Hasil untuk "Academies and learned societies"

M. Venhart, A. Herzáň

Bratislava is the capital and largest city of the Slovak Republic. In the Middle Ages, as a part of the Hungarian Empire, it became one of its centers of politics, culture, education and science. In 1467, the first university in the territory of the present Slovakia, named the Academia Istropolitana, was founded in the city of Bratislava. The name of the university was derived from the ancient name of the Danube River, Istros. In 1825 the Hungarian National Learned Society, which is the present Hungarian Academy of Sciences, was founded in Bra ti slava using a donation from count István Széchenyi. After the First World War, Slovakia became a part of Czechoslovakia. Czechoslovakia, as a common state of Czechs and Slovaks needs to be considered as a successful historical project, although it was not democratic during most of its existence. One of the most significant scientific and technological achievements was the design and construction of a nuclear reactor, which was operational at the Jaslovské Bohunice Power Plant. The Slovak Academy of Sciences is the main scientific and research institution in Slovakia, pursuing funda­ mental and applied research. It was founded in 1942, closed after the Second World War, and then re­ established in 1953. In 1955, physical chemist Dionýz Ilkovič, a close colla­ borator of Nobel Prize laureate Jaroslav Heyrovský, founded the Cabinet of Physics at the Slovak Academy of Sciences, which later evolved into the Institute of Physics. Since the begin­ ning, nuclear physics was one of the leading focuses of the Institute. It is worthwhile to mention contributions to the theory of pre­equilibrium nuclear reactions [1], which was developing rapidly in 70’s and 80’s. An important part of experimental program was rel­ ated to neutron physics. Several neutron generators, based on the d + T reaction, were constructed and operated [2]. Ex­ periments were focused on neutron scat­ tering, fast­neutron induced reac tions and national security appli cations. The positron annihilation spectro scopy group has been engaged in research at the inter­ face of several scientific fields, e.g., ma­ terials research, physical chemi stry and applications in biology [3–9]. Important societal changes during the last decade of the 20th century dra­ matically changed the nature of research in Slovakia. First was the Velvet revol­ ution in 1989 that transformed Czecho­ slovakia from communism with a planned economy to democracy with a free market economy. It was followed by a peaceful separation of the federation into two independent states in 1993. Such major changes in a short period of time, had many negative socio­economic consequences. One of these was the ext­ reme reduction of fundamental science funding, leading, e.g., to exodus of many of the best researchers, that mostly never returned. On the other hand, the change in the political system has made travel­ ling abroad much simpler, which opened new collaboration possibilities for Slo­ vak scientists. Slovakia became a member of the European Union in 2004. As a direct consequence, funding through struc­ tural funds of the EU became possible. This allowed significant improvement of scientific infrastructure in the coun­ try. This included also infra struc ture for nuclear physics. Presently, the nuclear physics group at the Institute of Physics has ten permanent staff, complemented with many students. It has extensive international collaboration with CERN, University of Jyväskylä, University of Liverpool, and iThemba Labs and op­ erates its own laboratory, equipped with a Tandetron® accelerator. The ISOLDE facility allows a unique possibility for small groups to run their own experimental program. Although first informal contacts emerged earlier, in 2016 Slovakia became a member of the ISOLDE collaboration. Another im­ portant mile stone was in 2019 when, following the strong suggestion of RECFA, Slovakia joined NuPECC as a full member. Strong efforts of the group from the Institute of Physics were cru­ cial for the establishment of these member ships.

Jaimir Conte

A tradução aqui apresentada consiste no Prefácio à tradução francesa de Siris, obra de George Berkeley publicada em inglês em 1744 e traduzida para o  francês em 1745 por  David-Renaud Boullier. Neste prefácio a Siris, publicada em francês com o título Recherches sur les vertus de l’eau de goudron, où l’on a joint des réflexions philosophiques sur divers autres sujets, além de oferecer um bom resumo da obra, Boullier explica a filosofia imaterialista de Berkeley e a apresenta favoravelmente como um antídoto interessante para as concepções materialistas.

