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Critical Conversations: Methods and Practices in Interdisciplinary Science Studies, Friday, May 18th, 2007


Stanford Science and Technology Studies Writing Group, 2006-2007

The Stanford Science and Technology Studies Writing Group welcomes Stanford graduate students, postdocs, visiting lecturers, and other members of the Stanford community in the early stages of their academic careers whose work engages with the interdisciplinary study of science and technology. The goal of the writing group is to provide a supportive structure to help prepare work for publication and/or dissertation, as well as grant proposals, dissertation proposals, and any other type of writing demanded of beginning scholars.

The Stanford STS Writing Group will meet four times a quarter during 2006-2007, and conclude with a day-long graduate student conference and keynote event in the spring of 2007.

Critical Conversations: Methods and Practices in Interdisciplinary Science Studies will be an all day event, Friday, May 18th, 2007

At each regular meeting, a participant circulates a piece of writing intended for publication or dissertation work and another participant serves as a moderator for discussion. In addition to the group discussion at meetings, participants are encouraged to provide written feedback to the author.

The STS Writing Group is supported by a grant from the Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology at Stanford University.

The group meets every other Tuesday from noon to 1:30pm in History room 307. Contact: Lydia Barnett (Department of History, lbarnett at stanford.edu) or Sarah Richardson (Program in Modern Thought and Literature, richardson at stanford.edu).

CISST Small Grants

The deadline for fall grants 2007-08 is April 25th, 2007, and the deadline for both winter or spring quarter grants is September 25, 2007.

The Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology is soliciting applications for grants for support of the interdisciplinary study of science and technology in the academic year 2007-2008. These grants will be relatively modest (primarily in the less than $5,000 range), so that circumstances where cost-sharing will be available are especially appropriate. The grants are intended for the support of new initiatives involved with the interdisciplinary study of science and technology -- involving workshops, conferences, speakers, and short-term visitors. (Interdisciplinary initiatives internal to the sciences and/or technology themselves, which do not include an historical, philosophical, sociological, methodological, or other such meta-perspective on science and/or technology are not appropriate for such grants.) Applications should be submitted electronically to Rosemary Rogers, the Center Administrator (rrogers@stanford.edu), and should consist of a page or two of explanation and justification, a budget outline, and a statement of possibilities for cost-sharing.

Previous Events

Newton

George E. Smith, Tufts University, will be giving three lectures at Stanford

The Isaac Newton Lectures at the Suppes Center

2/22/2007, 3/1/2007, and 3/8/2007

Turning Data into Evidence: Three lectures on the role of Theory in Science

Lecture 1 February 22, 2007
CLOSING THE LOOP: Testing Newtonian Gravity, Then and Now

Building 200 Room 203
4:15-6pm

Download Smith Lecture I (Word doc)

Download Smith Powerpoint Presentation I (ppt document)

Lecture 2 March 1, 2007
GETTING STARTED: Building Theories from Working Hypotheses

Building 200 Room 203
4:15-6pm

Download Smith Lecture II (Word doc)

Download Smith Powerpoint Presentation II (ppt document)

Lecture 3 March 8, 2007
GAINING ACCESS: Using Seismology to Probe the Earth's Insides

Building 200 - Room 203
4:15-6pm

Download Smith Lecture III (Word doc)

Download Smith Powerpoint Presentation III (ppt document)

ABSTRACT: The view that all observation is theory-mediated and hence that scientific evidence invariably rests on theoretical presuppositions now seems beyond dispute. Many see the consequent apparent lack of uncontestable grounding as raising deep questions about the nature and limits of the knowledge achieved in the sciences, questions that are sometimes taken to challenge all claims of science to epistemic authority. The three lectures will concede from the outset that theory of some sort is always needed to turn data into evidence and hence that theory always enters constitutively into evidence. But they will then argue that close analysis of historical practice in certain representative areas of physics shows that the ways in which theory has in fact entered into the process of marshalling evidence has not undercut but actually strengthened their claim to epistemic authority.

