THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 2, 2006: STS Thesis Charette

Seniors in the STS program will be available at this design charette for informal conversations with faculty and other students about the subject matter and research strategies for their senior theses. Food and drink will be provided.

 

 

 

 

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 15, 7:00–9:00 P. M.
HAHN BUILDING—ROOM 101, 420 N. Harvard, POMONA COLLEGE
FREE AND OPEN TO THE PUBLIC

Each speaker will talk for 20 minutes after which the floor will be opened for questions among the panelists and from members of the audience. The event is free and open to the public and will be held in Room 101, Hahn Building, 420 N. Harvard, on the Pomona College campus. A dessert reception will follow the program. The event is sponsored by the Hart Institute of Pomona College, the Hixon Forum for Responsive Science and Engineering at Harvey Mudd College, and the Science, Technology and Society (STS) Program of The Claremont Colleges. For more information please contact Rick Worthington 909/607-3529.

SCOTT FRANK
“The Place of Science in Hollywood Today”
Scott Frank is a cultural anthropologist who focuses on the ethnographic study of mass media, particularly the culture of the Hollywood entertainment industry. He has worked at the Museum of Television and Radio, and is currently writing “Lab Coats in the Dream Factory,” the definitive treatment of science in Hollywood films. He received his Ph.D. from USC.

MICHAEL SHERMER
“Conveying Information about Science in Print and on Television”

 

Michael Shermer is the founding publisher of Skeptic magazine, director of The Skeptics Society, a monthly columnist for Scientific American , host of Skeptics’ Distinguished Science Lecture Series at Caltech, co-host and producer of the Family Channel television series, “Exploring the Unknown,” and host of a radio show on science for KPCC. He received his Ph.D. from Claremont Graduate University.

JOE PALCA
“Covering Science Stories for a National Radio Audience”
Joe Palca is Senior Science Editor at National Public Radio and, currently, a Hoover Media Fellow at the Hoover Institute in Palo Alto. Since joining NPR, he has covered a range of science topics, from biomedical research to astronomy. Palca is a graduate of Pomona College and received his Ph.D. from UC Santa Cruz.

November 19 -Trip to "The Newtonian Moment" Exhibit at the Huntington Library (leaves from Pitzer Campus)

Transportation will be leaving from Pitzer at about 9:15 am on November 19. The curator of the exhibit, Mordechai Feingold, will offer a commentary and explanation of the artifacts being displayed. If you wish to get more information or make a reservation, please E-mail Professor Andre Wakefield or Professor Dick Olson

STS Events: Spring 2003

STS LUNCHES (chances to meet other students and faculty in the STS program)
        Bring your Claremont Colleges ID card (to get lunch in the dining hall) or bring a brownbag lunch  

            Thursday, September 19, 12-1 at Frank Dining Hall, Pomona College
                 
            October 24 Pomona Farm

            November 12 Frank Private Dining Room. Frank Dining Hall, Pomona College. 12-1.  Theme: Science and Activism

            December 12 

            February 20

            March 13

            April 7

STS Colloquium

Wenda K. Bauchspies, Science, Technology, and Society Program, Pennsylvania State University
“Women and Science in West Africa”
Thursday, February 13, 4:15pm, Carnegie 107

 The setting for my research is Togo, West Africa and in this talk I will weave together culture, science education, gender and technology. I will begin by discussing the importance of culture in understanding schools. Specifically, I will discuss the relationship between the Grand Frère social structure of Togo and the appropriation and integration of Western science, technology, and education. My discussion will then turn to female science and mathematics teachers and school administrators who are teaching, enforcing, and modeling the values of "discipline plus work equals success." I use my ethnographic data on time, space, bodies and words to illustrate science as a cultural construct in ways that facilitate understanding boundary work within and between cultures.

James Marshall, Computer Science, Pomona College
"The Quest for Artificial Intelligence: The First Fifty Years"
Thursday, February 27, 4:15pm, Carnegie 107

Since its inception a half-century ago, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) has grown into a large and flourishing research area which seeks to understand the nature of human minds by building machine minds. Is such a thing possible? How far has AI progressed toward this goal? Computer programs have been developed that converse in English on a variety of topics, play backgammon and chess at grandmaster levels, make analogies, learn to pronounce English text by example, learn to drive cars on the highway, diagnose diseases better than many human experts, and compose music. In recent years, many kinds of autonomous mobile robots have been built, able to get around in the world on their own. Despite these achievements, however, AI still has far to go. In this talk, we will examine the broad history of the field, and take a closer look at some existing AI programs and robots.

Michael Shermer, Skeptics Society
“Denying History: Who Says the Holocaust Never Happened, and Why Do They Say It?”
Sponsored by STS and the Holocaust Lecture Series, "Confronting Evil: Lectures on the Holocaust and Genocide"
March 4, 11:00 am, Hahn 108.

