How capitalism has shaped our perceptions of the natural world, as well as the products of science; some comparison with the Marxist view; special double issue. Partial contents: Science and progress: seven developmental myths in agriculture, by Richard Levins; Biology and social responsibility, by Eric Holtzman; The technological mystique and Third World options, by Maurice Bazin; The radical science movement in the United States, by Jon Beckwith.
This study examined the impact of US Africa Command on maritime security in the Gulf of Guinea in West Africa, between 2007 and 2020, with specific emphasis on the core maritime security challenges in West Africa. The study was anchored on the World Systems Theory, while data were generated using documentary and survey methods. Data collected were analysed using content analysis. The study found that maritime security challenges in West Africa include piracy, armed robbery, and drug trafficking. It also found that maritime insecurity has remained endemic in the Gulf of Guinea, despite the establishment of US Africa Command. The study locates the limited effectiveness of AFRICOM in mitigating maritime security challenges to its establishment without adequate consultation with West African leaders which triggered suspicion and resistance among countries in the Gulf of Guinea. The study posits that the geostrategic importance of the sub-regional maritime has remained the U.S government's strategic interest. The study, therefore, recommends, among others, that the U.S. government should strengthen inter-state collaboration through existing security agencies in the sub-region.
This report provides details of expenditure by nine Government Departments and 34 separate agencies. It represents the most detailed and comprehensive picture of spending on S&T available in Ireland and shows trends in S&T spending going back over eight years
In Greg Bear's critically acclaimed science fiction novel Darwin's Radio, the activation of an endogenous retrovirus (SHEVA), ironically located in a "noncoding region" of the human genome, causes extreme symptoms in women worldwide, including miscarriages. In the United States, a task force is assembled to control the pandemic crisis and to find out how SHEVA operates at the genomic level. However, as the story unfolds, it becomes manifest that SHEVA is too complex to decode in this way and, moreover, that it is not a disease at all. Biologist Kay Lang speculates that SHEVA is triggered by signals from the environment, and that newborn SHEVA children will be a new variation or species of Man. In this essay I analyze Bear's literary experiment with science along Deleuze and Guattari's important, but largely overlooked, concepts of State science and nomad science. Bear's novel gives narrative form to nomad-scientific ideas about life, notably Lynn Margulis's theory of endosymbiogenesis, which holds that a species' DNA is an assemblage of many genomes acquired in symbiotic relations. The import of Bear's informed speculations, I argue, is not crass prediction but a nomadic vision of life as always already different (impure, infected) and in becoming—a counterpoint to the image of the double helix as the bedrock of human identity. Darwin's Radio is a key example of how fiction can be an excellent partner for science, technology, and society, analyzing and intervening in debates about life and laying bare epistemological and biopolitical tensions of technoscience.
In this lucidly-written introduction to the topic, Sylvia Kraemer draws upon her extensive experience in government to develop a useful and powerful framework for thinking about the American approach to shaping and managing scientific innovation. Kraemer suggests that the history of science, technology, and politics is best understood as a negotiation of ongoing tensions between open and closed systems. Open systems depend on universal access to information that is complete, verifiable, and appropriately used. Closed systems, in contrast, are composed of exclusive and often proprietary feature.
Science, culture, and modern state formation : theory and analysis -- Understanding engine science : Sir Robert Boyle and the new experimentalism -- Engineering culture and the civilizing mission : William Petty and the new science in Ireland -- Engineering the data state : scopes, meters, and graphs -- Bio-population : the science of policing natural and political bodies -- Engineering Ireland : the material designs of modern statecraft
The philosophy of pragmatism is often cited as the source of the theoretical underpinnings of the contemporary policy sciences. However, an examination of the work of John Dewey reveals that pragmatism is incompatible with the conception of knowledge that now prevails in these sciences as well as the relationship currently established between this form of inquiry & the state. Fidelity to pragmatism requires a fundamental reconceptualization of the practice of social science & a reconsideration of the organization of knowledge & power in a democratic society. 43 References. HA
