Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Scientific'

According to Boyd/Putnam, scientific realism is the view that successful theories are typically approximately true and that their key terms typically refer. The no-miracle argument for the view holds that approximate truth and reference provide the best explanation of the success of science. I try to defend scientific realism from the following six lines of antirealist objections. First, constructive empiricists argue that inference to the best explanation is a problematic rule of inference. I try to show that their critiques of inference to the best explanation backfire on van Fraassen's positive philosophical theories, such as the contextual theory of explanation and constructive empiricism. Second, pessimistic inducers argue that successful current theories will follow the fate of successful past theories which turned out to be completely false. I reply that realists can get around the historical objection, once they take the realist attitude only toward successful theories that cohere with each other. Third, antirealists from van Fraassen (1980) to Stanford (2000) have been proposing antirealist explanations of the success of science, thereby challenging the realist claim that the realist proposal is the best. I criticize eight antirealist proposals that I found in the literature with a view to proving that the realist proposal is still the best of the proposals I know of. Fourth, antirealists reject realism based on their views on the nature of scientific explanation. I critically evaluate four antirealist objections coming from that route. Fifth, antirealists might object that the key realist predicate, 'approximate truth,' is obscure. I reply that the predicate is viable, because there are clear cases of approximately true descriptions, and because Hilpinen/Lewis's theoretical account of approximate truth can handle those clear cases. Sixth, constructive empiricists claim that constructive empiricism is better than scientific realism because it explains science without extra epistemic risk. I attempt to prove, contrary to what the constructive empiricists believe, that empirical adequacy is harder to come by than approximate truth in the light of the pessimistic induction and the realist responses to it. Conclusion. Semantic, economic, empirical, and pragmatic considerations as a whole favor scientific realism over scientific antirealism, when realists believe that our best theories, successful theories that cohere with each other, are approximately true, and antirealists believe that they are approximately empirically adequate. Scientific realism is overall better than scientific antirealism.

The scientific advances have greatly influenced the perception of the facts, generating some objectivation of the perception of the proof . In the past, many decisions were made on the basis of common sense and presumptions. This is reduced by the performance of more reliable evidence, which can generate a better conviction in the judge or legal operator.In this article, the author develops the effects that scientific evidence has had on legal practitioners, such as judges. Also, a theoretical framework will be proposed to understand this type of test, taking as reference emblematic cases.
Los avances científicos han influenciado enormemente la percepción de los hechos, generando cierta objetivación de la percepción de la prueba. En el pasado, muchas decisiones se tomaban sobre la base del sentido común y las presunciones. Ello se ve reducido con la actuación de medios probatorios más certeros y fiables, los cuales pueden generar una mejor convicción en el juez u operador jurídico.En el presente artículo, el autor desarrolla los efectos que ha tenido la prueba científica en los operadores del derecho, como los jueces. Asimismo, se planteará un marco teórico para comprender a dicho tipo de prueba, tomando como referencia casos emblemáticos.

In recent times the importance and opportunities a globalized science can offer have become more and more clear and needed. In a world struggling with economic depression, pollution, global warming, over population and looking for a reliable and unlimited source of energy capable of supporting the current needs, science and scientific knowledge needs to be at the center of every state policies. In this thesis I will first give an overview of the first years of international scientific cooperation and what it means for nations to work together. I will describe one of the first international cooperation, the Manhattan Project, and then move on to more recent time and how globalization has changes the way of doing science. Another important point I will take into consideration is the role science can play in international diplomacy, as a tool for nations to find common grounds and build something that can bring them closer. I will then move on to describe modern international cooperation projects, especially the ISS, being the most expensive international project ever started, and ITER, probably the world´s best chance at finding a reliable and durable solution to the energy problem. On ITER I will then focus on the creation of the project, thus analyzing the path that led to the signing of the agreement and of the Domestic Agencies as well as analyzing the problems the project has and is encountering. I will try to provide possible solutions for most of these problems, for the ITER project itself as well as for all future international scientific cooperation projects.

Thesis advisor: Katherine L. McNeill
Scientific arguments are used to persuade others for explanations that make sense of the natural world. Over time, through the accumulation of evidence, one explanation for a scientific phenomenon tends to take precedence. In science education, arguments make students' thinking and reasoning visible while also supporting the development of their conceptual, procedural, and epistemic knowledge. As such, argumentation has become a goal within recent policy documents, including the Next Generation Science Standards, which, in turn, presents a need for comprehensive, effective, and scalable assessments. This dissertation used assessments that measure students' abilities to critique scientific evidence, which is measured in terms of the form of justification and the support of empirical evidence, when reading and writing scientific arguments. Cognitive interviews were then conducted with a subset of the students to explore the criteria they used to critique scientific evidence. Specifically, the research investigated what characteristics of scientific evidence the students preferred, how they critiqued both forms of justification and empirical evidence, and whether the four constructs represented four separate abilities. Findings suggest that students' prioritized the type of empirical evidence to the form of justification, and most often selected relevant-supporting justifications. When writing scientific arguments, most students constructed a justified claim, but struggled to justify their claims with empirical evidence. In comparison, when reading scientific arguments, students had trouble locating a justification when it was not empirical data. Additionally, it was more difficult for students to critique than identify or locate empirical evidence, and it was more difficult for students to identify than locate empirical evidence. Findings from the cognitive interviews suggest that students with more specific criteria tended to have more knowledge of the construct. Lastly, dimensional analyses suggest that these may not be four distinct constructs, which has important implications for curriculum development and instructional practice. Namely, teachers should attend to the critique of scientific evidence separately when reading and writing scientific arguments
Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2015
Submitted to: Boston College. Lynch School of Education
Discipline: Teacher Education, Special Education, Curriculum and Instruction