George E. Smith is widely recognized as a leading authority on Isaac Newton, and, in particular, on Newton's contributions to scientific methodology. Together with I. B. Cohen, he edited The Cambridge Companion to Newton, where he has a central piece on Newton's methodology. Aside from being Professor of Philosophy at Tufts University, Smith has pursued a highly successful career as a practicing mechanical engineer, and he Directed the Dibner Institute for the History of Science and Technology at MIT from 2001-2006. The three lectures will discuss a number of key developments in the physical sciences, including gravitational research from Newton to Einstein, J. J. Thomson's work on the electron at the end of the nineteenth century, and twentieth-century seismological research into the earth's interior, in order to depict the fine structure of evidential reasoning in these sciences and thereby illustrate and defend their epistemic authority. The lectures will be of wide interest to historians, philosophers, pure and applied physicists, engineers, and earth scientists, as well as to all those interested in the question of the distinctive place of the "hard" sciences in Western intellectual life.

Stanford Seminar on Science, Technology, and Society Spring, 2006

April 21, 2006: Ronald Kline, Cornell University: "Where Are the Cyborgs in Cybernetics?"
April 28: Chandra Mukerji, UC San Diego: "The Gender Politics of Technological Expertise: The New Rome and New Romans in 17th Century France"
May 5: Diane Vaughan, Columbia University: "NASA Revisited: Theory, Analogy, and Public Sociology"
May 12: Londa Schiebinger, Stanford: "Exotic Abortifacients: The Gender Politics of Plants in the Eighteenth Century Atlantic World"
May 19: Joseph Dumit, UC Davis: "Virtually Unlimited Health Imperatives: Risk Trafficking and Prescription Maximization"
May 26: Simon Cole, UC Irvine: "How Much Justice Can Technology Afford? The Impact of Scientific and Technological Developments on Equal (Criminal) Justice"
June 2: Jean-Pierre Dupuy, École Polytechnique, Paris: "Back from Chernobyl: Diary of an Outraged Man"
June 9: Hugh Gusterson, MIT: "Deconstructing Colin Powell"
Contact jwidman@stanford.edu for more information about the seminar series.
Sponsored by the Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology and the Program in Science Technology and Science

For questions about this series, call (650) 723-2565

MediaSpace MediaSpace: A Panel Discussion on Being Public in a Networked World

April 14, 2006 3:00pm - 5:30pm Wallenberg Theatre, Bldg 160, Stanford University

Contact: Erica Robles - ewoka @ stanford.edu

New media technologies are transforming everyday places into complex ensembles of the physical and the virtual. Remote collaborations merge geographically distributed sites into shared workspaces. Virtual communities serve as contemporary public commons where networks, rather than architectural forms, provide the infrastructure for discourse. Tangible and ubiquitous computing systems graft a digital layer on objects and spaces, permanently re-shaping experiences of the familiar. And finally, mobile devices, so pervasive as to be mundane, support continuity through conversation even as the body crosses boundaries between locations. Communication technologies are blurring the distinction between where we are and what we experience.

The Department of Communication and The Patrick Suppes Center for The Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology proudly announce MediaSpace: A Panel Discussion on Being Public in a Networked World. This event is an interdisciplinary discussion about the ways in which fusions of media and space are re-shaping traditional boundaries between the public and the private, between interpersonal and mass communication, and between situations and locations. Three scholars, each with a different analytical perspective - critical, cultural, and design - will present from their work, articulating how media-spaces give rise to new forms of self-presentation, availability, anonymity, surveillance, monitoring, and spectatorship. Discussion, moderated by Professor Fred Turner of the Department of Communication, to follow.

Presentations:

Mark Andrejevic

"The Limits of Interactivity: Surveillance, Democracy, and Control in the Digital Enclosure."

