Democratizing science does not mean settling questions about Nature by plebiscite, any more than democratizing politics means setting the prime rate by referendum. What democratization does mean, in science as elsewhere, is creating institutions and practices that fully incorporate principles of accessibility, transparency, and accountability. It means considering the societal outcomes of research at least as attentively as the scientific and technological outputs. It means insisting that in addition to being rigorous, science be popular, relevant, and participatory.

First, according to Trumbull, Olson underestimates diffuse groups’ ability to develop compelling narratives about how they serve the public interest. In fact, weak, diffuse groups have a paradoxical political advantage: precisely because they are weak and diffuse, the public sees them as less self-interested and thus comparatively trustworthy. Second, Olson also underestimates the power of ideological motivation, rather than just money and concentration, to spur activism. Third, “diffuse interests can be represented without mobilization,” thanks to activism by politicians and government officials who take up their cause. (FDR started a federal pension program at a time when “retirees,” as a self-identified social class, did not yet exist. The program created the constituency, rather than the other way around.) Fourth, weak or diffuse interests can link up with concentrated groups to amplify their effectiveness, as when consumers align with exporters to oppose trade protections or when free-speech advocates join with political parties to oppose campaign-finance limits.

Not every perceived ill turns out to be bad. Socrates famously decried the invention of writing. He described its ill effects and never wrote anything, but despite his eloquence, he could not command the tide to stop. His student Plato mulled it over, sympathized—and wrote it all down! We will likely adjust to losing most privacy—our tribal ancestors did without it. Adapting to life without community could be more challenging. We may have to endure long enough for nature to select for people who can get by without it.

In a 1992 paper in Organizational Science titled “The Duality of Technology: Rethinking the Concept of Technology in Organizations,” Wanda Orlikowski applied the structuration theory of sociologist Anthony Giddens to technology use and reached a similar conclusion. Giddens argued that human agency is constrained by the structures around us—technology and sociocultural conventions—and that we in turn shape those structures. Software, malleable and capable of representing rules, is especially conducive to such analysis.

uma ligação direta com Deus justifica a violação de quaisquer refreamentos e considerações meramente humanos. Resumindo, os fundamentalistas não se tornaram diferentes dos comunistas Stalinistas “sem deus”, para os quais tudo foi permitido, já que viam a si mesmos como instrumentos diretos de sua divindade, a Necessidade Histórica do Progresso em Direção ao Comunismo.

Em vez de fazer seus personagens saberem qualquer coisa, você deve agora apresentar detalhes que permitam que o leitor os conheça. Em vez de fazer seus personagens quererem alguma coisa, você deve agora descrever a coisa para que seus leitores passem a querê-la também. 

formative study

craft cultures

Max Planck, when asked how often science changes and adopts new ideas, said, “with every funeral.” And for better or worse, they happen pretty regularly.

Who among us could predict anything five years into the future? What kind of science would science be if it could make reliable predictions about stuff five years out? Science is about what we don’t know yet and how we’re going to get to know it.

I know how crazy that sounds, but it is of course exactly the right way to proceed. If you are reviewing a grant, you should be interested in how it will fail—usefully or just by not succeeding. Not succeeding is not the same as failing. Not in science.

Too often you fail until you succeed, and then you are expected to stop failing. Once you have succeeded you supposedly know something that helps you to avoid further failure. But that is not the way of science. Success can lead only to more failure. The success, when it comes, has to be tested rigorously and then it has to be considered for what it doesn’t tell us, not just what it does tell us. It has to be used to get to the next stop in our ignorance—it has to be challenged until it fails, challenged so that it fails.

Fontomfrom rhythms can also be curiously ambiguous. For instance, you might think you’re playing a waltz (ONE two three, ONE two three), while the guy next to you sounds as if he’s playing a march (ONE two, ONE two). In fact, if you listen to him long enough, you might change your mind and decide that you, too, are really playing a march. In that sense, playing in a fontomfrom ensemble is like being inside a sonic version of an Escher lithograph: As you shift your attention from one part to another, the entire picture seems to change.

There is a very significant differentiation between user-design and User-centered design