Education and Ideologies of the Knowledge Economy: Europe and the Politics of Emulation

The Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein famously proposed a style of philosophy that was directed against certain pictures [bild] that tacitly direct our language and forms of life. His aim was to show the fly the way out of the fly bottle and to fight against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language: “A picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably” (Wittgenstein 1953, 115). In this context Wittgenstein is talking of philosophical pictures, deep metaphors that have structured our language but he does also use the term picture in other contexts (see Owen 2003, 83). I want to appeal to Wittgenstein in my use of the term ideology to refer to the way in which powerful underlying metaphors in neoclassical economics have a strong rhetorical and constitutive force at the level of public policy. Indeed, I am specifically speaking of the notion of ‘the performative’ in Wittgenstein and Austin. The notion of the knowledge economy has a prehistory in Hayek (1937; 1945) who founded the economics of knowledge in the 1930s, in Machlup (1962; 1970), who mapped the emerging employment shift to the US service economy in the early 1960s, and to sociologists Bell (1973) and Touraine (1974) who began to tease out the consequences of these changes for social structure in the post-industrial society in the early 1970s. The term has been taken up since by economists, sociologists, futurists and policy experts recently to explain the transition to the so-called ‘new economy’. It is not just a matter of noting these discursive strands in the genealogy of the ‘knowledge economy’ and related or cognate terms. We can also make a number of observations on the basis of this brief analysis. First, there has been a succession of terms like ‘postindustrial economy’, ‘information economy’, ‘knowledge economy’, ‘learning economy’, each with a set of related concepts emphasising its social, political, management or educational aspects. Often these literatures are not cross-threading and tend to focus on only one aspect of phenomena leading to classic dichotomies such as that between economy and society, knowledge and information. Second, these terms and their family concepts are discursive, historical and ideological products in the sense that they create their own meanings and often lead to constitutive effects at the level of policy. Third, while there is some empirical evidence to support claims concerning these terms, at the level of public policy these claims are empirically underdetermined and contain an integrating, visionary or futures component, which necessarily remains untested and is, perhaps, in principle untestable.

How can computer simulations produce new knowledge?

It is often claimed that scientists can obtain new knowledge about nature by running computer simulations. How is this possible? I answer this question by arguing that computer simulations are arguments. This view parallels Norton’s argument view about thought experiments. I show that computer simulations can be reconstructed as arguments that fully capture the epistemic power of the simulations. Assuming the extended mind hypothesis, I furthermore argue that running the computer simulation is to execute the reconstructing argument. I discuss some objections and reject the view that computer simulations produce knowledge because they are experiments. I conclude by comparing thought experiments and computer simulations, assuming that both are arguments.

Tailored instructional methods for students with diverse levels of computer knowledge and skills

The purpose of this online course is to ensure new nursing graduate students know how to use computer technologies required to complete academic and research activities. Powerful computers, high speed internet, digitalized resources and databases are widely available in educational institutes. New renovation and updates are being released at faster pace than ever. All these developments are necessary for a student to utilize computer programs and synthesize large amount of data in a limited time for any given academic research project. [See PDF for complete abstract]

Rat lungs show a biphasic formation of new alveoli during postnatal development

Roughly 90% of the gas-exchange surface is formed by alveolarization of the lungs. To the best of our knowledge, the formation of new alveoli has been followed in rats only by means of morphological description or interpretation of semiquantitative data until now. Therefore, we estimated the number of alveoli in rat lungs between postnatal days 4 and 60 by unambiguously counting the alveolar openings. We observed a bulk formation of new alveoli between days 4 and 21 (17.4 times increase from 0.8 to 14.3 millions) and a second phase of continued alveolarization between days 21 and 60 (1.3 times increase to 19.3 million). The (number weighted) mean volume of the alveoli decreases during the phase of bulk alveolarization from ∼593,000 μm(3) at day 4 to ∼141,000 μm(3) at day 21, but increases again to ∼298,000 μm(3) at day 60. We conclude that the "bulk alveolarization" correlates with the mechanism of classical alveolarization (alveolarization before the microvascular maturation is completed) and that the "continued alveolarization" follows three proposed mechanisms of late alveolarization (alveolarization after microvascular maturation). The biphasic pattern is more evident for the increase in alveolar number than for the formation of new alveolar septa (estimated as the length of the free septal edge). Furthermore, a striking negative correlation between the estimated alveolar size and published data on retention of nanoparticles was detected.