Gildo Magalhães dos Santos Filho

S. S. Leal, Rafaela Priscila Cruz Moreira, Leonardo Albernaz Amaral et al.

The pandemic has brought many consequences for society, especially in education for those that are less fortunate. In Brazil, public policy measures taken weren't enough to help an expressive percentual number of students in their academy journey during the pandemic. Giving this, this paper presents a teaching-learning model based on flipped classroom to the development of hard and soft skills in universities students and young people from Brazilian outskirts, helping to fill the gap left by the insufficient educational formation during the pandemic and encouraging them to start a higher education, especially in the IT market, which is a promising area with many opportunities. In the proposed model, university students learn by themselves, instructed by professors, about IT area content and then, beyond bringing the content to be discussed in the classroom, from the traditional flipped classroom method, they also have to give lessons about the content they learned to underprivileged young people from the outskirts. Three case studies were carried out by this paper, with outskirts from three states of Brazil. Results show that the model is scalable and therefore, can be applied in different communities with small adaptations. It could be observed that university students developed many skills by participating on the project and young people from the outskirts learned new contents, developed their confidence and their motivation to start higher education and some of them even got job opportunities because of the project. The study demonstrated a class attendance rate exceeding 70%, with over 75% of students from the three case studies expressing satisfaction with their participation in the project.

O. Avramenko, S. Tkachuk

The article presents that the museum of the history of technology demonstrates not only the achievements of engineering thought, but also the intellectual and creative abilities of the nation, society, and humanity. It is shown that almost every person constantly deals with one or another technical devices and devices. In this regard, the role of the study of such phenomena as technology and technical knowledge is growing significantly.It is substantiated that the inclusion of educational complexes in the educational process as a source of information and methodological tools is a well-learned technique since the times of Plato’s Academy and Aristotle’s Lyceum. From a psychological point of view, the presence of a non-traditional and unusual means of the educational process significantly increases the interest of the objects of influence and, as a result, increases the quality of the educational process. Such factors include modern multimedia teaching aids and educational complexes, such as museums, planetariums, galleries, and others.A draft of the position of the museum as a structural unit of the educational institution has been developed. It has been established that a museum is an institution or a structural unit of an institution, which is created for the purpose of performing educational and cognitive and scientific-methodical functions based on archival data and facts and the reconstruction of objects, events, phenomena and processes.It has been proven that the cultural and historical heritage of mankind in the form of a museum of the history of technology represents the development of civilization as a dynamic picture of the spread of technologies generated by fundamental discoveries made in the world. In essence, we are talking about the technological interpretation of the historical process, the fact that historical events are determined by nothing else than the development of technique and technology, which is one of the formative elements of a holistic and systemic view of the technosphere. Keywords: museum; history; technique; technology; technogenic society; technosphere; technological culture.

E. Zvereva, S. Kutia, Evgeniya M. Zanina

2023 will mark the 200th anniversary of birth of Nikolai Vladimirovich Pleshkov, who made a significant contribution to the development of the medical traditions of Taurida gubernia. There are no report devoted to his life in modern scientific literature. This article is based on the work with archival collections and pre-revolutionary literary sources. A former orphan, Pleshkov was able to receive a decent education due to his outstanding education, learned several foreign languages, and was well versed in local history, science, culture, literature, philosophy and religion; he was the author of many reports on religious and philosophical topics. In addition, he was actively involved in public life of Simferopol. He was one of the co-founders and for many years — chairman of Simferopol Doctors’ Society. During the Crimea war, the doctor worked under N.I. Pirogov. Among other things, Pleshkov is an author of the first Russian translation of Pascal’s work “Pensees”. Nowadays the former hospital building where N.V. Pleshkov worked houses the chair of Human Anatomy of the Institute “Medical Academy named after S.I. Georgievsky”. The facts of his biography, reconstructed in this article, allow not only to take a new look at the history of the development of health care in Taurida gubernia in the XIX century, but also to form the sense of continuity of passion among medical students.

