torsdag den 26. august 2010

Er antropofysik metafysik eller kosmologi?

Foredrag i Videnskabshistorisk Selskab:


Helge Kragh:

DET ANTROPISKE MULTIVERS
- FYSIK ELLER METAFYSIK?

Gennem det sidste tiår har dele af teoretisk fysik og kosmologi været involveret i en større epistemisk kontrovers om eksistensen af "mange verdener" - det såkaldte multivers - hvoraf vores eget univers blot udmærker sig ved, at der er intelligent liv i det. Det er "biofilt".
Forestillingen om multiverset er intimt knyttet til det i forvejen kontroversielle antropiske princip, og har siden ca. 2003 fået støtte fra nye udviklinger i stringteori. Flere fremtrædende fysikere anser multiversfysik som et muligt nyt paradigme, mens andre betragter det som uvidenskabelig metafysik. Kontroversen har givet anledning til at genoverveje det fundamentale spørgsmål om, hvad der definerer naturvidenskab og afgrænser denne form for viden fra ikke-videnskab.
Hvem bestemmer om en bestemt teori er af naturvidenskabelig karakter eller ej?

Helge Kragh har givet en kort introduktion til emnet i KVANT nr. 1 (2009).

Tid & sted: tirsdag, den 14. september 2010, kl. 17.00
i auditorium 10, på H. C. Ørsted Instituttet,
Universitetsparken 5, København
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onsdag den 25. august 2010

Hugin og Munin nr. 259

Hugin og Munin nr. 259, den 25. august, 2010.

Kære læsere, hermed udsendes Hugin og Munin med links til de enkelte arrangementer og andre nyheder nedenfor.
Redaktionen er som altid taknemmelig over at modtage forslag til omtaler af kommende arrangementer, bogomtaler, forslag til interessant artikellæsning, fodnotefyldte store bøger imod søvnløshed, eller andet uundværligt i ravnenes verden.



Nyhedsbrevet læses på odinsravne.blogspot.com hvor man øverst til venstre kan søge på emner, ligesom højrespaltens kalender- og arkiv-rubrikker giver en oversigt.
Med venlig hilsen Red.
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Den skjulte teknologi

DEN SKJULTE TEKNOLOGI

Dansk Teknologihistorisk Selskab
afholder i år årsmødeseminar
i Århus
fredag-lørdag den 17. og 18. september 2010.

Seminaret - som vil afsløre en række karakteristiske træk ved moderne teknologi - finder sted på Institut for Videnskabsstudier på Aarhus Universitet, med et indledende spændende virksomhedsbesøg.
Læs mere om årsmødet her:

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Biologien på fremmarch?

Studiekreds: Det evolutionære hjernemenneske
Kl. 16-18
Flg. 5 tirsdage: den 26.9; 12.10; 26.10; 23.11 og 7.12
Skt. Johannesgården
Blegdamsvej 1 B lokale K1 , 1. sal
2200 Kbh. N (Bag Skt. Johannes kirke ved Skt. Hans Torv)
Ved studenterpræst Nicolai Halvorsen.

Der er for tiden et stort fokus på hjerneforskning, vores bevidsthed som ofte kobles med evolutionære forklaringer på dette og hint. I populære fremstillinger og i medierne ser man ofte menneskelig adfærd forklaret med, at vi stadig går rundt med en stenalderhjerne eller at vi er evolutionært disponeret for at få bedst og mest afkom og derfor gør som vi gør. Det kan virke noget reduktionistisk, men i hvilken forstand er det sandt og hvad stiller vi op med den viden. Der kommer biologiske forklaringer på flere områder, der ikke er biologi: sociale samfund, litteratur, religion, film og menneskelig adfærd. Hvorfor sker det nu? Og er det en god udvikling?
Arr.: Studentermenigheden i København. Se også andre arrangementer på:
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tirsdag den 24. august 2010

Samarbejde og hjernearbejde i Wikipedia

Ph.D.-defense:
Rut Jesus:

Cooperation and Cognition in Wikipedia Articles
A data-driven, philosophical and exploratory study

Time: Saturday, September 4, 2010 at 13:00
Place: Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17, København, auditorium A.

