ABRINDO CAIXAS PRETAS EM AULAS DE FÍSICA: Uma reflexão educacional a partir dos conceitos de Bruno Latour.

As contribuições, em uma linha que se poderia chamar de “sociologia da ciência”, de Bruno Latour permitem-se dialogar com questões educacionais, em particular no que tange à consolidação histórica de conceitos científicos e ao fazer ciência, haja vista a ampla defesa que a literatura expõe no sentido de uma educação científica pautada na abordagem historicoepistemológica, que apreenta o conhecimento científico como construção sociocultural. Neste sentido, é de nosso especial interesse a concepção latouriana das caixas pretas, que representam conceitos e instrumentos, de uma dada disciplina científica, que alcançaram a posição de objetos (teóricos, como leis e equações, ou experimentais, como equipamentos de laboratório) considerados seguros até evidência em contrário. Exemplos de caixas pretas são abundantes: tipicamente, figuram como tal os instrumentos de medida, os conceitos e modelos que, a partir do momento em que sejam aceitos como válidos (pelos membros de uma comunidade de cientistas), fazem-se ponto de partida para novas descobertas. Quando um físico realiza experimentos em seu laboratório, está considerando válido um grande conjunto de princípios e confiando que seus instrumentos fornecem uma medida fiel para certas grandezas, suposição essa indispensável à prática científica. Frequentemente, esse cientista fará uso de instrumentos cujo princípio de funcionamento foge à alçada de seu conhecimento, e é sobre esse fato que Latour funda seu conceito de caixa preta (o qual se estende mesmo aos objetos da especialidade do nosso pesquisador). Neste ensaio, teremos por objetivo mostrar que (e como) a abordagem histórico epistemológica das aulas de ciências pode, em alguns aspectos, traduzir-se como o convite a abrir certas caixas pretas.

Sobre algunos fundamentos y alcances del fin de lo social propuesto por Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour plantea que la sociología clásica, heredera de la obra de Emile Durkheim, se ha dedicado a imponer explicaciones sociales para las acciones e interpretaciones de los actores, comportándose como una ingeniería social comprometida antes en la fundamentación de ciertos proyectos políticos que en el entendimiento de lo estudiado; la tarea que él propone en cambio, tributaria de la microsociología de Gabriel Tarde y denominada sociología de las asociaciones, es la de partir de las acciones e interpretaciones de los actores para explicar lo social, dudando de la existencia y efectividad de la sociedad como un todo ya dado. El interés de esta ponencia será preguntarse por los fundamentos epistemológicos y políticos de la postura de Latour (los trabajos de Tarde y Gilles Deleuze serán centrales en esta parte del recorrido), así como por las consecuencias que podrían desprenderse ? en esos mismos dominios epistemológicos y políticos ? en caso de que efectivamente sea asumido el fin de lo social como dominio autónomo de la realidad (en este caso sirviéndonos de algunos aportes de Horkheimer, Adorno y Eduardo Grüner)

Sobre algunos fundamentos y alcances del fin de lo social propuesto por Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour plantea que la sociología clásica, heredera de la obra de Emile Durkheim, se ha dedicado a imponer explicaciones sociales para las acciones e interpretaciones de los actores, comportándose como una ingeniería social comprometida antes en la fundamentación de ciertos proyectos políticos que en el entendimiento de lo estudiado; la tarea que él propone en cambio, tributaria de la microsociología de Gabriel Tarde y denominada sociología de las asociaciones, es la de partir de las acciones e interpretaciones de los actores para explicar lo social, dudando de la existencia y efectividad de la sociedad como un todo ya dado. El interés de esta ponencia será preguntarse por los fundamentos epistemológicos y políticos de la postura de Latour (los trabajos de Tarde y Gilles Deleuze serán centrales en esta parte del recorrido), así como por las consecuencias que podrían desprenderse ? en esos mismos dominios epistemológicos y políticos ? en caso de que efectivamente sea asumido el fin de lo social como dominio autónomo de la realidad (en este caso sirviéndonos de algunos aportes de Horkheimer, Adorno y Eduardo Grüner)

Sobre algunos fundamentos y alcances del fin de lo social propuesto por Bruno Latour

Bruno Latour plantea que la sociología clásica, heredera de la obra de Emile Durkheim, se ha dedicado a imponer explicaciones sociales para las acciones e interpretaciones de los actores, comportándose como una ingeniería social comprometida antes en la fundamentación de ciertos proyectos políticos que en el entendimiento de lo estudiado; la tarea que él propone en cambio, tributaria de la microsociología de Gabriel Tarde y denominada sociología de las asociaciones, es la de partir de las acciones e interpretaciones de los actores para explicar lo social, dudando de la existencia y efectividad de la sociedad como un todo ya dado. El interés de esta ponencia será preguntarse por los fundamentos epistemológicos y políticos de la postura de Latour (los trabajos de Tarde y Gilles Deleuze serán centrales en esta parte del recorrido), así como por las consecuencias que podrían desprenderse ? en esos mismos dominios epistemológicos y políticos ? en caso de que efectivamente sea asumido el fin de lo social como dominio autónomo de la realidad (en este caso sirviéndonos de algunos aportes de Horkheimer, Adorno y Eduardo Grüner)