English
Ph.D.
This dissertation explores how aesthetic claims in scientific arguments help construct scientific ethos through demonstrations of the rhetor's judgment. By examining the works of Josiah Willard Gibbs and Henry Rowland, two prominent nineteenth-century American scientists, through the lens of their formal rhetorical training as students in American universities, this dissertation investigates how aesthetic judgment is enacted in scientific writing and explores the rhetorical history of the terms "simplicity," "brevity," "imagination," and "taste" and their use in scientific arguments. The aesthetic judgment that both scientists demonstrate in their written work reinforced an understanding of scientific ethos. By placing nineteenth-century scientific writing in contact with the rhetorical theories of the time, this dissertation explores the history of aesthetic judgment in rhetoric and its influence on conceptualizations of the faculty of taste. The dissertation illuminates the connections between rhetorical training and the ability to perform appropriate judgment when creating a reliable scientific ethos in writing. Constructing a scientific ethos in writing became increasingly important and complicated during the time of great institutional change in scientific research, which occurred during the second half of the nineteenth century in America. Scientists constructed scientific ethos through demonstrations of aesthetic judgment in order to respond to the exigencies of both institutional pressures and disciplinary expectations.
Temple University--Theses

ViewPlus is collaborating with the American Physical Society (APS), DAISY, and several other companies and agencies to enable APS to publish its scientific journals in the highly accessible DAISY XML format. All text, math, and figures will be accessible to everybody, including people with print disabilities. The first experimental APS DAISY publications are targeted for 2010. All APS journals will eventually be published in DAISY form, and other scholarly publishers are expected to follow suit.

Ever since Hempel and Oppenheim's development of the Deductive Nomological model of scientific explanation in 1948, a great deal of philosophical energy has been dedicated to constructing a viable model of explanation that concurs both with our intuitions and with the general project of science. Here I critically examine the developments in this field of study over the last half century, and conclude that Humphreys' aleatory model is superior to its competitors. There are, however, some problems with Humphreys' account of the relative quality of an explanation, so in the end I develop and defend a modified version of the aleatory account.

We only need to consider public media reports to appreciate that there is growing concern amongst citizens for sustainability. This concern arises from increasing appreciation that the current direction and rate of exploitation of resources is not sustainable and humanity’s actions today are arguably compromising future generations’ ability to meet their living needs. By drawing on the research of scientists, ranging from their evidence of the problems of sustainability to those promising solutions, the same press reports show strong links between sustainability and science. The appearance of such reports in the public media implies that citizens understand the interaction of science and sustainability and that they can engage critically with scientific research, including its applications and implications for sustainability. In this dissertation this understanding and capacity to engage critically is termed scientific literacy. The general question governing the research reported in this dissertation arose from this context and is: What does it mean for citizens to be scientifically literate within the context of sustainability? More specifically, because it is expected that university graduates are well educated in a socially relevant manner, with commensurate responsibilities and influence, the focus question studied in this dissertation is: What does it mean for university graduates to be scientifically literate? It became apparent from the review of the literature, that the concept of scientific literacy was multidimensional. The three key dimensions that emerged were (i) the fundamental and enduring ideas and concepts of science, (ii) the nature of science and (iii) the interaction of science with society. These dimensions provided the framework for the research reported in this dissertation. Within this framework and based on the literature, two relationships amongst these dimensions were proposed. The first relationship was that the dimensions were in a conceptual hierarchal order, with successive dimensions including the previous dimensions and expanding upon them. The second relationship was that students’ scientific literacy developed sequentially along the same hierarchy. It was proposed that development occurred sequentially, with development of concepts of science first, nature of science second and interaction with society last. It was proposed that a scientifically literate person would have reached the level of understanding that includes the interaction of science with society. Specific indicators of the successive dimensions were functional, conceptual/procedural and multidimensional, which at this highest level, includes the relationship between the first two dimensions and society. This framework and the associated indicators were used as a structure and lens for interrogating the development of scientific literacy of 244 first year university students enrolled in Australia’s Murdoch University’s foundation unit, Life and the Universe. This is one of five units from which first year students are required to select one. The units are interdisciplinary in nature with Life and the Universe being a unit that covers generic issues in science. In part because of its content and in part because it allows students from all backgrounds to enrol, it was considered suitable for studying, illustratively, the development of scientific literacy of potential university graduates. The development of scientific literacy was studied in three ways. First, participants responded to open questions about a newspaper report of science, before and after their studying in Life and the Universe, second, they responded to a Likert style questionnaire regarding the nature of science, again before and after studying the unit, and third, a subset of participants were involved in a focus group run over two years. The participants’ responses to the open questions on the questionnaire were analysed for their critical engagement with the news brief, in terms of their ability to give reasons why the text should be accepted or rejected. The nature of requests for extra information about the news brief’s content was also analysed. Analysis of the initial responses to the open questions showed that more than fifty percent of the participants in this study did not demonstrate the ability to critically engage with science reported in the news. The Likert style questionnaire assessed participants’ conception of the nature of science, with one end of the continuum reflecting a traditional view that science was a body of unchanging facts, derived from objective and value free observations, and the other reflecting a more contemporary view, that scientific knowledge was dynamic, open to change, had subjective components, and had scientists socially located so that their work was not free of values. Analysis of the initial responses to the Nature of Science questionnaire showed that more than fifty percent of the participants were located on the continuum towards the contemporary, socially located end. However, it also showed that the majority were still not sufficiently located towards the contemporary end of the continuum to view science as dynamic, with a changing body of knowledge. There was no statistically significant difference in these analyses in relation to participants’ gender, time out of school, course of enrolment or science background. Unexpectedly, the comparison in the analysis of the news brief pre and post Life and the Universe showed that the number of participants engaging critically did not increase. More expectedly, the comparison of the pre and post Life and the Universe responses to the Likert scale showed that there was overall a statistically significant increase in the group’s contemporary, socially located, perspective of the nature of science during their participation in the foundation unit. Specifically, the participants demonstrated raised awareness of the tentative and subjective nature of science and that scientists study a world in which they are a part and, as such, their work is not objective or value free. Nevertheless, there was substantial possibility of higher locations on the scale which the majority of participants did not reach. This statistically significant increase, but possibility for further improvement, is compatible with the lack of increase in critical engagement with the news brief and suggests that the statistical increase was not educationally significant. The focus group data contributed greater depth of understanding to the researcher about the range in participants’ conceptions of the nature of science. The conceptions evident were consistent with the conclusions from the open questions and Likert style questionnaire and also highlighted limited understandings of scientific processes or scientific methods. It was evident that misconceptions and naïve understandings of the contemporary nature of science were present at the beginning and retained throughout the foundation unit learning experience. These limitations helped explain participants’ inability to engage meaningfully and to question critically the science news briefs contained in the questionnaires. Data from the focus group also suggested that a limited understanding of science terms prevented critical engagement with the content of the news briefs. Following closely the focus group participants’ development of scientific literacy over a two year period, allowed the researcher to gain a greater depth of understanding of the participants’ development of scientific literacy than that which could be gained alone from the large scale administrations of the questionnaire. This experience highlighted that the development of scientific literacy was far more complex than the originally proposed sequential development across the three dimensions. The analysis of converging sources of data challenged this proposition and resulted in a reconstruction of understanding about the development of scientific literacy. It was evident that the ability and disposition to critically question and act scientifically required parallel development of science content, socially located conceptions of the nature of science and understanding of its interaction with society. It was the blended and parallel development of these knowledge dimensions, at any level, that demonstrated scientific literacy. In order to characterise the more complex structure amongst the dimensions in which parallel development occurred, a rope metaphor was used. This metaphor effectively represented the observed development of scientific literacy, as it made concrete the interwoven threads of multidimensional knowledge. It represented more realistically the complex, intertwining and multidimensional aspects of participants’ development of scientific literacy. Re-thinking the development of scientific literacy and representing the construct with the rope metaphor offered possibilities for effective pedagogy in higher education. The interaction of multidimensional threads of knowledge seems an integral part of the development of scientific literacy and suggests the need for teaching and learning experiences that are holistic in nature and driven by socially relevant contexts.