Katie Purvis, CMC Joint Science Program
“Perceptions of Risk from Nuclear Testing in Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan”
Tuesday , March 11, 4:15pm, Carnegie 107

During the cold war, the Soviet Union operated their primary nuclear test site near the city of Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.  Many rural villages surround the test site and are now contaminated with radioactive material.  The health of these communities is very poor, which could be due in part or completely to radiation exposure. The main goal of this project is to study the differences in risk perception between the villagers, the doctors who treat them, and the scientists who work on the test site, and inform these perceptions with actual environmental and medical data.

Peter John, University of California, San Diego
"Le Nouveau Mestern: European Exceptionalism and the History of Science"
Thursday, March 13

Le Nouveau Western: The history of science continues to be guided by an antiquated narrative of Western exceptionalism. New strategies in the writing of global history have exposed the ethnocentric bias of familiar European and Western historical narratives. The history of science, emerging as it did in Europe during the height of its imperial hegemony, exhibits this bias most conspicuously. Indeed, with heightened critical awareness focused on standard accounts of Western progress, the history of science appears to have become a narrative of progress by proxy. The perpetuation over the course of the 20th century of the idea of science as the sui generis creation of Western culture is most conspicuously revealed in the historiography of the "scientific revolution."

Linda Strauss, University of California, San Diego
"Naive Scientists, Skeptical Magicians, and the Development of Scientific Method"
Friday March 14

Brian Tucker, McAurthur Fellow, Pomona College '67
"Geo-Hazards International's Efforts to Reduce Earthquake Risk in Developing Countries"
Tuesday, April 1 at 11:00 a.m. in Rose Hills Theatre

"My Ventures in the Academic, Government and Non-profit Worlds on Both Sides of the Pacific Rim"
Wednesday, April 2 at 12:00 noon in Blue Room, Frank Dining Hall

Tucker, founder of GeoHazards International, a non-profit organization, is dedicated to reducing earthquake damage in developing countries. Working with local seismologists, masons and politicians to heighten awareness of a region’s vulnerability, Tucker eschews a paternalistic approach in favor of empowering local people to recognize their own ability to help themselves. GHI encourages locals to create preparedness strategies, to improve the safety of existing public buildings and to change building codes to integrate seismic resistance into new construction. His second lecture will feature his life experiences working on both sides of the Pacific Rim. Organized by Pomona College’s Physics Department; co-sponsored with the Departments of Geology, the STS Program and PBI.

Trevor Campbell, Community Scholar in the STS program
Reginald Nugent, Director, Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, Cal Poly Pomona
Aaron Gilbert, STS student, Pomona College
"Science and Technology in Economic Devlopment: A Case Study of Jamaica"
Tuesday, April 22, 4:15 p.m., Carnegie 107

Campbell and Nugent will report on their ongoing involvement in a project with the University of the West Indies in Jamaica, and Gilbert will discuss his proposed research project related to his senior thesis in STS which he plans to carry out in Jamaica this summer.

Susanna Priest, Texas A&M University
"Biotechnology Across Cultures: A Case Study in Technology and Human Values"
Thursday, May 1 at 4:15 p.m., Carnegie 107

Many people in the scientific and engineering communities assume that popular resistance to new technologies is rooted in ignorance, sensationalized media reports, or both. This assumption is based on misperceptions of the relationships among science literacy, media content, and public opinion, and it ignores other reasons
for resistance, ranging from moral objections to concern about social impacts and the adequacy of regulatory responses. Using European and U.S. responses to biotechnology as a case in point, it is apparent that attitudes toward this technology reflect social values or preferences that are different in different national cultures.

Conferences

April 11-12:     "Knowledge and its Making in Northern Europe (1500-1800)
                        Westergaard Workshop
                        Pomona College     
                        Friday and Saturday, April 11-12, 2003
                        Smith Campus Center Room 208
                        8:45-5:30
                       Knowledge and its Making in Northern Europe (1500-1800)

  Organized by Pamela Smith, History, Pomona College, and Benjamin Schmidt, History, University of Washington, Seattle
See http://www.history.pomona.edu/Westergaard/overview.htm for more information

  This workshop will examine ways of knowing in early modern Northern Europe.  It will focus particularly on the social process of making knowledge, the variety of practices by which knowledge was produced, and the ways in which individuals demonstrated their possession of knowledge.  We are especially interested in how new kinds of knowledge, such as the “new science,” differentiated themselves from indigenous or vernacular knowledge systems, as well as the ways in which the production of knowledge was the result of group activity, whether in workshops, as a result of bureaucratic structures, or of commercial ventures in early modern Europe.

Our aim is to probe a number of related questions:  How was knowledge produced and validated in early modern Europe—a period when so many disciplinary standards of inquiry were being established—and how does this relate otherwise to the production of culture?  What variations exist among geographic, visual, literary, scientific, and other modes of inquiry?  What is the connection between structures of knowledge and the objects of their representation?  The workshop papers will treat methods of acquiring, authenticating, assimilating, disseminating, and representing knowledge in the period ranging from the voyages of European discovery to the nineteenth century.  Presenters will be drawn broadly from the humanities and social sciences in order to explore the different modes of knowing in science, art, religion, music, and other areas. 