Challenges and opportunities related to the creation of a unique society of specialists in general internal medicine in 2015

A common training plan in general internal medicine was a brave enterprise started in 2011 in accordance with the common objectives of the Swiss Society of General Medicine and the Swiss Society of Internal Medicine. The next challenge will be the dissolution of the two Societies and therefore the creation of an unique new association in 2015. This is an extraordinary opportunity to bring together the specific qualities of each association and to create a new society. Issues, objectives and secondary benefits expected from the creation of the largest national society of a medical discipline are explored as a joint discussion in this article.

The World of Indicators. The Making of Governmental Knowledge through Quantification

The twenty-first century has seen a further dramatic increase in the use of quantitative knowledge for governing social life after its explosion in the 1980s. Indicators and rankings play an increasing role in the way governmental and non-governmental organizations distribute attention, make decisions, and allocate scarce resources. Quantitative knowledge promises to be more objective and straightforward as well as more transparent and open for public debate than qualitative knowledge, thus producing more democratic decision-making. However, we know little about the social processes through which this knowledge is constituted nor its effects. Understanding how such numeric knowledge is produced and used is increasingly important as proliferating technologies of quantification alter modes of knowing in subtle and often unrecognized ways. This book explores the implications of the global multiplication of indicators as a specific technology of numeric knowledge production used in governance. Combination of insights from anthropology of law, history of science, science and technology studies, sociology of quantification, economics and geography will appeal to those who are uncomfortable with the separation between 'theoretical' and 'empirical' approaches and with the current weakness of critique that address the main trends shaping the relations between capitalism, markets, law and democracy Theoretical discussion of the nature and historical formation of quantification will appeal to those who ask questions such as, 'What is new or different about our contemporary reliance on quantitative knowledge?' Groundbreaking empirical case studies uncover the social work and politics that often go into the making of indicators and explore the far-reaching effects and impacts of these numerical representations in specific settings

Enhancing Food Sovereignty and Food Security through the Revitalization of Indigenous Knowledge: Experiences from the Bolivian Andes

Endogenous development is defined as development that values primarily locally available resources and the way people organized themselves for that purpose. It is a dynamic and evolving concept that also embraces innovations and complementation from other than endogenous sources of knowledge; however, only as far as they are based on mutual respect and the recognition of cultural and socioeconomic self-determination of each of the parties involved. Experiences that have been systematized in the context of the BioAndes Program are demonstrating that enhancing food security and food sovereignty on the basis of endogenous development can be best achieved by applying a ‘biocultural’ perspective: This means to promote and support actions that are simultaneously valuing biological (fauna, flora, soils, or agrobiodiversity) and sociocultural resources (forms of social organization, local knowledge and skills, norms, and the related worldviews). In Bolivia, that is one of the Latin-American countries with the highest levels of poverty (79% of the rural population) and undernourishment (22% of the total population), the Program BioAndes promotes food sovereignty and food security by revitalizing the knowledge of Andean indigenous people and strengthening their livelihood strategies. This starts by recognizing that Andean people have developed complex strategies to constantly adapt to highly diverse and changing socioenvironmental conditions. These strategies are characterized by organizing the communities, land use and livelihoods along a vertical gradient of the available eco-climatic zones; the resulting agricultural systems are evolving around the own sociocultural values of reciprocity and mutual cooperation, giving thus access to an extensive variety of food, fiber and energy sources. As the influences of markets, competition or individualization are increasingly affecting the life in the communities, people became aware of the need to find a new balance between endogenous and exogenous forms of knowledge. In this context, BioAndes starts by recognizing the wealth and potentials of local practices and aims to integrate its actions into the ongoing endogenous processes of innovation and adaptation. In order to avoid external impositions and biases, the program intervenes on the basis of a dialogue between exogenous, mainly scientific, and indigenous forms of knowledge. The paper presents an analysis of the strengths and weaknesses of enhancing endogenous development through a dialogue between scientific and indigenous knowledge by specifically focusing on its effects on food sovereignty and food security in three ‘biocultural’ rural areas of the Bolivian highlands. The paper shows how the dialogue between different forms of knowledge evolved alongside the following project activities: 1) recuperation and renovation of local seeds and crop varieties (potato – Solanum spp., quinoa – Chenopodium quinoa, cañahua – Chenopodium pallidicaule); 2) support for the elaboration of community-based norms and regulations for governing access and distribution of non-timber forest products, such as medicinal, fodder, and construction plants; 3) revitalization of ethnoveterinary knowledge for sheep and llama breeding; 4) improvement of local knowledge about the transformation of food products (sheep-cheese, lacayote – Cucurbita sp. - jam, dried llama meat, fours of cañahua and other Andean crops). The implementation of these activities fostered the community-based livelihoods of indigenous people by complementing them with carefully and jointly designed innovations based on internal and external sources of knowledge and resources. Through this process, the epistemological and ontological basis that underlies local practices was made visible. On this basis, local and external actors started to jointly define a renewed concept of food security and food sovereignty that, while oriented in the notions of well being according to a collectively re-crafted world view, was incorporating external contributions as well. Enabling and hindering factors, actors and conditions of these processes are discussed in the paper.

