scholarly journals Six Decades of Scientific Pan-Americanism. An Interview with Jorge E Allende

Author(s):  
Miguel L. Allende

Jorge E. Allende is a biochemist trained in the United States who has been a Professor at the University of Chile since 1961. He has served in many leadership positions in both Chilean and international scientific organizations and academic institutions. He led the International Cell Research Organization, the Latin American Network of Biological Sciences and obtained the Chilean National Science Prize. He belongs to the Chilean Academy of Sciences and is a foreign member of the U. S. National Academy of Sciences and also of the U.S. National Academy of Medicine. During his career, besides leading a highly successful research group, he was instrumental in generating an esprit de corps among Latin American scientists of all fields in biology starting in the late 1960’s. He began a longstanding tradition by organizing advanced training courses for young scientists from the region who would not have otherwise had the opportunity to experience the latest methods and concepts in biological research, courses that had world leading researchers as instructors. A constant focus of his efforts consisted in promoting the establishment of postgraduate programs in biology throughout the continent, coordinating international funding programs aimed at scientific development in the third world and, more recently, advocating for science education among children and school teachers as the only way to achieve scientific literacy in our societies. In this interview, we explore how these issues were addressed by him and his counterparts in other Latin American countries, at a time when they had to start, essentially, from scratch.

Author(s):  
O.О. Letychevskyi ◽  

The article is devoted to the scientific development of the Glushkov Institute of Cybernetics of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine on the application of algebraic and insertional modeling technologies created on the basis of behavioral algebra. Technologies of formalization, algebraic verification, and testing of software and hardware specifications within the model-driven development method are considered. The use of algebraic modeling in biological research, development of systems based on blockchain platforms, analysis of legal and economic models is covered. One of the main areas of application of these technologies is the field of cybersecurity, which uses the method of algebraic matching and formalization of patterns of vulnerabilities and cyberattacks.


Author(s):  
Amy C. Offner

In the years after 1945, a flood of U.S. advisors swept into Latin America with dreams of building a new economic order and lifting the Third World out of poverty. These businessmen, economists, community workers, and architects went south with the gospel of the New Deal on their lips, but Latin American realities soon revealed unexpected possibilities within the New Deal itself. In Colombia, Latin Americans and U.S. advisors ended up decentralizing the state, privatizing public functions, and launching austere social welfare programs. By the 1960s, they had remade the country's housing projects, river valleys, and universities. They had also generated new lessons for the United States itself. When the Johnson administration launched the War on Poverty, U.S. social movements, business associations, and government agencies all promised to repatriate the lessons of development, and they did so by multiplying the uses of austerity and for-profit contracting within their own welfare state. A decade later, ascendant right-wing movements seeking to dismantle the midcentury state did not need to reach for entirely new ideas: they redeployed policies already at hand. This book brings readers to Colombia and back, showing the entanglement of American societies and the contradictory promises of midcentury statebuilding. The untold story of how the road from the New Deal to the Great Society ran through Latin America, the book also offers a surprising new account of the origins of neoliberalism.


2016 ◽  
Vol 46 (5) ◽  
pp. 556-591 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brit Shields

This paper seeks to combine studies of émigré scientists, Cold War American science, and cultural histories of mathematical communities by analyzing Richard Courant’s participation in the National Academy of Sciences interacademy exchange program with the Soviet Union in the 1960s. Following his dismissal by the Nazi government from his post as Director of the Göttingen Mathematics Institute in 1933, Courant spent a year at the University of Cambridge, and then immigrated to the United States where he developed the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Courant’s participation with the National Academy of Sciences interacademy exchange program at the end of his career highlights his ideologies about the mathematics discipline, the international mathematics community, and the political role mathematicians could play in contributing to international peace through scientific diplomacy. Courant’s Cold War scientific identity emerges from his activities as an émigré mathematician, institution builder, and international “ambassador.”


Author(s):  
Joseph L. Breault

The National Academy of Sciences convened in 1995 for a conference on massive data sets. The presentation on health care noted that “massive applies in several dimensions . . . the data themselves are massive, both in terms of the number of observations and also in terms of the variables . . . there are tens of thousands of indicator variables coded for each patient” (Goodall, 1995, paragraph 18). We multiply this by the number of patients in the United States, which is hundreds of millions.


2004 ◽  
Vol 95 (2) ◽  
pp. 487-493
Author(s):  
Xiaofang Gao

Hedge is defined as the expression of provisionalness and possibility that makes scientific messages tentative, vague, and imprecise, thereby reducing the force of claims scientists make. Linguistic study of hedges began in the early 1970s in generative semantics. Since then, the focus has shifted from seeking linguistic properties in spoken discourse to analyzing its pragmatic functions in written contextual communication. The purpose of this paper was to analyze hedges in Chinese and English scientific articles from the perspective of contrastive pragmatics. Based on a contextual analysis of 5 Chinese and 5 English scientific articles, selected randomly, from two journals in molecular biology— Science in China and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, there were significant differences between Chinese and English scientific articles in use of hedges.


2019 ◽  
Vol 27 (1) ◽  
pp. 78-85
Author(s):  
A. E. Skelton ◽  
A. Franklin

AbstractThe extent to which aesthetic preferences are ‘innate’ has been highly debated (Reber, Schwarz, & Winkielman, Personality and Social Psychology Review, 8(4), 364–382, 2004). For some types of visual stimuli infants look longer at those that adults prefer. It is unclear whether this is also the case for colour. A lack of relationship in prior studies between how long infants look at different colours and how much adults like those colours might be accounted for by stimulus limitations. For example, stimuli may have been too desaturated for infant vision. In the current study, using saturated colours more suitable for infants, we aim to quantify the relationship between infant looking and adult preference for colour. We take infant looking times at multiple hues from a study of infant colour categorization (Skelton, Catchpole, Abbott, Bosten, & Franklin, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 114(21), 5545–5550, 2017) and then measure adult preferences and compare these to infant looking. When colours are highly saturated, infants look longer at colours that adults prefer. Both infant looking time and adult preference are greatest for blue hues and are least for green-yellow. Infant looking and adult preference can be partly summarized by activation of the blue-yellow dimension in the early encoding of human colour vision. These findings suggest that colour preference is at least partially rooted in the sensory mechanisms of colour vision, and more broadly that aesthetic judgements may in part be due to underlying sensory biases.


2017 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 239784731769499 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edward J Calabrese

This commentary summarizes a spate of recent papers that provide historical evidence that the 1956 recommendation of the US National Academy of Sciences Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation I Genetics Panel to switch from a threshold to a linear dose–response model for risk assessment was an ideologically motivated decision based on deliberate falsification and fabrication of the research record. The recommendation by the Genetics Panel had far-reaching influence, affecting cancer risk assessment, risk communication strategies, community public health, and numerous medical practices in the United States and worldwide. This commentary argues that the toxicology, risk assessment, and regulatory communities examine this issue, addressing how these new historical evaluations affect the history and educational practices of these fields as well as carcinogen regulation.


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