This report shares the results of a year-long study of the impact of IMLS grants (1998-2003) though programs that served youth aged 9-19. Nearly 400 museum and library programs were surveyed about their goals, strategies, content, audience, and structure, as well as about their impact, effectiveness, and outcomes.
NASA has decided to cut by 50% the next two-year budget for the Astrobiology Institute (NAI), and for all of the studies on life in outer space. This reduction follows an announcement made by Dr Michael Griffin, the Administrator of the space agency of the United States Government when, in addressing the Mars Society last summer, he clearly stated that xenobiology studies are marginal to the mission of NASA.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Pietro Greco
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
The Scientific Communications Act of 2007 (HR 1453) was introduced by the US House of Representatives on 9th March. The National Science Foundation, an independent United States Government agency that supports fundamental research and education, has thus been allowed to spend ten million dollars for each of the fiscal years 2008 through 2012 to provide communications training to improve the ability of scientists to engage in public dialogue.
Probably among the first to deal with it, nearly sixty years ago, Norbert Wiener, the founding father of cybernetics (The human use of human beings. Cybernetics and Society, Houghton Mifflin Company, London, 1950), prefigured its opportunities, as well as its limitations. Today, it is a quite common belief. We have entered (are entering) a new, great era in the history of human society: the age of information and knowledge.
The Department of Computer Science and Engineering and DO-IT IT (Disabilities, Opportunities, Internetworking and Technology) at the University of Washington propose to create the AccessComputing Alliance for the purpose of increasing the participation of people with disabilities in computing careers. Alliance partners Gallaudet University, Microsoft, the NSF Regional Alliances for Persons with Disabilities in STEM (hosted by the University of Southern Maine, New Mexico State University, and UW), and SIGACCESS of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) and collaborators represent stakeholders from education, industry, government, and professional organizations nationwide.
Alliance activities apply proven practices to support persons with disabilities within computing programs. To increase the number of students with disabilities who successfully pursue undergraduate and graduate degrees, the alliance will run college transition and bridge, tutoring, internship, and e-mentoring programs. To increase the capacity of postsecondary computing departments to fully include students with disabilities in coursers and programs, the alliance will form communities of practice, run capacity-building institutes, and develop systemic change indicators for computing departments. To create a nationwide resource to help students with disabilities pursue computing careers and computing educators and employers, professional organizations and other stakeholders to develop more inclusive programs and share effective practices, the alliance will create and maintain a searchable AccessComputing Knowledge Base of FAQs, case studies, and effective/promising practices.
These activities will build on existing alliances and resources in a comprehensive, integrated effort. They will create nationwide collaborations among individuals with disabilities, computing professionals, employers, disability providers, and professional organizations to explore the issues that contribute to the underrepresentation of persons with disabilities and to develop, apply and assess interventions. In addition, they will support local and regional efforts to recruit and retain students with disabilities into computing and assist them in institutionalizing and replicating their programs. The alliance will work with other Alliances and organizations that serve women and underrepresented minorities to make their programs accessible to students with disabilities. Finally they will collect and publish research and implementation data to enhance scientific and technological understanding of issues related to the inclusion of people with disabilities in computing.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Richard LadnerLibby CohenSheryl BurgstahlerWilliam McCarthy
This article will briefly present a few theses and reflections of mine on some perversions and disruptions under way in knowledge development and in science representation. Nevertheless, I will abstain from exposing thoroughly the obvious and triumphal side of the coin. Namely, I am not going to extol the amazing fortune of science and knowledge, which have become the fundamental resource for development, at economic level in first place. Indeed, having reached a certain age, I can allow myself although to a certain degree of oversimplification less enthusiasm and a few old-fashioned ideas.
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
In 2007, global investments in R&D have increased by 7% on the previous year and have reached an absolute historical peak, exceeding for the first time the threshold of 1,100 billion dollars (calculated in the hypothesis of a purchasing power parity between the currencies). The world invests in scientific research and technological development 2.1% of the wealth it produces. At the same time, there has been an increase in the exchange of high added-knowledge value goods and high tech represents now the most dynamic sector of the world economy.
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Pietro Greco
resourceresearchProfessional Development, Conferences, and Networks
In 2007 the Life Long Learning Programme (previously Socrates) of the European Commission has started. The programme offers to teachers, educators and policy-makers of the education sector the opportunity to be funded for participating at various training courses organized in all EU countries by international networks and projects. The SEDEC course will be included in that list in 2008. The article shortly present how to ask for a grant.
This paper summarizes key findings from a web-based questionnaire survey among Danish scientists in the natural sciences and engineering science. In line with the Act on Universities of 2003 enforcing science communication as a university obligation next to research and teaching, the respondents take a keen interest in communicating science, especially through the news media. However, they also do have mixed feeling about the quality of science communication in the news. Moreover, a majority of the respondents would like to give higher priority to science communication. More than half reply
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TEAM MEMBERS:
Kristian Hvidtfelt NielsenCarsten KjaerJorgen Dahlgaard