It is now part and parcel of the official philosophical wisdom that models are essential to the acquisition and organisation of scientific knowledge. It is also generally accepted that most models represent their target systems in one way or another. But what does it mean for a model to represent its target system. Surprisingly, this issue has hardly been recognised, much less seriously discussed. In the first part, I introduce the problem of scientific representation and argue for its importance. In the second part, I provide a critique of the current orthodoxy, the semantic view of theories. Though writers in this tradition do not explicitly address the issue of scientific representation, the semantic view implies that a model represents by being isomorphic or, in another version, similar to its target. I argue that this view faces insurmountable problems because both isomorphism and similarity are notions too weak to endow a model with representational power. In the third part, I develop a theory of representation that overcomes the shortcomings of the semantic view. The leading idea consists in taking representation to be explained in terms of three relations: denotation, display and designation. A model denotes its target system in roughly the same way in which a name denotes its bearer. At the same time it displays certain aspects, that is, it possesses these aspects and a user of the model thematises them. Finally, an aspect of the model designates an aspect of the target if the former stands for the latter and a specification of how exactly the two relate is provided.

The validity of claims made about 'schizophrenia' (that it is a scientific concept and that it refers to a syndrome) was assessed in three analyses: of the writings of those said first to have described schizophrenia; of the development of rules for inferring schizophrenia and of 'genetic' research said to be central to the concept's theoretical network. Four major conclusions were drawn: 1. That there was no evidence to support the original introduction of 'schizophrenia', but good evidence that some of the population from which it was derived were suffering from a later-identified neurological disorder. 2. That the rules for inferring schizophrenia have been developed in a manner quite different from the development of concepts in the empirical sciences and in medicine. 3. That there is no evidence that the rules set out in DSM-111 refer either to a syndrome or to any pattern of phenomena and 4. that 'genetic' research has been seriously misrepresented in secondary sources and does not support 'schizophrenia'. A number of factors were discussed as possibly important in explaining the continued use and influence of ‘schizophrenia'. These included the use of popular but fallacious types of argument to defend the concept, the functions it apparently serves for psychiatry and the public, the perceived primacy of biological or dispositional explanations of behaviour and the habits of 'seeing' patterns in unrelated phenomena, of inferring before describing, of reifying constructs and of confusing observation and inference. Finally, the implications of abandoning 'schizophrenia' were discussed and the weak foundations of the distinctions between 'normal, and abnormal' behaviour emphasised. An alternative framework, derived from the experimental analysis of behaviour was suggested and illustrated, both for the analysis of bizarre behaviour and of the conditions under which it is seen as symptomatic of schizophrenia.

There has long been interest in algorithms for simulating physical systems. We are concernedwith two areaswithin this field: fastmultipolemethods andmeshlessmethods. Since Greengard and Rokhlin’s seminal paper in 1987, considerable interest has arisen in fast multipole methods for finding the energy of particle systems in two and three dimensions, and more recently in many other applications where fast matrix-vector multiplication is called for. We develop a new fast multipole method that allows the calculation of the energy of a system of N particles in O(N) time, where the particles’ interactions are governed by the 2D Yukawa potential which takes the form of a modified Bessel function Kv. We then turn our attention to meshless methods. We formulate and test a new radial basis function finite differencemethod for solving an eigenvalue problemon a periodic domain. We then applymeshlessmethods to modelling photonic crystals. After an initial background study of the field, we detail the Maxwell equations, which govern the interaction of the light with the photonic crystal, and show how photonic band gaps may be given rise to. We present a novel meshless weak-strong form method with reduced computational cost compared to the existing meshless weak form method. Furthermore, we develop a new radial basis function finite differencemethod for photonic band gap calculations. Throughout the work we demonstrate the application of cutting-edge technologies such as cloud computing to the development and verification of algorithms for physical simulations.

ViewPlus is collaborating with the American Physical Society (APS), DAISY, and several other companies and agencies to enable APS to publish its scientific journals in the highly accessible DAISY XML format. All text, math, and figures will be accessible to everybody, including people with print disabilities. The first experimental APS DAISY publications are targeted for 2010. All APS journals will eventually be published in DAISY form, and other scholarly publishers are expected to follow suit.

This thesis is about Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of collective scientific practice. The question it aims to answer is: How is it possible to describe the collective scientific practice during what Kuhn defines as periods of normal science? In the introductory chapter I discuss Kuhn's model of science as presented in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In Chapter 2, I define Kuhn's notion of normal science as a collective practice carried out within a scientific community in the light of a 'paradigm'. Since the concept of paradigm was abandoned after Structure, the following chapters examine Kuhn's late notions of 'exemplar', 'taxonomy' and 'lexical network'. After discussing the problems with these concepts, at the end of Chapter 5 I reconsider the idea of 'disciplinary matrix' and I suggest an interpretation of Kuhn's notion of 'lexicon' as its linguistic explicitation. In Chapter 6 I show how, if scientific revolutions are changes of disciplinary matrix, the phenomenon of specialization is a special case of scientific revolutions. I conclude that Kuhn's late focus on the linguistic aspects of science is not a retreat from his early interests in scientific practice, because analyzing scientific language means analyzing the most public, accessible and inter-subjective characteristic of the community of scientists.