The Right to Die Debate: The Demonization of Dr. Kevorkian and the Creation of a Moral Panic Surrounding Physician-Assisted Suicide in the United States

The Right to Die Debate is a recent but highly controversial moral matter. In particular, physician-assisted suicide (PAS) is an issue that has been evaded by the medical community for years. As of 1990, most states had never encountered the issue before and therefore did not have any laws in place to prohibit PAS (Strate et. al, 2005). Dr. Jack Kevorkian, a retired pathologist from Royal Oak Michigan was the first to publicly address PAS. He brought the issue into the limelight through a bizarre and crude series of assisted deaths that had a lasting impact on not only the Right to Die Debate as whole, but on public policy and both federal and state governmental agendas. This study focuses on the way in which the media, in particular the New York Times (NYT) has portrayed Dr. Jack Kevorkian as incompetent, morally culpable and in an overall negative light in the past twenty years. Applying Stanley Cohen’s 1972 theory of moral panic, a content analysis of NYT media publications between 1990 and 1999 supports Cohen’s theory and reveals that the media has created a moral panic surrounding Kevorkian. This has in turn led to public policy that prevents both terminally ill individuals and their doctors from having a desirable choice; that of voluntary euthanasia and PAS.

Refined facial disparity maps for automatic creation of 3D avatars

We propose a new method to automatically refine a facial disparity map obtained with standard cameras and under conventional illumination conditions by using a smart combination of traditional computer vision and 3D graphics techniques. Our system inputs two stereo images acquired with standard (calibrated) cameras and uses dense disparity estimation strategies to obtain a coarse initial disparity map, and SIFT to detect and match several feature points in the subjects face. We then use these points as anchors to modify the disparity in the facial area by building a Delaunay triangulation of their convex hull and interpolating their disparity values inside each triangle. We thus obtain a refined disparity map providing a much more accurate representation of the the subjects facial features. This refined facial disparity map may be easily transformed, through the camera calibration parameters, into a depth map to be used, also automatically, to improve the facial mesh of a 3D avatar to match the subjects real human features.

Creation of a novel protein-coding region at the RNA level in black pine chloroplasts: the pattern of RNA editing in the gymnosperm chloroplast is different from that in angiosperms.

