Dinner in the Iguanodon
On New Year’s Eve 1853, a small celebratory dinner took place in the most unlikely of places: inside the model of the iguanodon at the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, which was still under construction. While a celebratory meal is conventional on such a date, the location most certainly was not. Why did they have dinner in so strange a place? Who was invited and who was to know about it? What was the message that they were trying to send? The Illustrated London News (ILN) famously covered this unusual event on page twenty-two of their January 7, 1854 issue, which included a large illustration of the dinner, an article covering the details of the evening as it unfolded, and an article on the Gigantic Bird of New Zealand. The common thread that tied together these three articles was comparative anatomist Richard Owen. Though it may seem trivial at first glance, Richard Owen’s inclusion in the press surrounding this “Dinner in the Iguanodon Model, At the Crystal Palace, Sydenham” is loaded with meaning. As Patricia Anderson suggests, the way an image is presented and disseminated, from its location on the page and its captions, to the accompanying text and the publication in which it itself is printed “directs the viewer’s attention to a context for the picture, a context which directs the reader-viewer’s attention toward a specific message which may, or may not be, literally depicted.” My paper will explore the ways in which the Illustrated London News’ image of the “Dinner in the Iguanodon Model” and Richard Owen’s presence in two articles accompanying the illustration, are reflective of the implicit construction and dissemination of the progressive vision of Victorian Britain that the periodical espoused.
Reflection of the New Mathematics Education Movement in Soviet Pedagogical Journals: USSR’s and US’s struggles towards constructing a ‘modern’ mathematics curriculum
Mathematics education often becomes the topic of public debates in various media. Moreover, these debates are often arranged and even ‘staged’ to show off the society’s concern with public education in general. Professional mathematicians and mathematics educators use education field as their ‘stage’ for demonstrating their involvement in modern scientific practices and their preoccupation with modernization and applicability of education offered to the general public. In this talk I will present a case study of an attempt to bring the school mathematics curriculum closer to the academic requirements of STEM related professions and everyday needs of students in the USSR during the 1960’s and 1970’s. Despite the numerous positive aspects and long-term accomplishments of conducted education reforms, the reconstructed curriculum was widely criticized during the 1980’s by both professional mathematicians and school teachers.
The shortcomings of the reform were triggered by the reformers’ disconnectedness from the mainstream government-mandated political ideology that played a large role in all aspects of Soviet Society. The perceived ineffectiveness of the reforms was not rooted in the mathematical content, but rather in the new ways it was presented. We will examine the published opinions of Soviet educators regarding the New Mathematics Movement in the US. Then we will analyze the features of the newly formed curriculum of both countries.
Decades that followed the end of the World War II were marked by political and social turmoil associated with the onset of the Cold War and its consequences. However, public education was the subject of concern for politicians and general population alike.
American and Canadian historians of mathematics and education have provided detailed accounts and analysis of the “New Mathematics” movement in education, its goals, features and aftermath. Almost parallel to the reforms in the West, innovative and fundamental mathematics education reforms were also being carried out in the Soviet Union. These reforms and their long lasting legacy have not been covered adequately enough in the literature thus far.
Science, Rhetoric and Morality in Seneca’s Naturales Quaestiones
Seneca’s eight-book work of natural philosophy, the Naturales Quaestiones, is unique within the ancient world for having been composed by an author who was equally distinguished as a moralist, an imperial adviser, and even as a playwright. Like all of Seneca’s work, it exhibits the highest degree of rhetorical polish, and it involves attentive readers in the complex task of sorting through its multiple literary, political, and ethical purposes. My paper will focus on Seneca’s combined role as a moralist and a naturalist in the NQ, exploring how he presents the contribution of scientific knowledge to the tranquillity of soul that is proper to a Stoic living in accordance with nature. In so doing, I shall also consider Seneca’s rhetorical self-presentation as a both a natural philosopher and a philosophical therapist, as well as the subtle political messaging conducted through the emperor Nero’s presence in the pages of the NQ—a presence made more explicit than in any other work of Seneca that is not expressly political in character. I hope to show how Seneca combines earnest moral and scientific investigations with a significant element of political and literary performance in this often neglected, but richly layered work.