Quite often, accuracy is a neglected issue in scientific visualization. Indeed, in most of the visualizations there are two wrong assumptions: first, that the data visualized is accurate. Second, that the visualization process is exempt from errors. On these basis, the objectives of this thesis are three-fold: First, to understand the implications of accuracy in scientific visualization. It is important to analyse the sources of errors during visualization, and to establish mechanisms that enable the characterization of the accuracy. This learning stage is crucial for a sucessful scientific investigation. Second, to focus on visualization features that, besides enabling the visualization of the data, give users an idea of its accuracy. The challenging aspect in this case is the use of appropriate visual paradigms. In this respect, the awareness of how human beings create and process a mental image of the information visualized is important. Thrid and most important, the development of more accurate versions of visualization techniques. By understanding the issue of accuracy concerning a particular technique, there is a high probability to reach to a proposal of new improvements. There are three techniques under study in this thesis: contouring, isosurfacing and particle tracing. All these are widely used in scientific visualization. That is why they have been chosen. For all of them, the issue of showing accuracy to users is discussed. In addition, two new accurate versions of contouring and isosurfacing techniques have been presented. The new contouring method is for data defined over rectangular grids and assumes that the data vary linearly along the edges of the cell. The new isosurfacing method is an improvement of the Marching-Cubes method. Some aspects of this classic approach are clarified, and even corrected.

We only need to consider public media reports to appreciate that there is growing concern amongst citizens for sustainability. This concern arises from increasing appreciation that the current direction and rate of exploitation of resources is not sustainable and humanity's actions today are arguably compromising future generations' ability to meet their living needs. By drawing on the research of scientists, ranging from their evidence of the problems of sustainability to those promising solutions, the same press reports show strong links between sustainability and science. The appearance of such reports in the public media implies that citizens understand the interaction of science and sustainability and that they can engage critically with scientific research, including its applications and implications for sustainability. In this dissertation this understanding and capacity to engage critically is termed scientific literacy. The general question governing the research reported in this dissertation arose from this context and is: What does it mean for citizens to be scientifically literate within the context of sustainability? More specifically, because it is expected that university graduates are well educated in a socially relevant manner, with commensurate responsibilities and influence, the focus question studied in this dissertation is: What does it mean for university graduates to be scientifically literate? It became apparent from the review of the literature, that the concept of scientific literacy was multidimensional. The three key dimensions that emerged were (i) the fundamental and enduring ideas and concepts of science, (ii) the nature of science and (iii) the interaction of science with society. These dimensions provided the framework for the research reported in this dissertation. Within this framework and based on the literature, two relationships amongst these dimensions were proposed. The first relationship was that the dimensions were in a conceptual hierarchal order, with successive dimensions including the previous dimensions and expanding upon them. The second relationship was that students' scientific literacy developed sequentially along the same hierarchy. It was proposed that development occurred sequentially, with development of concepts of science first, nature of science second and interaction with society last. It was proposed that a scientifically literate person would have reached the level of understanding that includes the interaction of science with society. Specific indicators of the successive dimensions were functional, conceptual/procedural and multidimensional, which at this highest level, includes the relationship between the first two dimensions and society. This framework and the associated indicators were used as a structure and lens for interrogating the development of scientific literacy of 244 first year university students enrolled in Australia's Murdoch University's foundation unit, Life and the Universe. This is one of five units from which first year students are required to select one. The units are interdisciplinary in nature with Life and the Universe being a unit that covers generic issues in science. In part because of its content and in part because it allows students from all backgrounds to enrol, it was considered suitable for studying, illustratively, the development of scientific literacy of potential university graduates. The development of scientific literacy was studied in three ways. First, participants responded to open questions about a newspaper report of science, before and after their studying in Life and the Universe, second, they responded to a Likert style questionnaire regarding the nature of science, again before and after studying the unit, and third, a subset of participants were involved in a focus group run over two years. The participants' responses to the open questions on the questionnaire were analysed for their critical engagement with the news brief, in terms of their ability to give reasons why the text should be accepted or rejected. The nature of requests for extra information about the news brief's content was also analysed. Analysis of the initial responses to the open questions showed that more than fifty percent of the participants in this study did not demonstrate the ability to critically engage with science reported in the news. The Likert style questionnaire assessed participants' conception of the nature of science, with one end of the continuum reflecting a traditional view that science was a body of unchanging facts, derived from objective and value free observations, and the other reflecting a more contemporary view, that scientific knowledge was dynamic, open to change, had subjective components, and had scientists socially located so that their work was not free of values. Analysis of the initial responses to the Nature of Science questionnaire showed that more than fifty percent of the participants were located on the continuum towards the contemporary, socially located end. However, it also showed that the majority were still not sufficiently located towards the contemporary end of the continuum to view science as dynamic, with a changing body of knowledge. There was no statistically significant difference in these analyses in relation to participants' gender, time out of school, course of enrolment or science background. Unexpectedly, the comparison in the analysis of the news brief pre and post Life and the Universe showed that the number of participants engaging critically did not increase. More expectedly, the comparison of the pre and post Life and the Universe responses to the Likert scale showed that there was overall a statistically significant increase in the group's contemporary, socially located, perspective of the nature of science during their participation in the foundation unit. Specifically, the participants demonstrated raised awareness of the tentative and subjective nature of science and that scientists study a world in which they are a part and, as such, their work is not objective or value free. Nevertheless, there was substantial possibility of higher locations on the scale which the majority of participants did not reach. This statistically significant increase, but possibility for further improvement, is compatible with the lack of increase in critical engagement with the news brief and suggests that the statistical increase was not educationally significant. The focus group data contributed greater depth of understanding to the researcher about the range in participants' conceptions of the nature of science. The conceptions evident were consistent with the conclusions from the open questions and Likert style questionnaire and also highlighted limited understandings of scientific processes or scientific methods. It was evident that misconceptions and naive understandings of the contemporary nature of science were present at the beginning and retained throughout the foundation unit learning experience. These limitations helped explain participants' inability to engage meaningfully and to question critically the science news briefs contained in the questionnaires. Data from the focus group also suggested that a limited understanding of science terms prevented critical engagement with the content of the news briefs. Following closely the focus group participants' development of scientific literacy over a two year period, allowed the researcher to gain a greater depth of understanding of the participants' development of scientific literacy than that which could be gained alone from the large scale administrations of the questionnaire. This experience highlighted that the development of scientific literacy was far more complex than the originally proposed sequential development across the three dimensions. The analysis of converging sources of data challenged this proposition and resulted in a reconstruction of understanding about the development of scientific literacy. It was evident that the ability and disposition to critically question and act scientifically required parallel development of science content, socially located conceptions of the nature of science and understanding of its interaction with society. It was the blended and parallel development of these knowledge dimensions, at any level, that demonstrated scientific literacy. In order to characterise the more complex structure amongst the dimensions in which parallel development occurred, a rope metaphor was used. This metaphor effectively represented the observed development of scientific literacy, as it made concrete the interwoven threads of multidimensional knowledge. It represented more realistically the complex, intertwining and multidimensional aspects of participants' development of scientific literacy. Re-thinking the development of scientific literacy and representing the construct with the rope metaphor offered possibilities for effective pedagogy in higher education. The interaction of multidimensional threads of knowledge seems an integral part of the development of scientific literacy and suggests the need for teaching and learning experiences that are holistic in nature and driven by socially relevant contexts.

