergipe in the period from 1977 to 2019. The results demonstrate a positive trend in the growth of the volume of publications and that the intellectual production of the university is the result of its integration in national and international networks of scientific collaboration. A management report that aims to demonstrate the value of the university should accurately contemplate the intangible assets produced by it, which could be used as indicators of research efficiency. The disclosure of the value of intangible assets is a strategy to increase the value and credibility of the brand, but also a form of positive accountability to its maintainer and to society.

Regulatory networks and regional human rights governance: a study of the European Network of National Human Rights Institutions

Transnational regional networks of regulatory bodies play a prominent role in complex systems of human rights governance. Despite their growing importance, we still have much to learn about the roles regional networks play as regulatory stewards in the field of human rights. I draw on the literature about regulatory stewardship to analyse a recently formalised regulatory network operating in Europe – the European Network of National Human Rights Institutions. The analysis proposes a model of global governance for human rights that includes networks of national human rights institutions as intermediaries. Moreover, it draws on some of the main concepts of network analysis to assesses the European network’s development into a ‘network administrative organisation’ and applies the model of regulatory stewardship to analyse the institutional network’s use of hierarchical and managerial stewardship to: support its member institutions; stimulate intra-network communication and learning; gain access to international networks; and to shape the regional human rights agenda.

A Dream Deferred

International news, and the technological infrastructures required to collect, distribute, and publish it, have long been battlegrounds of imperial ambition and anticolonial contestation. In the early 1960s, press professionals, engineers, and telecom officials from the global South elaborated a wide-ranging structural critique of the status quo, arguing that developing mass media required decolonizing international networks and global governance practices that perpetuated media inequality. But over the course of the decade, UNESCO began to invite research and expertise from American social scientists and engineers, who came to define UNESCO’s approach to satellite-based media development. By redefining the scope of media development to an instrumentalist vision of Westernization, such research eclipsed a broad, structural vision of reform, casting southern experts’ more radical designs into shadow. By recovering this history, the article tells a new story of the ideologies and governance practices that helped sustain global news inequality in the satellite age.

Science funding under an authoritarian regime: Portugal's National Education Board and the European ‘academic landscape’ in the interwar period

This article enables an understanding of scientific practice and funding in a peripheral country ruled by a dictatorship in the interwar period, and thus provides the basis for comparison with studies of other non-democratic regimes. We examine the work of Portugal's Junta de Educação Nacional (National Education Board), which administered and provided funding for science from 1929 to 1936. Our findings show that this public body encouraged the participation of the Portuguese academic community in international science networks. This scenario contrasts with the dominant historiographical thesis that between the wars the Portuguese academic community did not play a role in international networks, and that it lacked state support. Also in contrast with the dominant historiography, whose ideological bias meant that a simplified picture was portrayed, whereas the reality is shown to be complex, this study demonstrates that the Portuguese dictatorial state sought to foster scientific progress through the Junta, but that resentment among academics and the resistance of universities to innovation meant that this objective was only partially achieved. Finally, the memory of a number of scientists has been rescued from oblivion, as we show how their political stance during the dictatorship led to their being ignored by historiographers when democracy prevailed.