The Value of the Map and the Place of STS

In the 2020 Prague Virtual Conference of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S), Sharon Traweek was awarded the society’s John D. Bernal Prize jointly with Langdon Winner, for her distinguished contributions to the field of STS. In this essay responding to Traweek’s Bernal Lecture, I explore the continuing relevance of her work for Japan’s STS community. Even though this community has grown rapidly since the beginning of the 2000s, I argue in this essay that her work, produced more than three decades ago, encourages us today to reflect how we may want to relate ourselves to the local organization of science and the politics of epistemic authority in the country.

Unchaining Collective Intelligence for Science, Research, and Technology Development by Blockchain-Boosted Community Participation

Since its launch just over a decade ago by the cryptocurrency Bitcoin, the distributed ledger technology (DLT) blockchain has followed a breathtaking trajectory into manifold application spaces. This study aper analyses how key factors underpinning the success of this ground-breaking “Internet of value” technology, such as staking of collateral (“skin in the game”), competitive crowdsourcing, crowdfunding, and prediction markets, can be applied to substantially innovate the legacy organization of science, research, and technology development (RTD). Here, we elaborate a highly integrative, community-based strategy where a token-based crypto-economy supports finding best possible consensus, trust, and truth by adding unconventional elements known from reputation systems, betting, secondary markets, and social networking. These tokens support the holder’s formalized reputation and are used in liquid-democracy style governance and arbitration within projects or community-driven initiatives. This participatory research model serves as a solid basis for comprehensively leveraging collective intelligence by effectively incentivizing contributions from the crowd, such as intellectual property work, validation, assessment, infrastructure, education, assessment, governance, publication, and promotion of projects. On the analogy of its current blockbusters like peer-to-peer structured decentralized finance (“DeFi”), blockchain technology can seminally enhance the efficiency of science and RTD initiatives, even permitting to fully stage operations as a chiefless decentralized autonomous organization (DAOs).

MIECZYSŁAW KONOPACKI – THE OUTSTANDING POLISH HISTOLOGIST, ANATOMIST, AND FREEMASON ACTIVIST

This article presents the life and work of Professor Mieczysław Konopacki, a Polish physician, freemason, social and political activist. Mieczysław Konopacki was born in 1880 in Wieluń, a town with almost 800 years of history. After passing his secondary school-leaving examinations in 1899, he began his studies at the University of Warsaw. Thanks to his diligence and commitment to research, in 1903, he received the degree of candidate of all-natural sciences at the Imperial Warsaw University. In the same year, he was arrested by the Russian authorities for his involvement in developing education in the Polish countryside and forced to move to Cracow, where he began his studies at the Faculty of Medicine of the Jagiellonian University. In 1907, he married and moved to Lviv with his wife, who was also an embryologist. There, the couple began working at the Histology Department. Also, there, in 1911, Mieczysław Konopacki obtained his doctor’s degree in medicine. He was an extremely hard-working and broad-minded man. He was a member of many associations and international scholar organizations. He took an active part in many congresses and symposia. In independent Poland, Professor Konopacki was involved in the organization of science. He tried to compensate for the many years of neglect caused by the policy of the partitioners. In 1933 Professor Konopacki was elected Vice President of the Warsaw Branch of the Young Men’s Christian Association. Complementing the social activity of Professor Konopacki was his activity in the Grand National Lodge of Poland. He died in Warsaw on September 25, 1939, fatally struck by shrapnel from a German bullet.

“Technology” In Secondary Schools Organization Of Science Classes

The article deals with the organization of science lessons in secondary schools and the use of new pedagogical technologies and innovative teaching methods in its teaching.

The Evolution of Methodical Approaches for Evaluation the Efficiency of the Activities of Scientific and Research Organizations in the Czech Republic

The article deals with the evolution of methodological approaches used in the Czech Republic to assess the effectiveness of scientific institutions. This country shares common features with Ukraine in the organization of science and it is one of the most successful examples of socio-economic and organizational reforms in Eastern Europe. It is showed that the evaluation method, introduced in the Czech Republic since 2004, was initially purely quantitative and focused exclusively on research results such as publications, patents, prototypes, and the like. Authors conclude that the quantitative assessment did not take into account the quality of research; they also poorly reflected the importance of the results, and encouraged scientific organizations to play a dishonest game with inflating the values of individual indicators. Aggregation of all indicators into one complex indicator did not allow to evaluate the efficiency of the institution’s activities correctly, and bibliometric indicators strongly depended on the citation culture in a particular scientific discipline. The key elements of the implemented new assessment methodology (M17+) are considered, in which preference is given to the informed expert reviews, which involve a set of available indicators together with other information to make a decision on the overall assessment more comprehensive. Use M17+ will provide the following opportunities: to evaluate the results and impact of scientific activities; to make a general forecast for the development of enterprises; evaluate departmental structures and different missions of institutions under evaluation; to utilize views of the partners; evaluate the institution in the national and international contexts; provide information for the allocation of public funds secured for the institutional development of scientific institutions. The conclusion is made that the switching from the simplified, purely mechanistic approaches to assessment indicates the recognition of the complexity of scientific activities and the diversity of functions of research institutes in the socio-economic development of the state. Studying the experience of evaluating research institutions in the Czech Republic is of great importance for Ukraine as a country with European integration intentions, especially in the context of limited funding for science and increased difficulties with obtaining the budget money.