We only need to consider public media reports to appreciate that there is growing concern amongst citizens for sustainability. This concern arises from increasing appreciation that the current direction and rate of exploitation of resources is not sustainable and humanity's actions today are arguably compromising future generations' ability to meet their living needs. By drawing on the research of scientists, ranging from their evidence of the problems of sustainability to those promising solutions, the same press reports show strong links between sustainability and science. The appearance of such reports in the public media implies that citizens understand the interaction of science and sustainability and that they can engage critically with scientific research, including its applications and implications for sustainability. In this dissertation this understanding and capacity to engage critically is termed scientific literacy. The general question governing the research reported in this dissertation arose from this context and is: What does it mean for citizens to be scientifically literate within the context of sustainability? More specifically, because it is expected that university graduates are well educated in a socially relevant manner, with commensurate responsibilities and influence, the focus question studied in this dissertation is: What does it mean for university graduates to be scientifically literate? It became apparent from the review of the literature, that the concept of scientific literacy was multidimensional. The three key dimensions that emerged were (i) the fundamental and enduring ideas and concepts of science, (ii) the nature of science and (iii) the interaction of science with society. These dimensions provided the framework for the research reported in this dissertation. Within this framework and based on the literature, two relationships amongst these dimensions were proposed. The first relationship was that the dimensions were in a conceptual hierarchal order, with successive dimensions including the previous dimensions and expanding upon them. The second relationship was that students' scientific literacy developed sequentially along the same hierarchy. It was proposed that development occurred sequentially, with development of concepts of science first, nature of science second and interaction with society last. It was proposed that a scientifically literate person would have reached the level of understanding that includes the interaction of science with society. Specific indicators of the successive dimensions were functional, conceptual/procedural and multidimensional, which at this highest level, includes the relationship between the first two dimensions and society. This framework and the associated indicators were used as a structure and lens for interrogating the development of scientific literacy of 244 first year university students enrolled in Australia's Murdoch University's foundation unit, Life and the Universe. This is one of five units from which first year students are required to select one. The units are interdisciplinary in nature with Life and the Universe being a unit that covers generic issues in science. In part because of its content and in part because it allows students from all backgrounds to enrol, it was considered suitable for studying, illustratively, the development of scientific literacy of potential university graduates. The development of scientific literacy was studied in three ways. First, participants responded to open questions about a newspaper report of science, before and after their studying in Life and the Universe, second, they responded to a Likert style questionnaire regarding the nature of science, again before and after studying the unit, and third, a subset of participants were involved in a focus group run over two years. The participants' responses to the open questions on the questionnaire were analysed for their critical engagement with the news brief, in terms of their ability to give reasons why the text should be accepted or rejected. The nature of requests for extra information about the news brief's content was also analysed. Analysis of the initial responses to the open questions showed that more than fifty percent of the participants in this study did not demonstrate the ability to critically engage with science reported in the news. The Likert style questionnaire assessed participants' conception of the nature of science, with one end of the continuum reflecting a traditional view that science was a body of unchanging facts, derived from objective and value free observations, and the other reflecting a more contemporary view, that scientific knowledge was dynamic, open to change, had subjective components, and had scientists socially located so that their work was not free of values. Analysis of the initial responses to the Nature of Science questionnaire showed that more than fifty percent of the participants were located on the continuum towards the contemporary, socially located end. However, it also showed that the majority were still not sufficiently located towards the contemporary end of the continuum to view science as dynamic, with a changing body of knowledge. There was no statistically significant difference in these analyses in relation to participants' gender, time out of school, course of enrolment or science background. Unexpectedly, the comparison in the analysis of the news brief pre and post Life and the Universe showed that the number of participants engaging critically did not increase. More expectedly, the comparison of the pre and post Life and the Universe responses to the Likert scale showed that there was overall a statistically significant increase in the group's contemporary, socially located, perspective of the nature of science during their participation in the foundation unit. Specifically, the participants demonstrated raised awareness of the tentative and subjective nature of science and that scientists study a world in which they are a part and, as such, their work is not objective or value free. Nevertheless, there was substantial possibility of higher locations on the scale which the majority of participants did not reach. This statistically significant increase, but possibility for further improvement, is compatible with the lack of increase in critical engagement with the news brief and suggests that the statistical increase was not educationally significant. The focus group data contributed greater depth of understanding to the researcher about the range in participants' conceptions of the nature of science. The conceptions evident were consistent with the conclusions from the open questions and Likert style questionnaire and also highlighted limited understandings of scientific processes or scientific methods. It was evident that misconceptions and naive understandings of the contemporary nature of science were present at the beginning and retained throughout the foundation unit learning experience. These limitations helped explain participants' inability to engage meaningfully and to question critically the science news briefs contained in the questionnaires. Data from the focus group also suggested that a limited understanding of science terms prevented critical engagement with the content of the news briefs. Following closely the focus group participants' development of scientific literacy over a two year period, allowed the researcher to gain a greater depth of understanding of the participants' development of scientific literacy than that which could be gained alone from the large scale administrations of the questionnaire. This experience highlighted that the development of scientific literacy was far more complex than the originally proposed sequential development across the three dimensions. The analysis of converging sources of data challenged this proposition and resulted in a reconstruction of understanding about the development of scientific literacy. It was evident that the ability and disposition to critically question and act scientifically required parallel development of science content, socially located conceptions of the nature of science and understanding of its interaction with society. It was the blended and parallel development of these knowledge dimensions, at any level, that demonstrated scientific literacy. In order to characterise the more complex structure amongst the dimensions in which parallel development occurred, a rope metaphor was used. This metaphor effectively represented the observed development of scientific literacy, as it made concrete the interwoven threads of multidimensional knowledge. It represented more realistically the complex, intertwining and multidimensional aspects of participants' development of scientific literacy. Re-thinking the development of scientific literacy and representing the construct with the rope metaphor offered possibilities for effective pedagogy in higher education. The interaction of multidimensional threads of knowledge seems an integral part of the development of scientific literacy and suggests the need for teaching and learning experiences that are holistic in nature and driven by socially relevant contexts.