STS Events: Fall 2002

STS COLLOQUIUM

October 15, 2002
4:15 pm, Carnegie 107, Pomona College

Marianne de Laet
Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Science, Technology, & Society , Harvey Mudd College

“Cosmologies: On Astronomical and Anthropological Observation.”  

On and off, over the past two years, I have been involved, as an anthropologist, with a quite extraordinary science and engineering project at Caltech. The  “California Extremely Large Telescope” (CELT) concerns the building of a next generation ground-based optical telescope; it includes astronomers and engineers; managers and technicians; funders and administrators; dissenters and enthusiasts; potential users and future neighbors; critics and admires; sceptics and believers. As an anthropologist and STS scholar I try to make sense of the connections between all these bodies: how do they, together, produce a telescope? In this talk I discuss the intricacies of observing scientists and engineers. I will give a brief introduction to the telescope project; explain the role of the anthropologist as a cultural commentator on technology and science; juxtapose the various cosmologies that are at play here; and discuss why one might want to do this kind of work -- and how it might be of use for those who build … extremely large telescopes.

 

October 29, 2002
4:15pm, Carnegie 107, Pomona College

Sal Restivo
Hixon-Riggs Visiting Professor in Science, Technology and Society

"Romancing the Robots: Can Social Robots Dance, and Why it Matters"  

Dr. Restivo will discuss developments in social robotics, the development of socially skilled emotional robots.  These robots (e.g., Cog and Kismet at MIT's AI Lab) are being designed as prototypes of robots that one day will be capable of interacting with humans in conscious and emotional ways.  Social robotics engineers tend to operate with social theories that are too psychological to capture the radically social and rhythmic nature of human beings.  Dr. Restivo will discuss reigning psychologically grounded theories of   mind in social robotics and the alternative "enculturation" or "social construction" theory of mind he advocates.  He will also address other social and cultural issues raised by the emergence of social robots.

 

November 4, 2002
4:15 pm, Crookshank 1, Pomona College

Demetra Sfendoni-Mentzou
Professor of Philosophy at the Aristotelian University of Thessalonika, Greece

"Aristotle's Theory of Tragedy and of Science and Bas van Fraassen's Empiricism

 

November 12, 2002
4:15 pm, Carnegie 107, Pomona College

Rachel Mayeri
Assistant Professor of Media Studies , Harvey Mudd College

“Stories from the Human Genome: An Animated History of Reproduction.”

    An experimental animation, which looks playfully at the way historical interpretations of reproductive science have reflected the thought-styles and prejudices in each era from the 17^th century to the present day.
    This interdisciplinary video addresses the interaction of visual art, contemporary technology, and historical cultural beliefs. It also shows how science has historically worked to support-rather than unseat-religious and cultural myths.

STS Events: Spring 2002

• February 6th, 4:15 PM, Galileo Hall, HMC
  Sandra Harding, UCLA, author of Is Science Multicultural? and Andrew Feenberg, San Diego State University, author of Questioning Technology, "Science Studies and Environmentalism."

• February 12th, 4:15 PM, Smith Campus Center, Rm 208, Pomona
  Evelyn Fox Keller, Professor of History and Philosophy of Science, MIT, "Genes and Development Narratives."

• February 20th, 4:00 PM, Carnegie Bldg., Room 107, Pomona College
  Brian Keeley, "Anthropomorphism, primatomorphism, mammalomorphism: Understanding cross-species comparisons."

• March 13th, 7:00 PM, Rose Hills Theater, Smith Center, Pomona
  William McDonough, FAIA, architect and entrepreneur, "The Sustainable Campus: Design for Ecological Leadership."

• March 26th, Evelyn Fox-Keller, Director of Science, Technology, and Society, MIT, "Genes and Developmental Narratives."

• April 2nd, Michael Bravo, Scott Polar Research Institute, Fellow of Downing College, Cambridge, "Science and Shamanism in the Circumpolar North."

• April 5th, Funshop on Designs for a Convivial Future, Smith Campus Center, Rm 208, Pomona

• 9:00 AM, Keynote Address, "Allegorical Notes on Redesigning Paradise," Langdon Winner, RPI, author of Autonomous Technology and The Politics of Design forthcoming.

• 10:00 AM, Featured Speakers, "Do-it-Yourself Deathscapes," Theodore Steinberg, Case Western; and "Megafollies," Grey Brechin, UC Berkeley.

• Lunch at The Farm, Pomona College

• 1:30 PM, Panel on "The L.A. that Might Have Been," Terry Young, CSU Long Beach; Joan Woodward, Cal Poly Pomona; and Jennifer Welch, USC.

• 3:15 PM, Panel on "Reinhabiting a Reenchanted World," Langdon Winner and John Cobb, Claremont School of Theology, chairs, with student panelists of the Claremont Colleges

STS Events: Fall 2001

• October 30th
  David Arian, Harry Bridges Institute, "Ports and Politics: Technological Change and Community in a Global Society."

• November 15th at 4:15, Carnegie Hall, Rm 102, Pomona
  Grey Brechin and Robert Dawson, authors of Farewell Promised Land, "Imperial San Francisco."