Abstract:
Wikipedia has created and harnessed new social and work dynamics, which can provide insight into specific aspects of cognition, as amplified by a multitude of editors and their ping-pong style of editing, spatial and time flexibility within unique technology-community fostering features. Wikipedia's motto "The Free Encyclopedia That Anyone Can Edit" is analyzed to reveal human, technological and value actors within a theoretical context of distributed cognition, cooperation and technological agency. In the Data-driven studies using data from Wiki log pages, network visualization and bicliques are used and developed to focus closer on the process of collaboration in articles and meta-articles, and inside the article "Prisoner's dilemma" and the policy article "Neutral Point of View". The several tools used reveal clusters of interest, dense areas of coordination, a blend between coordination and direct editing work, and point to Wikipedia's dynamic stability in content and form. In the philosophical-cognitive studies, a distinction between Cognition for Planning and Cognition for Improvising is proposed to account for Wikipedia's success and mode of editing whereby many small edits are used for its improvement. In the exploratory part an installation of a 'live-Wiki' 'Our Collnnective Minds' piece reflects on several aspects of Wikis, free culture, open source and Do-It-Yourself by engaging in the debate in a more creative and participative form. These studies contribute to constructing an ecology of the article, a vision of humanities bottom-up, and a better understanding of cooperation and cognition within sociotechnological networks.

The thesis can be downloaded from
http://www.nbi.dk/~vulpeto/jesus_thesis_final.pdf

Assessment committee:
Associate Professor Lisbeth Klastrup, Digital Culture & Mobile Communication Research Group, IT University of Copenhagen (chairman);
Professor Stevan Harnad, School of Electronics and Computer Science University of Southampton;
Professor Juha Suoranta, Department of Education, University of Tampere

Co-chairman [ordstyrer]:
associate professor Klemens Kappel, Department of Media, Cognition and Communication, University of Copenhagen

Supervisor:
Associate professor Claus Emmeche, Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies, University of Copenhagen.

Total programme:
After the defense, there will be a reception in auditorium C, planned to start around 15:30. Please tell us (by email to Di Ponti [ vulpeto [at] gmail.com ]) about your presence here, so as to estimate the volume of wikisoup.

After the reception, at 16:30 (estimated) to 18:30, we hope also to see you at a Meta-Ph.D. Performance.

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Ph.d.-kursus i forskningsetik

Phd. course – research ethics - autumn 2010
Research Ethics for Scientists
and Engineers in the 21st Century

From November 8 to 12, 2010, the Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies at the University of Copenhagen (CPNSS), together with the Institute for Education, Philosophy and Learning at Aalborg University (IEPL) will organize an international and interdisciplinary PhD course entitled “Research Ethics for Scientists and Engineers in the 21st Century”.

The course will address the ethical dilemmas that researchers face in turbulent times, where clear-cut distinctions between pure and applied science can no longer be upheld. The course is aimed at creating a space where PhD students can qualify their reflections on their role as young researchers by drawing on philosophical, sociological, and ethical perspectives in analyzing possibilities and problems of contemporary science.

Course participants will be asked to analyze real dilemmas taken from the intersection between science and society – often taking the experiences of individual researchers as the starting point for the analysis. The case analyses will be related to the following five main themes that will be treated during the course:

1. Scientific Conduct and Misconduct: At the Fringe of Normal Science
2. Scientific Social Responsibility in Cases of Life and Death
3. The Conflicting Values of Research in a Post-academic Setting
4. Post Normal Science and Wicked Problems
5. Ethics as a problems-solving activity: Towards a Socially Responsible Scientific Practice

Prior to course take-off the course participants will be expected to have read text materials.

Venue: Niels Bohr Institute, Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen. Aud. M (building M)
Language: English.
Course fee: None. Participants will be required to take care of the transportation to Copenhagen, as well as of board and lodging.

Teachers: Christian Baron; Tom Holmgaard Børsen (organizers); Mikkel Willum Johansen; and Nicolas König.

Invited lectures: Anja Skaar Jacobsen (NBA); Thomas Plough (CIT, AAU); Anders Frøslev Jensen (CPNSS, KU); Gitte Meyer (CeBRA, KU) and Mercy Kamara (CBIT, RUC).

Registration: Please sign up by sending your email to baron [at] nbi.dk . Last registration date October 25th, 2010. A confirmation of your participation will be sent out within three days of registering.

Merit: 2.5 ECTS for simple participation with oral presentation during the course, 5 ECTS for participation with paper assignment. These papers may be delivered in Danish or English.


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Red Venedig med levende teknologi

Møde om Levende Teknologi på SDU d. 24. aug., kl. 17:30.

Fremtiden byder på levende byer af specialdesignede celler. De kan forvandle forurening til byggematerialer og redde Venedig fra at synke. Mød op på Syddansk Universitet, hvor ISSP giver dig chancen for at diskutere muligheder og konsekvenser af levende teknologi med verdens klogeste hoveder.
Rundt i verden er forskere i gang med at skabe kunstigt liv og teknologier der i stigende grad baserer sig på livets grundlæggende træk. Det kaldes ’levende teknologi’ og har stort potentiale til at hjælpe både menneskeheden og vores planet til at overleve endnu et århundrede.