Situational awareness concept in a multinational collaboration environment : challenges in the information sharing framework

Technological capabilities are built to support different types of collaboration, and this gives the justification to widely observe, how activity environments are influenced by technology. Technology as an enabler can be addressed from different perspectives, other than merely technological. Dynamic, evolving environment is at the same time interesting but also challenging. As a multinational collaboration environment, the maritime surveillance is an good example of time critical and evolving environment, where technological solutions enable new ways of collaboration. Justification for the inspiration to use maritime environment as the baseline for understanding the challenges in creating and maintaining adequate level of situational awareness, derives from the complexity of the collaboration and information sharing environment elements, needed to be taken into account, when analyzing criticalities related to decision making. Situational awareness is an important element supporting decision making, and challenges related to it can also be observed in the maritime environment. This dissertation describes the structures and factors involved in this complex setting, found from the case studies that should be taken into account when trying to understand, how these elements affect the activities. This dissertation focuses on the gray area that is between a life threatening situation and normal everyday activities. From the multinational experimentation series case studies, MNE5 and MNE6 it was possible to observe situations that were not life threatening for the participants themselves, but not also basic every day activities. These case studies provided a unique possibility to see situations, where gaining of situational awareness and decision making are challenged with time critical crisis situations. Unfortunately organizations do not normally take the benefit from the everyday work to prepare themselves for possible emerging crisis situations. This dissertation focuses on creating a conceptual model and a concept that supports organizations – also outside the maritime community – to improve their ability to support gaining of situational awareness from the individual training level, all the way to changes in organizational structures in aiming for better support for decision making from the individual level to the highest decision making level. Quick changes and unpredictability are reality in organizations and organizations do not have the possibility to control all the factors that affect their functioning. Since we cannot be prepared for everything, and predict every crisis, individual activities inside teams and as a part of organizations, need to be supported with guidance, tools and training in order to support acting in challenging situations. In fact the ideology of the conceptual model created, lies especially in the aim of not controlling everything in beforehand, but supporting organizations with concrete procedures to help individuals to react in different, unpredictable situations, instead of focusing on traditional risk prevention and management. Technological capabilities are not automatically solutions for functional challenges; this is why it is justified to broaden the problem area observation from the technological perspective. This dissertation demonstrates that it is possible to support collaboration in a multinational environment with technological solutions, but it requires the recognition of technological limitations and accepting the possible restrictions related to technological innovations. Technology should not be considered value per se, the value of technology should be defined according to the support of activities, including strategic and operational environment evaluation, identification of organizational elements, and taking into account also the social factors and their challenges. Then we are one step closer to providing technological solutions that support the actual activities by taking into account the variables of the activity environment in question. The multidisciplinary view to approach the information sharing and collaboration framework, is derived especially from the complexity of decision making and building of situational awareness, since they are not build or created in vacuity, but in the organizational framework by the people doing it with the technological capabilities, enabled by the organizational structures. Introduced case studies were related to maritime environment, but according to the research results, it is valid to argue, that based on the lessons learned it is possible to create and further develop conceptual model and to create a general concept to support a wider range of organizations in their attempt to gain better level of situational awareness (SA) and to support decision making. To proof the versatile usage of the developed concept, I have introduced the case study findings to the health care environment and reflected the identified elements from the trauma center to the created concept. The main contribution to complete this adventure is the presented situational awareness concept created in the respect to NATO concept structure. This has been done to tackle the challenge of collaboration by focusing on situational awareness in the information sharing context by providing a theoretical ground and understanding, of how these issues should be approached, and how these elements can be generalized and used to support activities in other environments as well. This dissertation research has been a several year evolving process reflecting and affecting presented case studies and this learning experience from the case studies has also affected the goals and research questions of this dissertation. This venture has been written from a retro perspective according to ideology of process modeling and design rationale to present to the reader how this entire journey took place and what where the critical milestones that affected the end result, conceptual model. Support in a challenging information sharing framework can be provided with the right type of combination of tools, procedures and individual effort. This dissertation will provide insights to those with a new approach to war technology for the organizations to gain a better level of awareness and to improve the capabilities in decision making. This dissertation will present, from the war technology starting point, a new approach and possibility for the organizations to create a better level of awareness and support for decision making with the right combination of tools, procedures and individual effort.