Scaffolds, not Fictions: Mediation and Representation in Scientific Modelling
In recent years, many philosophers have drawn comparisons between scientific models and artistic products such as paintings and works of fiction, bringing insights from aesthetics to bear on questions about the relationship between models and the systems and phenomena they are used to investigate (e.g. French (2003), Godfrey-Smith (2006, 2009), Frigg (2010), Contessa (2010), and Toon (2010)). For them, the comparison between science and art is meant as more than mere analogy, rather revealing something deep about the fictional nature of models as, like paintings, imperfect and limited depictions of the world or, like literature, descriptions of an imagined world or of what this world might have been like. In this paper I examine these accounts in light of Morrison’s (2015) moderate perspective, which, rather than calling all models “fictional,” reserves this characterization for the latter kind, namely, models of imaginary targets. As I argue, both “extreme fictionalists” and Morrison’s moderate position fit in a broader conceptual framework that can be identified as the “representational view of models,” holding that models are used for indirect investigations of target phenomena because models represent those targets (Morrison & Morgan 1999).
Despite its popularity, the representational view of models is riddled with problems, both general (e.g. accommodating idealizations and abstractions) and particular (e.g. the anything-is-similar-to-anything-else-in-some-way objection to pure dyadic representation, and the related anything-can-represent-anything-else-for-someone objection to triadic representation). A powerful but still widely neglected alternative to the representational view is the artefactual view of models, according to which models are not truth-bearing representations, but rather autonomous tools or devices. As such, models can be more or less useful for certain purposes, but they are useful by virtue of what they present rather than what they represent. In articulating the (anti-representational) artefactual view of scientific modeling, I reject fictionalist approaches and the comparison between science and art, favoring instead the analogy with engineering: like scaffolds, models function as tools which facilitate our engagement with the world rather than trying to represent it. Thus, models are never fictional, but can play a mediatory role in inquiry depending on what uses they afford.
Disease Definitions and Competing Treatments: The Case of Cholelithiasis
Definitions of disease entities can be constructed simultaneously along multiple axes and are surprisingly precarious even when based on biopathological mechanisms. Definitions can be chosen based on the affected organ or physiological system such as liver disease or cardiovascular disease, length of time that is generally endured by the patient such as acute or chronic, or on the type of treatment planned, such as medical or surgical. This paper will discuss the development of the various treatment options for gallstones/gallbladder disease and how the chosen treatment changes the definition of cholelithiasis on numerous levels. More specifically, it examines how the chosen treatment determines a medical or surgical definition of the disease and how the alternative disease definitions played into tensions between medicine and surgery over the jurisdiction of cholelithiasis treatment.
Until the second half of the 19th century, gallstones were mainly treated as a medical disease with painkillers. Following the advent of sophisticated technologies in surgery, such as aseptic technique and anaesthesia, surgical treatments were developed to treat either the gallstones or the diseased gallbladder. Eventually gallbladder removal, or cholecystectomy, became the gold standard of treating cholelithiasis, defining the disease as a surgical disease of the gallbladder. In the 1970s however, the physicians attempted to reclaim cholelithiasis as a medical disease with the use of orally administered bile acids to facilitate the chemical dissolution of the gallstones. Since the attempted medical treatment failed to fully cure the patient of gallstones, cholelithiasis continued to be a surgical disease and therefore within the realm of the surgeon. However, the hope for a less invasive treatment for gallbladder disease was not lost on the surgical community and a minimally invasive surgical intervention for this problem was eventually developed in the late 1980s. The case of cholelithiasis thus shows how the categorization of disesase entities is highly susceptible to the development of new scientific knowledge and, above all, therapeutic innovations.
Promoting thin: Life insurance mortality numbers and their use and misuse in creating a fear of fat
Obesity has been a topic of debate and condemnation since the turn of the twentieth century, and our fear of fat has only increased since the 1980s. But the reasons for our fixation on weight are complex, and largely inappropriate. Science and medical numbers give our treatment of obesity legitimacy, but where do this numbers come from, and what did they actually mean in their original context? Given the number of people currently labelled obese, and the treatment of the obese in todays’ society, it is important to take a second look.
In 1909, a life insurance committee report noted a relationship between obesity and higher mortality rates in the first large-scale study of its kind. That report led to the Medico-Actuarial Mortality Investigation, published in five volumes between 1912 and 1914 by a collaborative committee of actuaries and medical directors representing 43 major North American insurance companies. Most of the second volume focused on assessing the impact of weight on mortality, using information about tens of thousands of policy holders. The findings were clear: over average weight was dangerous to health and increased the risk of early death.
Or, at least, the findings were treated as if they were that simple. In reality, and as often happens when science filters into the public domain, the reality of what the study found was more complex. The section on women, for instance, found obesity in women to be less fatal than being married at the time of application for insurance. Nor were the numbers for men necessarily better interpreted, taking no account of who was covered for life insurance in the early 1900s or whether that could be considered representative. By critically examining what the study found, and how those numbers were reflected in wider arguments over the dangers of obesity, I will provide a healthier history of our obsession with weight.
Staging Science 