Læs mere om mødet her:

Levende teknologi siges at have et stort potentiale for anvendelse. Kunstige celler af olie og vand kan for eksempel omdanne CO2 fra luften til kalksten. En teknologi der potentielt kan redde Venedig fra at synke. Etc.
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GMO-nyt fra det etiske råd

Det Etiske Råds nyhedsbrev er på gaden - eller i elnettet, bl.a. om

Første GMO-spredning påvist i USA
og
EU foreslår at enkelt-lande får mulighed for at afvise GMO’er

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STS-seminarrække på RUC

During the fall, RUC will host a series of STS-workshops in the seminar room at Department of Philosophy & Philosophy of Science, 3.1.3, 13.00-15.00, followed by a reception. Everybody is welcome to join.

17. september
Emmanuel Didier (Centre national de la recherche scientifique / École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris): ’What is America About? Statistics, the New Deal, and Democracy’.

1. oktober
Matthias Heymann (Aarhus Universitet): ’Constructing evidence and trust: How did climate scientists’ confidence in their models and simulations emerge?’

15. oktober
Kirsten Simonsen (Roskilde Universitet): ’Practice, Spatiality and Embodied Emotions: An Outline of a Geography of Practice’.

29. oktober
Mats Fridlund (Københavns Universitet): ’The Terror and Security of Things: Recovering a Material and Phenomenological History of a Lost Fear’.

12. november
Fernando Flores (Lunds Universitet): ’Broken Technologies: The Humanist as Engineer’.

26. november
Thomas Söderqvist (Københavns Universitet): ’Cultures of Meaning and Cultures of Presence: The Use of Material Objects in the History of Science, Medicine and Technology’.

10. december
Gert Goeminne (Vrije Universiteit Brussel / Universiteit Gent): ’Does the climate need consensus? Rethinking science as politics’.

Event information:
September 17, 2010
1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
October 1, 2010
1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
October 15, 2010
1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
October 29, 2010
1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
November 12, 2010
1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
November 26, 2010
1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
December 10, 2010
1:00 pm to 3:00 pm
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Genetisk gensyn i Forum Teologi Naturvidenskab

PROGRAM EFTERÅR 2010:
GENSYN MED GENERNE

Genforskning, genteknologi og gen-etik har været diskuteret i Forum Teologi Naturvidenskab adskillige gange. Imidlertid er genetik et felt, der udvikler sig med lynets hast, og udviklingen ser ud til at få store konsekvenser for både vor selvforståelse som mennesker og fremtidens diagnosticering og behandling af sygdomme. Udviklingen påvirker naturligvis også de etiske problemstillinger, der knytter sig til genetikken. Derfor er der god grund til et gensyn med generne. Se det fulde program for møderækken her:


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mandag den 23. august 2010

Denmark at an Open Access crossroads


Public meting: Workshop on

Denmark at an Open Access crossroads
– mandate or a peoples’ movement?

Time: September 3, 2010, at 13:15 to 15:15
Place: Niels Bohr Institute, Auditorium A, Blegdamsvej 17, Copenhagen (entrance to auditorium A via the reception in the basement of the villa at Blegdamsvej 17)

Meeting programme:
13:15
Claus Emmeche (CPNSS): Welcome note.

Key notes and repliques:

13:20
Juha Suoranta: Towards a global folkehøjskole? (abstract below)

13:40 - replique by Anne-Mette Wehmüller (member of Frederiksberg City Council and Candidate for the Danish Parliament, website): Denmark as a knowledge society

13:45 - Juha Suoranta: replique
13:50 - questions and general discussion

13:55
Stevan Harnad: Mandating (Green) Open Access to Maximize the Usage and Impact of Danish Research Output (abstract below)

14:15 - replique by Mette Thunø (dean of research, Faculty of Humanities, University of Copenhagen): The open door and the big books.

14:20 - Stevan Harnad: replique
14:25 - questions and general discussion


Actors, Brief statements, and Discussion

14:30
Kaspar Kirstein Nielsen (physicist, EliteForsk2009 price receiver; Danish Technical University): Ask a scientist what is do be done

14:35
Bo Öhrström (Danish Agency for Libraries and Media; Denmark's Electronic research Library (DEFF), chairman of the Danish Open Access Committee): The recent recommendations for implementation of Open Access in Denmark

14:40
Questions

14:45

14:50
Discussion

14:55
Jørgen Burchardt (researcher and chairman of The Society of Danish Science Editors): Can an Open Access mandate avoid destroying a well functioning publication system? (abstract below)

15:05: Discussion

15:15: End of meeting.