G. Roymahapatra, Ben Bin Xu, Chittaranjan Sinha

Acharya Sir Prafulla Chandra Rậy, a member of Companion of the Indian Empire (CIE, the Most Eminent Order of the Indian Empire founded by Queen Victoria), Founder Fellow of the Indian National Science Academy (FNI, Delhi which is now renamed as FNA), Fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal (FRASB, Kolkata), Fellow of the Indian Association for the Cultivation of Science (FIAS, Kolkata), and Fellow of the Chemical Society (FCS, London), is a pathfinder and originator of India's modern chemistry – teaching and research, chemical industry, philanthropist, industrialist and educationist. He was born on August 2, 1861 in the village Raruli, Khulna, (now in Bangladesh). He learned science by attending as an external student, particularly chemistry from Prof. Alexander Peddler, Presidency College (now Presidency University, Kolkata). It was the only college, where science teaching started in pre-independent India. After receiving Gilchrist Scholarship, he joined the Edinburgh University UK in 1882 and received B. Sc. in Chemistry from Prof. Alexander Crum Brown in 1885 and D. Sc. in 1887. His research thesis entitled, "Conjugated Sulphates of the Copper-magnesium Group: A Study of Isomorphous Mixtures and Molecular Combinations" earned Hope Prize from the University. The double sulfates known in his times are a few only like Mohr’s salt (i.e., (NH4)2SO4,FeSO4·6H2O); cyanochroite, K2SO4, CuSO4·6H2O. Prafulla Chandra worked in the laboratory of organic chemist and the global research tempted to physical chemistry at that time. He found out more space in doubledouble sulphates, like Mm2SO4, MbSO4. 6H2O, Mm2SO4, MbSO4·6H2O (where Mm refers to monovalent; Mb or Mb refers to the bivalent metal ion). However, the structure of such salts was known much later, after the discovery of single crystal X-ray diffraction measurements in early 1930’s and the present form only appeared after 1960’s. Rây was elected as Vice-President of the University of Edinburgh Chemical Society in 1888 and the President was Prof. Alexander Crum Brown.

Olivier Pourret, Pallavi Anand, Pieter Bots et al.

Background: Members of editorial boards of academic journals are often considered gatekeepers of knowledge and role models for the academic community. Editorial boards should be sufficiently diverse in the background of their members to facilitate publishing manuscripts representing a wide range of research paradigms, methods, and cultural perspectives.Objectives: To critically evaluate changes in the representation of binary gender and geographic diversity over time on the editorial boards of Chemical Geology and Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, flagship geochemistry journals, respectively, from the European Association of Geochemistry and the Geochemical Society – Meteoritical Society partnership.Methods: The composition of editorial boards was ascertained as given in the first issue of each year, over 1965–2021 for Chemical Geology and 1950–2021 for Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta, and members of the editorial boards were coded for their country of affiliation (the country of origin may have been different) and for their binary gender.Results: Gender parity, limited to men and women, and the number of countries of affiliation increased steadily between the late 1980s and 2021. However, the geographic distribution remained dominated by affiliations from North America and Western Europe. The editor-in-chief or board of editors had a significant impact on the diversity of the editorial boards, and both geographic and gender diversity may evolve with nearly every newly appointed editor. However, the persistently substantial under-representation on editorial boards of affiliations outside North America and Europe is of concern and needs to be the focus of active recruitment and ongoing monitoring. This approach will ensure that traditionally low geographic diversity is increased and maintained in the future.Conclusion: Improving diversity and inclusion of editorial boards of academic journals and strengthening journal and disciplinary reputations are mutually reinforcing. Instituting a rotating editorship with emphasis on embedding broader geographic networks and more equitable international recruitment could ensure sustained and wider geographic representation and gender balance of editorial boards and promote originality and quality of published research, representing our global communities.

