Kategoria BISAC: Technology & Engineering >> Social Aspects

What does it mean to be an expert? In "Rethinking Expertise," Harry Collins and Robert Evans offer a radical new perspective on the role of expertise in the practice of science and the public evaluation of technology.
Collins and Evans present a Periodic Table of Expertises based on the idea of tacit knowledge-knowledge that we have but cannot explain. They then look at how some expertises are used to judge others, how laypeople judge between experts, and how credentials are used to evaluate them. Throughout, Collins and Evans ask an important question: how can the public make use of...

This book represents the first calm, detailed, and rational description of the imminent end of western industrial civilization as we know it. Despite this alarming premise Gimpel is far from pessimistic, save in the short term: with the sure hand of the historian, he emphasizes how humanity has always recovered from its previous collapses in the past, and will certainly do so again. The unique value of this book is that it gives us a baseline from which we can now work into the future.

This book represents the first calm, detailed, and rational description of the coming end of our...

Cloning was first published in 1985. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

Cloning has become in recent years a subject of widespread speculation: the word is a source of fear and wonder, the concept a jumping-off point for the fantasies of cartoonists, film producers, and novelists. With this book, cell biologist Robert Gilmore McKinnell provides the first clear scientific explanation of the procedure for general...

Everyday Engineering was written to help future engineers understand what they are going to be doing in their everyday working lives, so that they can do their work more effectively and with a broader social vision. It will also give sociologists deeper insights into the sociotechnical world of engineering. The book consists of ethnographic studies in which the authors, all trained in both engineering and sociology, go into the field as participant-observers. The sites and types of engineering explored include mechanical design in manufacturing industries, instrument design,...

Nuclear energy, stem cell technology, GMOs: the more science advances, the more society seems to resist. But are we really watching a death struggle between opposing forces, as so many would have it? Can today s complex technical policy decisions coincide with the needs of a participatory democracy? Are the two sides even equipped to talk to each other?

Beyond Technocracy: Science, Politics and Citizens answers these questions with clarity and vision. Drawing upon a broad range of data and events from the United States and Europe, and noting the blurring of the expert/lay...

It happens in America every four decades and it is about to happen again. America's demand for change in the 2008 election will cause another of our country's periodic political makeovers. This realignment, like all others before it, will result from the coming of age of a new generation of young Americans--the Millennial Generation--and the full emergence of the Internet-based communications technology that this generation uses so well. Beginning in 2008, almost everything about American politics and government will transform--voting patterns, the fortunes of the two political parties,...