NB: The recent recommendations for implementation of Open Access in Denmark in a report from the Open Access Committee be downloaded in a Danish and an English version.

Present voices in the audience will also include Thorkil Damsgaard Olsen (OA deputy of the rector of University of Copenhagen), Marianne Gauffriau and Thomas Sinkjær (Danish National Research Foundation), science manager Ulla Jakobsen (the Lundbeck Foundation), senior advisor Leif Hansen (Copenhagen Business School; cf. the CBS OA policy), director Marianne Alenius (Museum Tusculanums Press, University of Copenhagen), professor Karen A. Krogfelt (The Danish Council for Independent Research | Technology and Production Sciences (FTP)) and principal Inger Schow (Centre for Independant Research and Research Training, The Danish Agency for Science, Technology and Innovation).


Abstracts:

Juha Suoranta (Professor in Adult Education at the University of Tampere, Adjunct Professor at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki):
Towards global folkehøjskole?
What is the largest educational endeavor at the moment? It is not the world's higher education systems nor all adult education combined. It is Wikipedia, with its sister projects (Wikiversity etc.) and other platforms of sharing and interacting in the Internet. The age of Wikipedia, or Wikiword in general, is marked by a change, or perhaps even a revolution, in the we way we learn and educate each other: institutionalized learning is transforming into new forms of
collaborative learning projects and sharing our ideas and knowledge in the Internet via wikis. In these venues learning has little to do with individual rote learning (as many times in classrooms) and much to do with collective sharing and participating in learning. Learning is not so much reading and listening than evaluating and editing, which is a new, vital form of literacy. Thus Wikiworld is another step forward in the process of progressive, democracy enhancing educational thinking in the best liberal fashion of N. Grundtvig and the tradition of
Nordic folkehøjskole.

Literature:
• See list of Juha's works at http://en.wikipedia.org./wiki/Juha_Suoranta and his blog
• Wikiworld. Revisited edition (with Tere Vadén), 2010 (about) (buy), (free download)
• Juha Suoranta: "Learners and Oppressed Peoples of the World, Wikify! Wikiversity as a Global Critical Pedagogy" (2010, preprint download)
• Juha Suoranta & Tere Vadén: "Wikilearning as Radical Equality" (2010, preprint download)
• Juha Suoranta: Wikilearning vs Formal Learning (Table 1)
• Leinonen, Teemu, Juha Suoranta & Tere Vadén: "Learning in and with an open wiki project: Wikiversity's potential in global capacity building" (link to the peer-reviewed paper)


Stevan Harnad (Canada Research Chair in Cognitive Science at Universite Quebec a Montreal and Professor in Electronics and Computer Science at University of Southampton, UK):
Mandating (Green) Open Access to Maximize the Usage and Impact of Danish Research Output
Open access (OA) means making peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly journal articles accessible for free online to all of their potential users rather than -- as now -- only to those users whose universities can afford subscription access to the journal in which
they are published. OA has been shown to increase research usage and impact metrics substantially, in every field. There are two ways to provide OA: The author self-archives a copy of the final draft in his institution's OA repository ("Green OA") or the author publishes the article in a journal that makes the article OA ("Gold OA"). Gold OA depends on publishers and costs extra money per article; Green OA depends only on researchers, their institutions and their funders, requires no extra payment, it can be mandated, and universities
and research funders the world over have already begun to mandate Green OA self-archiving, including among the early adopters Harvard, MIT and Stanford plus the National Institutes of Health in the US, Edinburgh, University College London and Southampton plus all
the RCUK councils in the UK, the EC and ERC councils in Europe, and, in Scandinavia: both the Swedish and Norwegian Research Councils, the universities of Bergen, Blekinge and Chalmers plus all the Finnish Universities -- but in Denmark so far only the Copenhagen Business
School! OA is optimal and inevitable, but there is a competitive advantage in being among the first to mandate OA, rather than the last. The Houghton Report has also shown that the benefit to cost ratio of mandating Green OA is 40/1. My talk will be about how universities and funders can mandate Green OA, why and how.