Boston University. University Professors Program Senior theses.
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2031-01-02

Scientific Workflows bieten flexible Möglichkeiten für die Modellierung und den Austausch komplexer Arbeitsabläufe zur Analyse wissenschaftlicher Daten. In den letzten Jahrzehnten sind verschiedene Systeme entstanden, die den Entwurf, die Ausführung und die Verwaltung solcher Scientific Workflows unterstützen und erleichtern. In mehreren wissenschaftlichen Disziplinen wachsen die Mengen zu verarbeitender Daten inzwischen jedoch schneller als die Rechenleistung und der Speicherplatz verfügbarer Rechner. Parallelisierung und verteilte Ausführung werden häufig angewendet, um mit wachsenden Datenmengen Schritt zu halten. Allerdings sind die durch verteilte Infrastrukturen bereitgestellten Ressourcen häufig heterogen, instabil und unzuverlässig. Um die Skalierbarkeit solcher Infrastrukturen nutzen zu können, müssen daher mehrere Anforderungen erfüllt sein: Scientific Workflows müssen parallelisiert werden. Simulations-Frameworks zur Evaluation von Planungsalgorithmen müssen die Instabilität verteilter Infrastrukturen berücksichtigen. Adaptive Planungsalgorithmen müssen eingesetzt werden, um die Nutzung instabiler Ressourcen zu optimieren. Hadoop oder ähnliche Systeme zur skalierbaren Verwaltung verteilter Ressourcen müssen verwendet werden. Diese Dissertation präsentiert neue Lösungen für diese Anforderungen. Zunächst stellen wir DynamicCloudSim vor, ein Simulations-Framework für Cloud-Infrastrukturen, welches verschiedene Aspekte der Variabilität adäquat modelliert. Im Anschluss beschreiben wir ERA, einen adaptiven Planungsalgorithmus, der die Ausführungszeit eines Scientific Workflows optimiert, indem er Heterogenität ausnutzt, kritische Teile des Workflows repliziert und sich an Veränderungen in der Infrastruktur anpasst. Schließlich präsentieren wir Hi-WAY, eine Ausführungsumgebung die ERA integriert und die hochgradig skalierbare Ausführungen in verschiedenen Sprachen beschriebener Scientific Workflows auf Hadoop ermöglicht.
Scientific workflows provide a means to model, execute, and exchange the increasingly complex analysis pipelines necessary for today's data-driven science. Over the last decades, scientific workflow management systems have emerged to facilitate the design, execution, and monitoring of such workflows. At the same time, the amounts of data generated in various areas of science outpaced hardware advancements. Parallelization and distributed execution are generally proposed to deal with increasing amounts of data. However, the resources provided by distributed infrastructures are subject to heterogeneity, dynamic performance changes at runtime, and occasional failures. To leverage the scalability provided by these infrastructures despite the observed aspects of performance variability, workflow management systems have to progress: Parallelization potentials in scientific workflows have to be detected and exploited. Simulation frameworks, which are commonly employed for the evaluation of scheduling mechanisms, have to consider the instability encountered on the infrastructures they emulate. Adaptive scheduling mechanisms have to be employed to optimize resource utilization in the face of instability. State-of-the-art systems for scalable distributed resource management and storage, such as Apache Hadoop, have to be supported. This dissertation presents novel solutions for these aspirations. First, we introduce DynamicCloudSim, a cloud computing simulation framework that is able to adequately model the various aspects of variability encountered in computational clouds. Secondly, we outline ERA, an adaptive scheduling policy that optimizes workflow makespan by exploiting heterogeneity, replicating bottlenecks in workflow execution, and adapting to changes in the underlying infrastructure. Finally, we present Hi-WAY, an execution engine that integrates ERA and enables the highly scalable execution of scientific workflows written in a number of languages on Hadoop.