Erin Foley, Rachel Moriarty, Kerys Martin

Background: The Early Career Publishers Committee (ECPC) of the STM Association (the International Association of Scientific, Technical, and Medical Publishers)’s Early Career Publishers Committee (ECPC) aims to engage, and provide tools and resources for, early-career publishers (ECPs) and professionals. The committee believes it is important to survey the community regularly to understand the background, needs, and concerns of its members to better achieve the committee’s goals.Objectives: Early-career professionals were surveyed in 2014 and 2020: the first survey was undertaken to get a baseline understanding of the community and to guide the newly formed ECPC whereas the second not only sought to review some aspects of the first survey but also to identify and explore ways to improve engagement and support through new or revised survey questions.Methods: The two surveys were conducted online through the ECPC mailing list and social networks. The surveys were voluntary, with the option to skip some questions, and responses – some in the form of a rating scale – were collected anonymously. Each survey remained open for over a month to maximize responses, but neither was pretested. Some questions in the first survey were revised in the second in the light of learnings from the first survey.Results: Most of respondents were women, 25–54 years old, from the UK or the US, with higher degrees, and working in editorial roles. In the second survey, many respondents were interested in developing their career either in their current role or in a different one, and nearly half were actively seeking a new role. Over half said that finding the right role was a challenge. Many had never participated in a publishing-related mentoring scheme, and most had not heard of the STM mentoring scheme before.Conclusions: More tools, resources, and outreach for entry-level and younger industry members, for those from countries outside the UK and US, and for those seeking to develop their careers may be useful in the future. The mentoring scheme could be publicized more prominently to drive engagement. A new survey will be needed in the next 2–3 years, given the potential impact of the COVID-19 global pandemic on the number of respondents in the second (2020) survey and their motivation.

Josué Bertolin

Ciência e religião são dois importantes fundamentos da sociedade humana. No entanto, no senso comum tem-se a ideia subjacente de um conflito irreconciliável instalado entre razão e fé. É notada, por vezes, uma abordagem reducionista do assunto, e, assim, perpetuam-se imagens prejudiciais ao progresso desses campos do saber. Esse artigo vem discutir a relação entre ciência e fé sob uma perspectiva histórica. Busca-se compreender a possibilidade de haver intercâmbio de conhecimento entre ambas e quais modelos têm sido propostos. Algumas contribuições brasileiras para a possível interação construtiva entre as áreas do saber também são analisadas.

D. North

I entered the field of risk analysis forty years ago from a background in physics followed by doctoral training and experience in decision analysis. I came into the Society for Risk Analysis (SRA) after participating as a committee member in the 1983 National Academies report, Risk Assessment in the Federal Government: Managing the Process. The insights and recommendations from this report, and successor reports from 1996 and 2008, merit revisiting on this 40th anniversary. Risk analysis includes risk assessment, a process of summarizing applicable science to inform decisions; and risk management, a process of making informed choices, usually involving multiple stakeholders. Inherent in both is the need to deal with complexity, uncertainty, and differing perspectives and goals. The lessons I have learned include the need for a conceptual separation of risk management from risk assessment, the benefit of an iterative dialogue between these activities, and the wisdom of articulating and assessing what we know, what we want, and what we can do as we seek to understand and manage risks affecting ourselves and those we advise.

J. Beckman

The paper discusses the publications of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences (RSAS) as part of a wider network of publication exchange, linking learned societies, libraries, and archives. The periodicals of the RSAS went through several reorganisations between 1813 and 1903, all to some extent related to their role in publication exchange. Although subject to many of the same deliberations of commercial value and institutional prestige as the expanding book trade, publication exchange offered a means of communication for institutions with widely differing financial, linguistic and scientific status, and a forum for articulating a wide range of values significant in scientific publication. In the context of publication exchange, the roles of producers and consumers, and of publishers and repositories of scientific knowledge overlap, and librarians emerge alongside editors as central actors in scientific communication. Scientific editorship should be viewed not only as a means of disseminating scientific findings to wider audiences, but as designing a product that could be used to forge institutional connections, to acquire publications, and to build collections. The case of the RSAS periodicals highlights the importance of publication, not only for the distribution of scientific knowledge,but for its acquisition.

Natalia Alimova, Yuri Brumshteyn

Objective: To analyse the productivity of post-Soviet countries, adjusted by population, in terms of research papers published and the proportions of those papers indexed by Scopus and the Web of Science.Methods: Relevant data on the journals indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science were analysed. Where required, data were also extracted from Russian Science Citation Index databases and websites of journals.Results: On average, the post-Soviet countries had 31 researchers per 10,000 people. The average numbers of publications per researcher in journals indexed by Scopus was 1.04 and the corresponding figure for the Web of Science was 0.87. In terms of the number of journals indexed in Scopus and the Web of Science, the leading countries were Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania.Conclusion: Although the post-Soviet countries differed considerably in terms of bibliometric indices, the overall values were low. Main features of the journals were as follows: articles published in national languages – in Russian in many cases – and in English, articles mostly by authors within the region, and only a minority of foreigners as members of editorial boards. Thus most of the journals cannot be considered international. All the journals examined have websites in a national language and/or in English and invariably carry information on ethical practices, although such information is not given in a uniform format and varies from country to country.