Addendum:
As the studies of Alma Swan and Bo-Christer Björk have shown, although researchers know and value the benefits of Open access (OA), just as with "publish or perish," they will not provide OA spontaneously; they will only do so only if OA is mandated by their institutions and funders. A decade of evidence has now shown that to keep waiting for OA to be provided by a spontaneous "people's" impetus is to keep waiting in vain.
The reason OA's primary target content is peer-reviewed journal articles rather than books is that, without exception, journal articles are written solely for research uptake, usage and impact, not for author royalty income. This is not true of books in general, hence book OA cannot be mandated -- but the increasingly palpable impact benefits of article OA will no doubt inspire more and more researchers to consider making their books OA too.
See:
• Swan, Alma (2006) Open Access Self-Archiving: An Introduction. JISC Technical Report.
• Harnad, Stevan (2008) Open Access Book-Impact and "Demotic" Metrics. Open Access Archivangelism.

Literature:
Harnad, S. (2010) The Immediate Practical Implication of the Houghton Report: Provide Green Open Access Now. Prometheus, 28 (1). pp. 55-59. http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18514/

Gargouri, Y., Hajjem, C., Lariviere, V., Gingras, Y., Brody, T., Carr, L. and Harnad, S. (2010) Self-Selected or Mandated, Open Access Increases Citation Impact for Higher Quality Research. (in press) http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/18493/

Harnad, S. (2008) Waking OA’s “Slumbering Giant”: The University's Mandate To Mandate Open Access. New Review of Information Networking 14(1): 51 - 68 http://eprints.ecs.soton.ac.uk/17298/3/giantpaper1.pdf

The Immediate-Deposit/Optional-Access (ID/OA) Mandate: Rationale and Model

Optimizing OA Self-Archiving Mandates: What? Where? When? Why? How?

How to Integrate University and Funder Open Access Mandates



Jørgen Burchardt (researcher and chairman of The Society of Danish Science Editors):
Can an Open Access mandate avoid destroying a well functioning publication system?
Burchardt is among the pioneers for Open Access, and he got the first Danish scholarly peer-reviewed journal on-line in 2001. Besides, he knows from his own research how the conditions are for publishing in countries with small culture groups and speech areas.
The most optimistic theories about OA are built on experiences from international STM (Science, Technology, Medicine) areas. Unfortunately those can not be transferred to small countries like Denmark. Mandating OA author self-archives would be pure poison for the existing publishing system and a catastrophe for researchers and society because qualified publishing would disappear. Self-archived manuscripts are of a considerably lower quality than articles from professional publishers.
Mandating OA paid by authors could be a solution. The model is, however, not useful in the humanities, social sciences, and other topics with poor single researchers. Some topics will lose twenty-five percent of their results (from researchers, who are unemployed, retired, or from non-research institutions). Simultaneously the researchers will lose their freedom to publish when non-researchers in reality decide about economic support or not.
A hybrid OA model with a protection period for sale, together with a compensation for lost income, could be a solution. It keeps economic resources for the editorial process and the editorial freedom will to some extent be kept.
In general, researchers and students will not have any advantage of OA at all! The research libraries give by and large all the necessary literature. However, OA will be an advantage for the economy and the population because of the understandable research from the humanities and social sciences, together with the Danish language popular science magazines within STM.

Literature:
”Videnskabelig redaktion og forskningspublicering – en glemt forudsætning for forskningsformidling”.
http://www.videnssamfundet.dk/c.aspx?ItemId=103

”Da bibliotekarer kvalte dansk forskningsformidling”, Ingeniøren 7/6 2010 Hvad hvis forskerne bestemte?
http://ing.dk/artikel/109447-da-bibliotekarer-kvalte-dansk-forsknings-formidling

”Stop planen som nedlægger de danske videnskabelige tidsskrifter.” Høringssvar til DEFF’s Open Access udvalg
http://www.videnssamfundet.dk/a.aspx?ItemId=99

”Selvarkivering – en vej til fri og gratis forskning?”
http://www.videnssamfundet.dk/a.aspx?ItemId=101

”Tvang, propaganda og uhyrlige påstande” Kommentarer til bibliotekernes OA forslag. http://www.videnssamfundet.dk/a.aspx?ItemId=98

”Hvidbog om dansk forskningsformidling” – med anbefalinger. http://www.videnssamfundet.dk/d.aspx

”Fra universitet til samfund. Forskningsformidlingens infrastruktur”. Bog 2007. http://www.videnssamfundet.dk/d2.aspx


The meeting is organized by CPNSS, Center for the Philosophy of Nature and Science Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Postscript:
slides and notes from the meeting:
  • Juha Suoranta's lecture notes (pdf)
  • Stevan Harnad's slides (ppt)
  • Jørgen Burchardt's slides (ppt)
  • Bo Öhrström's slides (ppt)

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