The phenomenon of RNA editing has been found to occur in chloroplasts of several angiosperm plants. Comparative analysis of the entire nucleotide sequence of a gymnosperm [Pinus thunbergii (black pine)] chloroplast genome allowed us to predict several potential editing sites in its transcripts. Forty-nine such sites from 14 genes/ORFs were analyzed by sequencing both cDNAs from the transcripts and the corresponding chloroplast DNA regions, and 26 RNA editing sites were identified in the transcripts from 12 genes/ORFs, indicating that chloroplast RNA editing is not restricted to angiosperms but occurs in the gymnosperm, too. All the RNA editing events are C-to-U conversions; however, many new codon substitutions and creation of stop codons that have not so far been reported in angiosperm chloroplasts were observed. The most striking is that two editing events result in the creation of an initiation and a stop codon within a single transcript, leading to the formation of a new reading frame of 33 codons. The predicted product is highly homologous to that deduced from the ycf7 gene (ORF31), which is conserved in the chloroplast genomes of many other plant species.

Creation of drug-specific herpes simplex virus type 1 thymidine kinase mutants for gene therapy.

Herpes simplex virus type 1 (HSV-1) thymidine kinase is currently used as a suicide agent in the gene therapy of cancer. This therapy is based on the preferential phosphorylation of nucleoside analogs by tumor cells expressing HSV-1 thymidine kinase. However, the use of HSV-1 thymidine kinase is limited in part by the toxicity of the nucleoside analogs. We have used random sequence mutagenesis to create new HSV-1 thymidine kinases that, compared with wild-type thymidine kinase, render cells much more sensitive to specific nucleoside analogs. A segment of the HSV-1 thymidine kinase gene at the putative nucleoside binding site was substituted with random nucleotide sequences. Mutant enzymes that demonstrate preferential phosphorylation of the nucleoside analogs, ganciclovir or acyclovir, were selected from more than one million Escherichia coli transformants. Among the 426 active mutants we have isolated, 26 demonstrated enhanced sensitivity to ganciclovir, and 54 were more sensitive to acyclovir. Only 6 mutant enzymes displayed sensitivity to both ganciclovir and acyclovir when expressed in E. coli. Analysis of 3 drug-sensitive enzymes demonstrated that 1 produced stable mammalian cell transfectants that are 43-fold more sensitive to ganciclovir and 20-fold more sensitive to acyclovir.

An authoring tool for decision support systems in context questions of ecological knowledge

Decision support systems (DSS) support business or organizational decision-making activities, which require the access to information that is internally stored in databases or data warehouses, and externally in the Web accessed by Information Retrieval (IR) or Question Answering (QA) systems. Graphical interfaces to query these sources of information ease to constrain dynamically query formulation based on user selections, but they present a lack of flexibility in query formulation, since the expressivity power is reduced to the user interface design. Natural language interfaces (NLI) are expected as the optimal solution. However, especially for non-expert users, a real natural communication is the most difficult to realize effectively. In this paper, we propose an NLI that improves the interaction between the user and the DSS by means of referencing previous questions or their answers (i.e. anaphora such as the pronoun reference in “What traits are affected by them?”), or by eliding parts of the question (i.e. ellipsis such as “And to glume colour?” after the question “Tell me the QTLs related to awn colour in wheat”). Moreover, in order to overcome one of the main problems of NLIs about the difficulty to adapt an NLI to a new domain, our proposal is based on ontologies that are obtained semi-automatically from a framework that allows the integration of internal and external, structured and unstructured information. Therefore, our proposal can interface with databases, data warehouses, QA and IR systems. Because of the high NL ambiguity of the resolution process, our proposal is presented as an authoring tool that helps the user to query efficiently in natural language. Finally, our proposal is tested on a DSS case scenario about Biotechnology and Agriculture, whose knowledge base is the CEREALAB database as internal structured data, and the Web (e.g. PubMed) as external unstructured information.

Johnson's (revised) universal cyclopaedia; a scientific and popular treasury of useful knowledge.

Mode of access: Internet.

The sacred and profane history of the world connected, from the creation of the world to the dissolution of the Assyrian empire at the death of Sardanapalus, and to the declension of the kingdoms of Judah and Israel under the reigns of Ahaz and Pekah: including the dissertation on the creation and fall of man.

"Illustrated with a new and correct set of maps and plans."

The American natural history; a foundation of useful knowledge of the higher animals of North America,

I. Mammals.--II. Mammals (concluded) Birds.--III. Birds (concluded)--IV. Reptiles, amphibians and fishes.