Science and Technology

1/6/2019

I'm dumb enough to have started another degree program. This time I'm attending Virginia Tech. My son Matt expressed an interest in reading whatever feeble work I manage to produce along the way so here is a first installment. I actually finished this class before the Christmas holiday so I'm uploading this after the fact. Try not to fall asleep.

1 Comment

Michael Beach

1/6/2019 10:50:54 am

The professor gave me a B+ on this one. Here are her remarks:

Comments: Choosing the relationship between, or definition of, science and technology as a topic was a risky move, since this is such a broad question.

For Cirac-Claveras, I would not have said that the science-technology relationship was the focus of her article: her stated focus is how a user community was created for a technological system that was, as you note, “a solution looking for a problem.” But her answer to that question—that the technologists reinvent themselves as scientists so that they can become their own users—does raise the issue of how institutional affiliations and metrics differentiate the two categories. So, if you wanted to explore the sci-tech relationship, this would be a legitimate source, even if that is not necessarily what the author had in mind.

On the other hand, it doesn’t seem fair to criticize her for not clearly distinguishing between science and engineering, given that this was not her goal. Your critique about how users changed their views on satellite data is a good one; she seems to be arguing that CESBIO performed “linking” research that made the satellite data fit into ecologists’ existing models, but I would have liked her to explain this better.

For Daniels and Krige, your summary of their argument is not very clear. When and why did politicians link the binaries “science/technology” and “open/classified”? What were the incentives for researchers to classify their work in one category or the other, and did these incentives change over time? What is the authors’ overall conclusion? You make a good point that the authors could have addressed the question of how we can craft better definitions of basic & applied science.

Comparison: You note the common issues and questions in these articles. How would you compare their historical approaches, in terms of questions asked, sources used, etc.? It would also be interesting to know what, if any, national differences you saw between the French and US cases (it’s my impression that engineers are held in higher regard in France, so there might not be as much of a science/engineering dichotomy in French culture).

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