Railways, Airports and Sea Container Operators as Publicly Listed Companies – Financial Performance and Shareholder Value Creation Perspective

Logistics infrastructure and transportation services have been the liability of countries and governments for decades, or these have been under strict regulation policies. One of the first branches opened for competition in EU as well as in other continents, has been air transports (operators, like passenger and freight) and road transports. These have resulted on lower costs, better connectivity and in most of the cases higher service quality. However, quite large amount of other logistics related activities are still directly (or indirectly) under governmental influence, e.g. railway infrastructure, road infrastructure, railway operations, airports, and sea ports. Due to the globalization, governmental influence is not that necessary in this sector, since transportation needs have increased with much more significant phase as compared to economic growth. Also freight transportation needs do not correlate with passenger side, due to the reason that only small number of areas in the world have specialized in the production of particular goods. Therefore, in number of cases public-private partnership, or even privately owned companies operating in these sub-branches have been identified as beneficial for countries, customers and further economic growth. The objective of this research work is to shed more light on these kinds of experiments, especially in the relatively unknown sub-branches of logistics like railways, airports and sea container transports. In this research work we have selected companies having public listed status in some stock exchange, and have needed amount of financial scale to be considered as serious company rather than start-up phase venture. Our research results show that railways and airports usually need high fixed investments, but have showed in the last five years generally good financial performance, both in terms of profitability and cash flow. In contrary to common belief of prosperity in globally growing container transports, sea vessel operators of containers have not shown that impressive financial performance. Generally margins in this business are thin, and profitability has been sacrificed in front of high growth – this also concerns cash flow performance, which has been lower too. However, as we examine these three logistics sub-branches through shareholder value development angle during time period of 2002-2007, we were surprised to find out that all of these three have outperformed general stock market indexes in this period. More surprising is the result that financially a bit less performing sea container transportation sector shows highest shareholder value gain in the examination period. Thus, it should be remembered that provided analysis shows only limited picture, since e.g. dividends were not taken into consideration in this research work. Therefore, e.g. US railway operators have disadvantage to other in the analysis, since they have been able to provide dividends for shareholders in long period of time. Based on this research work we argue that investment on transportation/logistics sector seems to be safe alternative, which yields with relatively low risk high gain. Although global economy would face smaller growth period, this sector seems to provide opportunities in more demanding situation as well.

Aportes de las teorías sociológicas a la discusión de la ontología. Los casos de Luhmann, Habermas y Latour

En este trabajo se discuten los aportes de la teoría sociológica contemporánea al debate filosófico y científico de la ontología, para ello son cotejados los componentes ontológicos de la Teoría General de Sistemas Sociales de Niklas Luhmann, lla Teoría de la Acción Comunicativa de Jürgen Habermas y la Actor-Network Theory de Bruno Latour.

(FAB11_2_003) Authentic Japanese architecture after Bruno Taut: the problem of eclecticism

This paper will examine attitudes to eclectic stylistic borrowing in Japan in the twentieth century in light of the concept of authenticity. I am particularly interested in how an earlier claim correlating European modernist and traditional Japanese architecture continues to colour conceptions about what is an 'authentic' response for Japanese architects to make to contemporary conditions. Non-Western and vernacular architectures generally have been the repository for touristic desires for regional authenticity and difference. Yet Japan's unique role in the development of modernist architecture has given a peculiar intensity to the demand for its architecture to resist a perceived postmodern decadence.

Um corpo-dissertação em movimento : uma questão de aprendizagem

Este trabalho ganha corpo a partir das experiências do antropólogo Carlos Castaneda. Além de ponto de partida para pensar as questões relativas ao corpo, o movimento e aprendizagem, as obras A Erva do diabo, Uma estranha realidade e Porta para o infinito, do autor mencionado, comparecem aqui para 1) investigarmos os relatos de experiência; 2) apresentarmos alguns conceitos-chaves, relativos a aprendizagem da “feitiçaria”, tal como a vontade. Vale frisar que nosso interesse na obra de Castaneda, não está nas questões místicas do xamanismo, nem mesmo nos pontos relativos ao campo da antropologia, mas na questão da aprendizagem. Para Dom Juan, o vellho índio feiticeiro e principal mestre de Carlos Castaneda, o propósito final do aprendizado da feitiçaria é justamente tornar-se um homem de conhecimento. Com o objetivo de analisar o lugar do movimento e do corpo no processo de aprendizagem, faremos o seguinte percurso analítico: de Skinner e Piaget abordaremos respectivamente a aprendizagem do comportamento operante e a aprendizagem em sentido amplo. Em seguida, apresentamos o pensamento de Francisco Varela e Bruno Latour, principalmente os conceitos de enação, corpos articulados e aprendizagem por afetação. Com Vincianne Despret discutiremos o aspecto afectivo, corporal e involuntário da aprendizagem. Com este apanhado conceitual, visamos então colocar em análise os efeitos ético-políticos dos modos de produção de conhecimento, efeitos irremediavelmente neste corpo-dissertação, e mais ainda efeitos na vida. Por fim, ao que parece, as modulações nos conceitos de corpo, movimento/ação, ao longo da exposição dos autores indicaram, por vezes, a participação de outros elementos, tais como a vontade e a percepção-atenção, implicando variações na forma de conceber a aprendizagem. Percebemos que de acordo com a formulação de aprendizagem e as nuances do movimento/ação e do corpo, isto implica produções diferenciadas de conhecimento e de realidade.