Gilding Kepler’s cosmology

The article explores Johannes Kepler’s abortive attempts to produce an opulent, decorative art object to accompany the publication of his first treatise, Mysterium Cosmographicum (1596). It was Kepler’s hope that this Credentzbecher, so-called because it was designed to resemble a large, ceremonial chalice, would valorize the significance of what he believed to be an epoch-defining discovery concerning the proportional nature of the planetary intervals and serve as a personal introduction to his local sovereign, Duke Friedrich I of Württemberg (1557–1608). The correspondences of Kepler and his circle, some of which have been reproduced and translated here for the first time, reveal in excruciating detail the struggles to negotiate the demands, and exacting standards, of the Stuttgart court and Kepler’s difficulty working with the local goldsmiths employed by the court to enact his vision. Though met with skepticism and destined for failure, the model, its design, and the misunderstandings its failure revealed, poignantly display the sometimes-insurmountable gap between artisanal knowledge and scientific ambition.

The Association between Researchers’ Conceptions of Research and Their Strategic Research Agendas

PurposeIn studies of the research process, the association between how researchers conceptualize research and their strategic research agendas has been largely overlooked. This study aims to address this gap.Design/methodology/approachThis study analyzes this relationship using a dataset of more than 8,500 researchers across all scientific fields and the globe. It studies the associations between the dimensions of two inventories: the Conceptions of Research Inventory (CoRI) and the Multi-Dimensional Research Agenda Inventory—Revised (MDRAI-R).FindingsThe findings show a relatively strong association between researchers’ conceptions of research and their research agendas. While all conceptions of research are positively related to scientific ambition, the findings are mixed regarding how the dimensions of the two inventories relate to one another, which is significant for those seeking to understand the knowledge production process better.Research limitationsThe study relies on self-reported data, which always carries a risk of response bias.Practical implicationsThe findings provide a greater understanding of the inner workings of knowledge processes and indicate that the two inventories, whether used individually or in combination, may provide complementary analytical perspectives to research performance indicators. They may thus offer important insights for managers of research environments regarding how to assess the research culture, beliefs, and conceptualizations of individual researchers and research teams when designing strategies to promote specific institutional research focuses and strategies.Originality/valueTo the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to associate research agendas and conceptions of research. It is based on a large sample of researchers working worldwide and in all fields of knowledge, which ensures that the findings have a reasonable degree of generalizability to the global population of researchers.

Cultivating famine: data, experimentation and food security, 1795–1848

Collecting seeds and specimens was an integral aspect of botany and natural history in the eighteenth century. Historians have until recently paid less attention to the importance of collecting, trading and compiling knowledge of their cultivation, but knowing how to grow and maintain plants free from disease was crucial to agricultural and botanical projects. This is particularly true in the case of food security. At the close of the eighteenth century, European diets (particularly among the poor) began shifting from wheat- to potato-dependence. In Britain and Ireland during these decades, extensive crop damage was caused by diseases like ‘curl’ and ‘dry rot’ – leading many agriculturists and journal editors to begin collecting data on potato cultivation in order to answer practical questions about the causes of disease and methods that might mitigate or even eliminate their appearance. Citizens not only produced the bulk of these data, but also used agricultural print culture and participation in surveys to shape and direct the interpretation of these data. This article explores this forgotten scientific ambition to harness agricultural citizen science in order to bring stability and renewed vitality to the potato plant and its cultivation. I argue that while many agriculturists did recognize that reliance upon the potato brought with it unique threats to the food supplies of Britain and Ireland, their views on this threat were wholly determined by the belief that the diseases attacking potato plants in Europe had largely been produced or encouraged by erroneous cultivation methods.

A Critical Examination of Pascal Boyer’s Religion Explained The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought

Behind its theoretical and scientific ambition, Pascal Boyer’s work mobilizes several ideas and notions (starting with that of “religion”) that belong to the old Western cultural tradition. It is precisely this ideological substratum and its indispensable cognitive “crutches” that this article seeks to identify.

Redefining the city and demolishing the rest: The techno-green fix in postcrash Cleveland, Ohio

This paper examines the techno-environmental urban policy that emerged in Cleveland, Ohio following the financial crisis, consisting primarily of mass demolition and greening programs, we argue this techno-green fix is an urban redevelopment strategy in shrinking cities that reshapes these places into manageable islands of urban development. Demolition and green reuse accelerated displacement without gentrification in long established low-income communities of color while reinforcing the racial hierarchies in US property markets. We demonstrate how the unevenness of the demolition program mirrors earlier racialized practices while adopting the rhetoric and strategy of “smart shrinkage.” We show that behind its neutral and scientific ambition, this strategy targets the most disadvantaged areas of the inner city. The market rational of these programs reproduces old patterns of racial segregation in the city. Finally, we show that the “green” dimension of this strategy is highly ambivalent. If “greening” is publicly presented as a means to benefit marginalized areas and residents, it is also used as a way to transfer the maintenance of urban services to poor residents on the city’s east side, to erase urban spaces, and to foster market dynamics.

Transcendence in Technology

According to Max Weber, the “fate of our times” is characterized by a “disenchantment of the world.” The scientific ambition of rationalization and intellectualization, as well as the attempt to master nature through technology, will greatly limit experiences of and openness for the transcendent, i.e. that which is beyond our control. Insofar as transcendence is a central aspect of virtually every religion and all religious experiences, the development of science and technology will, according to the Weberian assertion, also limit the scope of religion. In this paper, we will reflect on the relations between technology and transcendence from the perspective of technological mediation theory. We will show that the fact that we are able to technologically intervene in the world and ourselves does not imply that we can completely control the rules of life. Technological interference in nature is only possible if the structures and laws that enable us to do that are recognized and to a certain extent obeyed, which indicates that technological power cannot exist without accepting a transcendent order in which one operates. Rather than excluding transcendence, technology mediates our relation to it.

Is There Value in Identifying Individual Genetic Predispositions to Violence?

In this article I want to ask what we should do, either collectively or individually, if we could identify by genetic and family profding the 12% of the male population likely to commit almost half the violent crime in our society. What if we could identify some individuals in that 12% not only at birth, but in utero, or before implantation? I will explain the source of these figures later; for now, I will use them only to provide a concrete example of the kind of predictive claims we can expect to be made with some frequency, and some scientific credibility, over the next generation. I will adopt an outlook that one commentator has called “pragmatic optimism,” but which could also be called technological optimism - the belief that a science or technology will achieve many or most of its advertised goals. My optimism will be directed towards human behavioral genetics, the source of predictions like the one I just offered; I will assume that this controversial discipline will achieve a substantial pan of its scientific ambition to identlfy genetic differences among individuals that help predict and possibly explain future behavior, psychological health, and cognitive skill. This optimism is very limited -it concerns the scientific success of behavioral genetics, not the social value of that success.