Department of Communication Studies, University of Iowa
Professor Andrejevic's work articulates the changing nature of participation and discourse about democratization of the viewer through forms such as reality TV and interactive media. His book, Reality TV: The Work of Being Watched, explores how interactive media shapes spectatorship, surveillance, monitoring, and participation, thus demonstrating ways in which new media make possible mutual surveillance and lateral monitoring between viewers and participants.

Anna McCarthy

"How to Read a Workstation"

Tisch School of the Arts, New York University
Professor McCarthy's work demonstrates how television -- a display device traditionally considered part of the domestic, or private sphere -- actively shapes discourse in public spaces. She is the author of Ambient Television: Visual Culture in Public Spaces, which uses archival research as well as contemporary readings of spaces transformed by screens in order to illuminate how both individuals and institutions utilize screens as a material and cultural form. Recently, her research has extended to computer workers and how their relationship with their consoles as a cultural site of expression.

Batya Friedman

"Privacy in Public?"
Information School, University of Washington; Co-Director of the Value-Sensitive Design Laboratory and The Mina Institute.
Professor Friedman's work focuses on cultural and social aspects of technology, synthesizing these perspectives with design methodologies in order to develop information and computing systems that reflect the values of users, institutions, and the broader community. Her research interests include human-computer interaction, informed consent, privacy in public, trust, moral agency, human dignity, urban simulation, and context-aware computing. She is the editor or a volume on Human Values and the Design of Computer Technology as well as several articles on theory and methods for value-sensitive design.


Discussion moderated by:

Fred Turner

Department of Communication, Stanford University
Fred Turner is a cultural historian of media and media technology. His most recent work has focused on the redefinition of computing as a bohemian practice. He is the author of two books -- From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, and Echoes of Combat: The Vietnam War in American Memory -- as well as a number of articles on media and cultural change.

Sponsored by the Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology

Download a flyer (PDF)


A Century of Relativity 1905-2005: An Einstein Workshop

Oct. 27th, 2005 2-5 pm Wallenberg Theatre, Bldg 160, Stanford University

Reception to follow

Dr. Tilman Sauer


Senior Research Associate in History and Einstein Papers Project,
California Institute of Technology
"Heuristic Aspects of Einstein's Unified Field Theory Program"

Dr. Dean Rickles


Postdoctoral Fellow
Dept. of Philosophy
University of Calgary
"What Price Determinism?"

Sponsored by the Patrick Suppes Center for the Interdisciplinary Study of Science and Technology and the Program in History and Philosophy of Science and Technology

Download a flyer (PDF)

January /February 2005

a three lecture series by

Itamar Pitowsky,
Eleanor Roosevelt Professor of the Philosophy of
Science in the Program for the History, Philosophy
and Sociology of Science,
the Hebrew University of Jerusalem


Logic and Probability in Modern Physics
The case of quantum mechanics

What is the basic structure of the world responsible for quantum "weirdness"? We shall review the attempts, which began with the mathematicians Birkhoff and von Neumann, to derive the basic structure underlying quantum mechanics (the Hilbert space) from simple logical axioms; and the arguments in support of the view that this is the quantum analogue of the logical (Boolean) structure of classical physics. It is a remarkable feature of the quantum formalism that it can be obtained from "almost nothing". Another remarkable feature is that quantum logic dictates Born's rule, that is, the quantum algorithm for calculating probabilities (this is a theorem by Gleason). We shall see how this fact provides for a natural and quite minimal semantics for quantum logic, which is in an important sense complete. Finally we shall see how this semantics accounts for the usual features of quantum mechanics-and thus for quantum "weirdness"- in a straightforward way: for example, the uncertainty relations, the violation of Bell's inequalities, the Kochen and Specker theorem, and the apparently classical behavior of macroscopic objects.

The lectures will take place Tuesday January 25th, February 1st, and February 8th at 4 pm in room 307 of building 200 (Lane History Building).