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1347 publications found

Mar 21, 2008 Commentary
Are museums places where science and society can really engage in a dialogue? A positive example related to the rubbish emergency in the Campania region

by Luigi Amodio

Science musums and science centres are wonderful places to host, support and mediate the dialogue between science and society. In fact, they are a natural crossroad where scientists, general public, media and insitutions for formal and informal learning meet. During the recent political and health crisis concerning the rubbish treatment in the Italian region of Campania, the science centre "Città della Scienza" has promoted an unusual dialogue between citizens and scientists.

Volume 7 • Issue 01 • 2008

Mar 21, 2008 Article
Science journalism in Latin America: how the scientific information from a scientific source is accommodated when it is transformed into a journalistic story

by Fernanda Veneu, Luis Henrique Amorim and Luisa Massarani

Scientific information ­ from the moment it is produced by the scientific community until it reaches the non- expert audience through the newspapers ­ is submitted to a complex process of adaptation. In this paper, we investigate the process of accommodating the scientific information provided by a primary scientific source (a peer-review journal) into journalistic discourse (a newspaper). As case studies we analyzed four scientific papers published by the peer-reviewed scientific journals Nature and Science, which were simultaneously used as primary scientific sources by Latin American newspapers. We observed that the process of accommodation into a new space, journalistic space, represents a significant shift in the content of the texts, including information that appears, disappears and is transformed in the process; transformations in the lexica, the style and the argumentation; a change in the hierarchy of the information; a shift in the information emphasized and in the social impact it might have.

Volume 7 • Issue 01 • 2008

Mar 21, 2008 Editorial
A total society of knowledge

by Pietro Greco

The major Lisbon goal is to give Europe back the primacy as a society of knowledge. `Giving back' is a more appropriate term than `giving', as Europe long held that primacy in the past, and virtually as a monopoliser from the 17th century throughout the 19th. Then, Europe shared it with North America for a long portion of the 20th century.

Volume 7 • Issue 01 • 2008

Mar 21, 2008 Article
Overseas internships as a vehicle for developing a meta-level awareness regarding science communication

by Kayoko Nohara, Michael Norton, Miki Saijo and Osamu Kusakabe

The overseas internship programme offered at Tokyo Institute of Technology as part of the science communication curriculum is highly significant, as it prompts graduate students to acquire new skills and awareness levels, including an enhanced meta-level understanding of the importance and complexity of human communications. The capacity to correlate and respond on-site in human interaction can be gradually cultivated during the internship as students experience diverse communication environments. Moreover, the exposure to different organisational, cultural and social environments helps develop a more international outlook. As a result of the initial experience described in this paper, TiTech has adopted internships as an important part of the educational tool-kit to produce scientists and engineers who can play an active role at the global level using their acquired technical knowledge and broad practical capabilities.

Volume 7 • Issue 01 • 2008

Mar 21, 2008 Commentary
A dialogue on hard sciences is possible. Is it useful too?

by Stefano Sandrelli

Dialogical models in science communication produce effective and satisfactory experiences, also when hard sciences (like astrophysics or cosmology) are concerned. But those efforts to reach the public can be of modest impact since the public is no longer (or not sufficiently) interested in science. The reason of this lack of interest is not that science is an alien topic, but that contemporary science and technology have ceased to offer a convincing model for the human progress.

Volume 7 • Issue 01 • 2008

Dec 21, 2007 Commentary
Mass technologies and ignorance in the society of knowledge

by Luciano Gallino

An advanced expression of culture and of social evolution, contemporary technology, which increasingly incorporates endless quantities of scientific knowledge, has acquired a decisive power on human existence and on the natural system supporting it. It has the ability, now demonstrated, to attain a vast improvement in the quality of life ­ if one can benefit from proper amounts of it ­ and to prolong life for decades. On the other hand, its results may also go in a totally opposite direction, either against ourselves or our descendants, or other populations. A similar theory is true for life-supporting systems.

Volume 6 • Issue 04 • 2007

Dec 21, 2007 Commentary
Individuals, knowledge and governance in the 21st-century society

by Andrea Cerroni

The knowledge society is a new social species that, despite many uncertainties and some (old and new) ambiguities, is emerging on the horizon of the 21st century. Placed at the convergence of two long-term processes (society of individuals and knowledge society), it is characterised by the social-economic process of knowledge circulation, which can be divided into four fundamental phases (generation, institutionalisation, spreading and socialisation). The current situation also sees the traditional (modern) structure of knowledge being outdated by the convergence of nanotechnologies, biotechnologies, information technologies and neuro-cognitive technologies (NBIC). In the background, the need arises to cross the cultural frontier of modernity.

Volume 6 • Issue 04 • 2007

Dec 21, 2007 Editorial
A Nobel prize to public science communication

by Pietro Greco

The Norwegian Nobel Committee has bestowed the 2007 Nobel Peace Price equally upon the scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Al Gore, former vice-President of the United States of America, with the same motivation: «for their efforts to build up and disseminate greater knowledge about man-made climate change, and to lay the foundations for the measures that are needed to counteract such change».

Volume 6 • Issue 04 • 2007

Dec 21, 2007 Book Review
It's science after all, Homer!

by Daniele Gouthier

Within just a few months, new releases in the world of publishing have seen two books dealing with science and The Simpsons, one published in the US and the other in Italy: last spring, What's science ever done for us? by Paul Halpern (John Wiley & Sons, New York 2007) and, this autumn, La scienza dei Simpson by Marco Malaspina (Sironi Editore, Milano 2007).

Volume 6 • Issue 04 • 2007

Dec 21, 2007 Commentary
Knowledge, responsibility and culture: food for thought on science communication

by Giancarlo Quaranta

The past few decades have been marked by a rapid scientific and technological development. One of the most paradoxical, and perhaps more disturbing, features of this process is the growing divide between the increased importance science has acquired in economic and social life and a society persistently showing spreading signs of contempt, mistrust and, most of all, disinterest in research.

Volume 6 • Issue 04 • 2007

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