Im Unterricht laufen routinierte Handlungen oft unbewusst ab. Solche Handlungsmuster sind wichtig für Lehrkräfte sowie für Schüler, da sie dem Unterricht Struktur geben und Sicherheit vermitteln. Sind sie aber hinderlich für die Entwicklung von Schülerleistungen, müssen sie verändert werden. Ziel der vorliegenden Arbeit ist es, kulturspezifische als auch schulstufenspezifische Handlungsmuster in Bezug auf die Umsetzung der Phasen der Erkenntnisgewinnung mit Hilfe einer Videoanalyse zu identifizieren. Dabei werden zusätzliche Qualitätsmerkmale einbezogen. Weiterhin wird überprüft, ob die Umsetzung der Erkenntnisgewinnung mit den Lehrer- und Schülervorstellungen zum Naturwissenschaftsverständnis zusammenhängt. Die Analyse der Unterrichtsvideos ergab, dass mehr Unterschiede hinsichtlich der Umsetzung von Erkenntnisgewinnungsprozessen auf kulturspezifischer Ebene bestehen als auf schulstufenspezifischer Ebene. Dabei fokussieren die schwedischen Lehrkräfte auf die Phase der Untersuchung und die dazugehörende Planungsphase. Die Lehrkräfte der deutschen Sekundarstufe I setzen hingegen auch andere Phasen der Erkenntnisgewinnung wie die Hypothesenbildung und die Auswertung und Interpretation vergleichsweise häufig um. Weiterhin zeigte sich trotz des (vorgegebenen) Fokus auf Erkenntnisgewinnung in der deutschen Sekundarstufe I eine konstant hohe Bedeutung der Vermittlung von Fachwissen. In der deutschen Sekundarstufe II ist auffällig, dass viel Zeit dazu verwendet wird, Versuche in selbstständiger Schülerarbeit aufzubauen. Vermutlich wird diesem Befund eine höhere Komplexität experimentellen Arbeitens zugrunde liegen. Generell werden im Chemieunterricht selten Fragestellungen formuliert und naturwissenschaftliche Untersuchungen reflektiert. Als zentrale Schlussfolgerung aus den Befunden kann abgeleitet werden, dass die Förderung einer ganzheitlichen, expliziten und möglichst offenen Umsetzung der Erkenntnisphasen in Schule und Lehrerausbildung notwendig ist.
In the classroom, routine actions are often carried out unconsciously. Such teaching patterns are important for teachers as well as for students as they structure lessons and provide security. However, if they are likely to be detrimental to the development of students, they must be changed. The aim of the current study is to identify culturally specific teaching patterns as well as teaching patterns between lower and upper secondary classes, by a comparison between students in Germany and Sweden followed by comparing teaching practices within several grades in Germany. This was achieved using video analysis to investigate the teaching practices used during the phases of Scientific Inquiry. During the analysis, further characteristics of quality were assessed. Further attention was paid to whether the implementation of Scientific Inquiry was related to the views of the nature of science held by the teachers and students. The analyses showed that the implementation of Scientific Inquiry differs more between Germany and Sweden than between grades. Swedish teachers focus on the investigation and the subordinate planning phase. Teachers of the German lower secondary classes focus more on other phases of Scientific Inquiry, such as formulating hypotheses and evaluation and interpretation. Although the focus of the lessons was given, content knowledge was often a particular focus in the German lower secondary classes. In German upper secondary grades it was apparent that a lot of time was spent enabling students to set up experiments on their own. This is presumably due to the higher complexity of the experimental work. In general, time is seldom spent on formulating scientific questions and reflecting on the scientific investigations. A major conclusion that can be derived from this study is that the support of a holistic, explicit and open implementation of the teaching of Scientific Inquiry remains indispensable in school and in teacher training.

An attempt was made to investigate two aspects of the learning and teaching context. One deals with how the sets of beliefs or expectations pupils hold about some phenomena affect the sense they make of experiences given to them in science classes. The other deals with the potential effect of the inevitable use of "scientific" and "everyday" language by both teachers and pupils in instruction. A sample of thirty Portuguese students from grade five to grade nine (10-15 years old) were given laboratory experiences and "parallel" everyday phenomena to discuss individually with the interviewer and then were invited to describe orally what and why things happened. The fundamental conceptions that students hold, the changes of these conceptions with students' age, as well as their consistency in different contexts and in similar tasks were identified in this experiment. The results suggested that these students, although having been exposed to formal teaching, still retain and use intuitive notions to think: about experiences in science lessons. The focus of the second experiment was to investigate how teachers' own perceptions may influence the development of pupils' ideas. It was carried out by observing seven teachers during ordinary classroom activities, to discover the relative contributions of 'scientific' and 'everyday' meaning in the language they used. Common features in teachers' and students' conceptualizations of "heat", "temperature" and "energy" were identified. Two main questions were discussed: i) what are the implications of the semantic variability in the disparate linguistic references for science education? ii) how to bridge the gap between teachers' and students' understandings, i.e., what connections can be made between what teachers and students talk about and perceive from discourse in the classroom? The results of this study seemed to reinforce the idea that it is impossible to keep external, everyday, informal culture out of the science classroom.

This thesis situates popular science lectures within broader Victorian cultures of public speech. In so doing, it argues that scientific naturalists such as Thomas Henry Huxley, John Tyndall and Robert Stawell Ball, adopted the lecture form as a specific tool with which to persuade the public of the validity of empirical scientific methods. It establishes a literary theoretical, and historical framework through which the textual versions of their performances should be read, highlighting the ways in which the scientists' claims to objectivity were enhanced, or obfuscated, through translation into print. Chapter one considers how Tyndall and Ball shaped their public performances in order to demonstrate their authority to speak for science. Technologies such as the lantern slide and demonstration apparatus, so integral to these scientists' performances, were represented in print in ways which complicated performers' presentations of scientific objectivity. Chapter two turns to Huxley, and examines the ways in which the scientist's self-presentation as an authoritative and morally upright figure drew on both early nineteenth-century science lecturing conventions, and pulpit oratory. It also shows that Victorian print cultures, including satires, and reporting of speech in newspapers, generated multiple versions of the same performance. The first two chapters illustrate how the male performer's body was integral to their presentation of scientific authority. Chapter three provides a counter-voice to this by examining the public lectures of four women: Catherine Buckton, Arabella Buckley, Eleanor Ormerod and Lydia Becker. Their occupation of the lecture platform challenged the perception that women lacked the physical and intellectual strength to do science. Chapter four looks at scientific themes in the public lectures of two non-scientists, Charles Kingsley and John Ruskin, and the ways in which these men adopted the rhetoric of scientific naturalists to both agree with, and challenge, their claims to scientific authority. Finally, chapter five moves to the provinces, with an in-depth case study of lecture circuits in Manchester. It looks at the way in which public scientific speech moulded class relations in the city, and how scientific naturalists capitalized on the consolidation of civic identities.

Abstract databases are essential for literature reviews, and in turn for the scientific process. Research into user interface designs and their impact on scientific article discovery is limited. The following study details the process of building a new abstract database and explores several user interface design elements that should be tested in the future.

The initial goal of this study was to test the feasibility of building a new abstract database. Using Crossref metadata, we concluded that the cost to produce parsing code for the entire data set proved prohibitive for a volunteer team. The legal, production, and design elements necessary to build a new abstract database are discussed in detail. This study should serve as a baseline for future abstract database testing.

