In a sustainable world, human needs would be met without chronic harm to the environment and without sacrificing the ability of future generations to meet their needs. Addressing the grand challenge of sustainability, the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) has developed a coordinated research and education framework, called the Science, Engineering, and Education for Sustainability (SEES) portfolio (http://www.nsf.gov/sees). The growing family of SEES activities, currently consisting of 11 programs, represents a major interdisciplinary investment by NSF that reflects the following topical
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Tim KilleenBen Van Der PluumMarge Cavanaugh
Most accounts of an ideal scientific discourse proscribe ad hominem appeals as one way to distinguish it from public discourse. Because of their frequent use of ad hominem attacks, the Climategate email messages provoked strong criticisms of climate scientists and climate science. This study asks whether the distinction between public and scientific discourse holds in this case and thus whether the exclusion of ad hominem arguments from scientific discourse is valid. The method of analysis comes from the field of informal logic in which argument fallacies like the ad hominem are classified and
Approaches to citizen science – an indispensable means of combining ecological research with environmental education and natural history observation – range from community-based monitoring to the use of the internet to “crowd-source” various scientific tasks, from data collection to discovery. With new tools and mechanisms for engaging learners, citizen science pushes the envelope of what ecologists can achieve, both in expanding the potential for spatial ecology research and in supplementing existing, but localized, research programs. The primary impacts of citizen science are seen in