Fun educational and artistic teaching tools for science outreach

The aim of scientific dissemination is to spread interest and knowledge of scientific issues by trying to reach people of all ages and social backgrounds. Simplifying, without trivializing, scientific concepts and making them attractive to the general public is therefore essential to achieve the previous objectives. For this purpose, it can be useful for scientists to work in close collaboration with artists, implementing new tools that can positively influence the emotional sphere and capture the attention of the people involved. Playful educational activity and visual language play a key role in this process, to convey interest and facilitate learning. An example of this approach are the educational laboratories structured as group games, in which great importance is given both to practical activities and to the transmission of concepts through their visualization in the form of images. Over the last 8 years, the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology, INGV), the Istituto di Scienze Marine del Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche (Institute of Marine Sciences of the National Research Council, CNR-ISMAR) and the Historical Oceanography Society (HOS) have collaborated in the organization of science dissemination events involving students from schools of different levels participating in educational experiences based on games, characterized by an essentially visual approach to the concepts presented. In this work, we would like to give a brief overview of these educational tools, retracing the choices made while ideating them, thanks mainly to the close collaboration with artists and illustrators.

Educational and artistic fun teaching tools for science outreach

The aim of scientific dissemination is to spread interest and knowledge of scientific issues by trying to reach people of all ages and social backgrounds. Simplifying (without trivializing) scientific concepts and making them attractive to the general public is therefore essential to achieve the previous objectives. For this purpose, it can be useful for scientists to work in close collaboration with artists, implementing new tools that can positively influence the emotional sphere and capture the attention of the people involved. Playful educational activity and visual language play a key role in this process, to convey interest and facilitate learning. An example of this are the educational laboratories structured as group games, in which great importance is given both to practical activities and to the transmission of concepts through their visualization in the form of images. Over the last eight years, the Istituto Nazionale di Geofisica e Vulcanologia (National Institute of Geophysics and Volcanology), the Institute of Marine Sciences of the National Research Council and Historical Oceanography Society have collaborated in the organization of science dissemination events involving students from schools of different levels in educational experiences based on games, characterized by an essentially visual approach to the concepts presented. In this work, we would like to give a brief overview of these didactic tools, retracing the choices made while ideating them, thanks mainly to the close collaboration with some artists and illustrators.

The ideal of whole knowledge as a principle of the organization of science and society: a glance at 4338 from the beginning of the XXI century

The paper analyzes the model of the scientific activity and social order organization, presented in the unfinished novel by V. F. Odoevskij «4338: St. Petersburg’ letters». It is shown that the novel has a futurological character and futurological success. The methodological principles articulated by Odoevskij are analyzed in detail, it is shown how these principles allow anticipating the general direction of development of organizational forms of scientific activity, some conceptual shifts in understanding the essence of scientific knowledge, as well as several social innovations. The author compares Odoevskij's methods of anticipating the future and methodological tools, used by classical futurology, on one hand, and Futures studies — on the other. It is proved that since Odoevskij constructs his futurological scenario in response to the contradictions in the development of modern science and modern society revealed by him earlier, this scenario has not only a prognostic, but also a utopian value — as an ideal model of the structure of science as a cognitive activity and as a social institution, which is capable to give fruitful principles of the organization of society as a whole.

Co-citations in context: Disciplinary heterogeneity is relevant

Citation analysis of the scientific literature has been used to study and define disciplinary boundaries, to trace the dissemination of knowledge, and to estimate impact. Co-citation, the frequency with which pairs of publications are cited, provides insight into how documents relate to each other and across fields. Co-citation analysis has been used to characterize combinations of prior work as conventional or innovative and to derive features of highly cited publications. Given the organization of science into disciplines, a key question is the sensitivity of such analyses to frame of reference. Our study examines this question using semantically themed citation networks. We observe that trends reported to be true across the scientific literature do not hold for focused citation networks, and we conclude that inferring novelty using co-citation analysis and random graph models benefits from disciplinary context.