P. Tregear

If it were not bad enough to find out that the Australian government has over recent years been redistributing Australian Research Council funds away from the humanities (and in particular the creative arts and writing) by a factor of almost two-thirds towards areas it described as being of ‘immediate and critical importance’, we now know that at least two music research projects that were approved in the 2019 grant round were subsequently denied support at the whim of former Federal education minister Simon Birmingham. I doubt many of us were surprised, however. The annual chore of grant writing has felt for some time now to be a Sisyphean one, more a ritual of disciplinary self-abasement rather than self-affirmation given the already dismally low chances of success. Nevertheless there now seems to be clear grounds for Australian Vice-Chancellors and learned academies to protest vigorously about such open prejudice against our discipline. Musicologists should protest too, of course, but perhaps we could also consider how we might better present the case for public support. To that end, the appearance of a book like William Cheng’s Just Vibrations: The Purpose of Sounding Good seems both timely and welcome, for in it Cheng sets himself the task of examining how musicology might ‘renegotiate the means and purposes of careful labor, intellectual inquiry, and living soundly’ (p. 5). Cheng’s endeavour parallels recent work done by a consortium of conservatoire heads (of which I was one) who explored how tertiary music education could be more explicitly understood in terms of its benefits to wider society. Just Vibrations stands out, however, for focusing specifically on musicology and has quickly generated a good deal of online

A. Crane, I. Henriques, B. Husted et al.

R. Dingwall, R. Iphofen, Janet Lewis et al.

Zbigniew Błocki

Na podstawie wybranych danych, takich jak rankingi uczelni, granty ERC oraz publikacje w najważniejszych czasopismach naukowych, analizowane jest miejsce polskiej nauki w światowej konkurencji. Następnie omówione są konieczne regulacje, które powinny zostać wprowadzone, by to miejsce poprawić. Najważniejszą z nich jest zmiana sposobu zarządzania naszymi uniwersytetami, a przede wszystkim inny sposób wyboru ich władz.

Julita Jabłecka

Celem artykułu jest przedstawienie różnych definicji misji uniwersytetu, jej obecnego znaczenia, zróżnicowanych funkcji, jakie pełni, oraz kontekstu, w jakim jest tworzona i wykorzystywana. Autorka ukazuje także powody uzasadniające nowy sposób rozumienia misji. Wynikają one z jednej strony z charakteru zmian w otoczeniu uczelni i w stosunkach między państwem a szkołami wyższymi, które zadecydowały o karierze tego pojęcia, z drugiej zaś z oczekiwań stawianych wobec współczesnego uniwersytetu oraz zmian w prowadzeniu dydaktyki i uprawianiu nauki.

Julita Jabłecka

W artykule przedstawiono podstawowe założenia metodologiczne odwołujące się do literatury z zakresu badań ewaluacyjnych oraz różnorodne podejścia i techniki stosowane przy ocenie szkolnictwa wyższego na Zachodzie. Metody i procedury oceny różnią się w zależności od przesłanek ewaluacji, a także celów i sposobów wykorzystania wyników oceny. Oceniane są wyniki działalności i sam proces kształcenia, a użytek z wyników oceny może mieć charakter instrumentalny, konceptualny lub perswazyjny. Wśród metod oceny wyróżnia się te, które mają charakter jakościowy oraz te, które są oparte na danych ilościowych (wskaźniki osiągnięć). Stosowanie różnorodnych metod oceny, a zwłaszcza wskaźników osiągnięć, budzi wiele zastrzeżeń i kontrowersji wynikających z niedoskonałości technik pomiaru. W artykule opisano także trudności samego procesu oceniania oraz warunki sprzyjające formułowaniu trafnych i obiektywnych ocen.