A method of conditional rewriting and stepwise refinement of an abstract experiment protocol is specified using grammars, with optional feature structures. Specific rewrite rule conditions including selective mappings between feature structures of protocols determine whether and how protocol rewriting is performed. Following simple grammars, the setups of the exemplified experiments were synthesised, including websites as materials, experiment procedures as methods, and cognitive tests as protocol modules.  Two synthesised cognitive science experiments on causal perception and design preference were conducted to test the effects of rhetorical (temporal and causal) and modal (tabular and graphical) presentation of information. In the causal perception experiment, the test subjects could not differentiate the effects of temporal and causal rhetorics in presenting aviation accident information. However, their ratings on causality based on the covariation between potential causes and consequences gave evidence for a better agreement with the power PC theory of causal perception (compared to the others assessed and still under disputes) in aviation accident reporting (a different test scenario). In the design preference experiment, more people prefer graphical to tabular presentation. Despite the high preference for graphical presentation, the given tabular presentation was generally rated to be easier than graphical presentation to interpret, especially for those who score below average in the visualisation and analogy-making tests. This piece of evidence helps generate a hypothesis relating design preferences to specific cognitive abilities.

My aIm In this thesis is to analyse the 'evolutionary analogy', a particular form. of evolutionary epistemology which claims that scientific change is governed by the same mechanisms, or by mechanisms analogous to those at work in organic evolution, mainly natural selection. In tenns of research questions, the overall aim of this thesis is to answer 'Is the process of scientific change analogous to or even the same as organic change?' Many philosophers proposed evolutionary theories of scientific change - evolutionary analogies. By drawing analogies or even equating the mechanisms of organic and scientific evolution they described the process underlying the latter but also justified its value, implicitly or explicitly, by a simple analogy: better theories are those which survive old ones, as better species are those which survive previous ones. The results of these philosophers, however, have not been satisfactory and a novel approach is needed. In this thesis I am interested in a purely descriptive philosophy of science and my position will be based on the critique of the most recent and comprehensive attempt to defend the evolutionary analogy, made by David Hull. In order to answer the research question I have formulated above, the following issues will be addressed: what is organic evolution;. what is meant by 'evolutionary analogy'; how analogy/identity can be evaluated; how evolutionary analogy/identity has been defended by philosophers; how these defences perform; what is the best defence available; whether it passes the evaluation and, if not, whether it can be improved; if all the positions fail, whether it is possible to conceive alternative analogies between other relevant processes which do not incur the same problems. By addressing these issues, I will be able to conclude that the process of scientific change is different from organic change and that only loose analogies can be defended.

Modern computer architectures, with multicore CPUs and GPUs or other accelerators, make stronger demands than ever on writers of scientific code. As a rule of thumb, the fastest, most efficient program consists of labor-intensive code written by expert programmers for a certain application on a particular computer. This thesis deals with several algorithmic and technical approaches towards effectively satisfying the demand for high-performance parallel programming without incurring such a high cost in expert programmer time. Effective programming is accomplished by writing performance-portable code where performance-critical functionality is provided either by external software or at least a balance between maintainability/generality and efficiency.
UPMARC
eSSENCE

Thanks to the advancement of the modern computer simulation systems, many scientific applications generate, and require manipulation of large volumes of data. Scientific exploration substantially relies on effective and accurate data analysis. The shear size of the generated data, however, imposes big challenges in the process of analyzing the system. In this dissertation we propose novel techniques as well as using some known designs in a novel way in order to improve scientific data analysis. We develop an efficient method to compute an analytical query called spatial distance histogram (SDH). Special heuristics are exploited to process SDH efficiently and accurately. We further develop a mathematical model to analyze the mechanism leading to errors. This gives rise to a new approximate algorithm with improved time/accuracy tradeoff. Known MS analysis systems follow a pull-based design, where the executed queries mandate the data needed on their part. Such a design introduces redundant and high I/O traffic as well as cpu/data latency. To remedy such issues, we design and implement a push-based system, which uses a sequential scan-based I/O framework that pushes the loaded data to a number of pre-programmed queries. The efficiency of the proposed system as well as the approximate SDH algorithms is backed by the results of extensive experiments on MS generated data.

This dissertation consists of a defence of scientific realism and a critique of empiricist antirealism. Strict empiricism is discussed in Chapter 1, in which it is argued that this variety of empiricism adequately describes only the initial stages of scientific research. Bas van Frassen's empiricist antirealism is then discussed in Chapter 2. Here, it is argued that this new position, although more sophisticated than earlier forms of empiricist antirealism, fails to constitute a genuinely acceptable alternative to scientific realism. The two main constituents of scientific realism--scientism and critical realism--are then defended in Chapters 3 and 4. Lastly, the superempirical virtues and their role in theory evaluation is discussed in Chapter 5, wherein they are presented as a nonempirical source of quality control on our theorizing.

This research project aims to put forward, through the examination of three scientific artefacts as case studies, an applied philosophy and methodology for the study of things and the thinking that they allow. Within a phenomenological/ecological framework, the project proposes that thinking of scientific instruments as playthings puts forward their instability and mobility as artefacts, and develops the notion of ‘historical affordance’ to relate the evolution and variation over time in what they offer to perception, action and understanding. An historical account is adopted to show that change is occurring in a continuous subsisting thing and to register the mobility and transformability of a thing while keeping in memory its past affordances and anticipating future ones that extend previous uses and practices. Each chapter takes a scientific artefact as a case study: the string surface model, the Crookes radiometer and the gyroscope. All date from the nineteenth century, which as a transitional period for natural philosophy and science proved ideal. Through the notion of historical affordance, each case study addresses the different materials and technologies that compose the device as histories, and looks at these constitutive parts separately and as particular arrangements and relationships within the device. The instruments are examined alongside objects that they resonate with from the fields of arts, craft and pedagogy – material ‘declinations’ in a network of objects that bring attention to particular substances and qualities of the artefacts and allow for thinking through things about the thought that dwells in things. Having fleshed out the historical affordance of the three instruments, the thesis finally proposes that each seems to suggest a particular ‘shape’ for these movements of thought: a topological one in the case of the model, an atmospheric one in the case of the radiometer and a kinetic one in the case of the gyroscope.