Record of the Week (Week of 17 February)

This week I begin to expand my weekly round up (under the clever title of Record of the Week) beyond academic literature.

ANTHROPOLOGY

Somatosphere Blog,

• ‘A Home for Science: the Anthropology of Tropical and Arctic Field-Stations‘
•  ‘Making up “persons” in personalized medicine with metabolomics

Savage Minds Blog, 

An essay by Bianca C. Williams (Professor of Ethnic Studies), ‘Guard Your Heart and Your Purpose: Faithfully Writing Anthropology”

Doing Anthropology in Public 

–> This piece was inspired by the following Op-Ed column in the New York Times Sunday Review, ‘Professors, We Need You!”

Understandably this has generated a tremendous response from academics (in addition to the ‘Doing Anthropology in Public’ piece)

• ‘What an academic wants, what Kristof needs‘
• ‘Dear Nicholas Kristof: We are right here!‘
• ‘Look Who Nick Kristof’s Saving Now‘
• ‘On Breaking Professors out of the academy’s constraints‘

Just Publics @365 has a Round up of Responses to Kristof’s Call for Professors in the Public Sphere

Also from Just Publics @365, ‘Cara Mertes on the Impact of Documentary‘

From Prof. Gillian Rose at Her Visual/Method/Culture/ Blog, ‘Interactive documentary – or interactive cinemascape?‘

Committee on the Anthropology of Science, Technology and Computing (CASTAC) blog, the question ‘What’s the Matter with artificial intelligence is asked?‘

GEOGRAPHY

Journal of Economic Geography,

‘The path- and place-dependent nature of scientific knowledge production in biotech 1986–2008‘

Technological dynamics and social capability: US states and European nations‘

Antipode
‘On the Performativity of Pill Pricing: Theory and Reality in the Economics of Global Pharmaceuticalization‘

NEW MEDIA / SOCIAL MEDIA / etc.

New Media and Society has a special section ‘Re: Search‘.

Nieman Journalism Lab, ‘Facebook friend of the court: The complicated relationship between social media and the courts‘

Social Media Collective Blog, ‘New anthology on media technologies, bringing together STS and Communication perspectives‘, and the link to Chapter 1 – Introduction

PUBLIC HEALTH

Public Health Perspectives of PLoS Blogs, ‘Breaking the cold chain: Why ditching refrigerators is a big deal for Africa‘

From PLoS One,  ‘Fate of Clinical Research Studies after Ethical Approval – Follow-Up of Study Protocols until Publication‘ [OPEN ACCESS]

RISK etc

Journal of Risk Research, ‘Risk policies and risk perceptions: a comparative study of environmental health risk policy and perception in six European countries‘

Risk: Reason and Reality blog at Big think, ‘Dangerous MIS-reasoning in the name of survival‘

SCIENCE COMMUNICATION

There is a new science communication website in town, sciworthy.com (‘science news straight from the lab’).
– You can read why Graham Short (researcher at the California Academy of science) started sciworhty.com over at the Communication Breakdown blog

Knight Science Journalism ‘Why is the Washington Post reprinting university press releases in its Health & Science Section?‘

Science as Culture, ‘GM Crops in Hungary: Comparing Mass Media Framing and Public Understanding of Technoscientific Controversy‘

SCIENCE & SOCIETY

Matthew Nisbet and  Ezra M. Markowitz published in PLoS One the following [OPEN ACCESS] study, ‘Understanding Public Opinion in Debates over Biomedical Research: Looking beyond Political Partisanship to Focus on Beliefs about Science and Society

• Author commentaries can be found at the Climate Shift Project website, at The Breakthrough, at The Scientist, at The Conversation.

At The Guardian’s Political Science blog, Mike Galsworthy argues that within the context of the debate over Britain’s EU membership, Europe offers benefits for science and innovation. ‘Eurosceptics could damage British science and innovation‘

At the LSE Impact Blog, Dr. Mark Goodwin asks, ‘Do we need more scientists in Parliament?’His recently published research suggests that they make little difference?’
The original research article about which the above blog post was written can be found in the Journal of Parliamentary Affairs, ‘Political Science? Does Scientific Training Predict UK MPs Voting Behaviour?’

NSF (USA) released Science and Engineering Indicators on February 6 (I only came across it this week). This report provides an overview of the science and technology picture in the United States and comes out every two years. You can find a discussion of the chapter “Science and Technology: Public Attitudes and Understanding” at the Communication Breakdown blog.

UNIVERSITIES, HIGHER EDUCATION, etc.

A post from KMbeing blog on ‘Universities & Research in a Knowledge Society‘

Savage Minds  blog – ‘What comes after the public university?

OTHER ROUND UPS

I recognise my limitations in tracking all kinds of interesting STS-related literature. Consequently, here are a few links to other round ups from around the web.

‘Around the Web Digest’ from Savage Minds can be found here.

‘Impact Round Up from 22nd February’ – Channels of academic influence, visualisations and turning raw data into actionable knowledge’from LSE Impact Blog is found here.

‘I’ve Got your missing links right here (22 February 2014)’ from Ed Yong’s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog can be found here.