Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
1,671
result(s) for
"Science Methodology Fiction."
Sort by:
The Acadia files. Book three, Winter science
A melting snowman leads her--of course!--to explore climate change and how to reduce her carbon footprint. The helium balloons at her eleventh birthday party beg questions--naturally!--of molecular structure, weights of gases,and neutral buoyancy. An afternoon making paper airplanes brings discoveries in aerodynamics. Tracks in the snow raise questions of how animals survive the winter. And an afternoon of sledding slides right into an investigation of momentum, acceleration, and friction.
Book
Shaky Foundations
Numerous popular and scholarly accounts have exposed the deep impact of patrons on the production of scientific knowledge and its applications.Shaky Foundationsprovides the first extensive examination of a new patronage system for the social sciences that emerged in the early Cold War years and took more definite shape during the 1950s and early 1960s, a period of enormous expansion in American social science.
By focusing on the military, the Ford Foundation, and the National Science Foundation, Mark Solovey shows how this patronage system presented social scientists and other interested parties, including natural scientists and politicians, with new opportunities to work out the scientific identity, social implications, and public policy uses of academic social research. Solovey also examines significant criticisms of the new patronage system, which contributed to widespread efforts to rethink and reshape the politics-patronage-social science nexus starting in the mid-1960s.
Based on extensive archival research,Shaky Foundationsaddresses fundamental questions about the intellectual foundations of the social sciences, their relationships with the natural sciences and the humanities, and the political and ideological import of academic social inquiry.
eBook
The Acadia files. Book two, Autumn science
Acadia Greene is at it again. In the summer she used science to figure out who was raiding her blueberry bushes. Now she's leading a campaign to clean up a local pond; figuring out why leaves change color; learning about time zones and germs; and discovering why we might all be drinking dinosaur pee. \"Conduct an experiment,\" her parents tell her whenever she has a new mystery to solve. \"Use the scientific method.\" So Acadia does science. And so can you.
Book
Robots beyond Science Fiction: mutual learning in human–robot interaction on the way to participatory approaches
Putting laypeople in an active role as direct expert contributors in the design of service robots becomes more and more prominent in the research fields of human–robot interaction (HRI) and social robotics (SR). Currently, though, HRI is caught in a dilemma of how to create meaningful service robots for human social environments, combining expectations shaped by popular media with technology readiness. We recapitulate traditional stakeholder involvement, including two cases in which new intelligent robots were conceptualized and realized for close interaction with humans. Thereby, we show how the robot narrative (impacted by science fiction, the term robot itself, and assumptions on human-like intelligence) together with aspects of power balancing stakeholders, such as hardware constraints and missing perspectives beyond primary users, and the adaptivity of robots through machine learning that creates unpredictability, pose specific challenges for participatory design processes in HRI. We conclude with thoughts on a way forward for the HRI community in developing a culture of participation that considers humans when conceptualizing, building, and using robots.
Journal Article
The contagious colors of Mumpley Middle School
When a mysterious illness sweeps through school, causing students to change color, sixth-grader scientist Wilmer Dooley tries to find the cause and cure.
Book
Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar
Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances our understanding of mind style: the experience of other minds, or worldviews, through language in literature. This book is the first to set out a detailed, unified framework for the analysis of mind style using the account of language and cognition set out in cognitive grammar. Drawing on insights from cognitive linguistics, Louise Nuttall aims to explain how character and narrator minds are created linguistically, with a focus on the strange minds encountered in the genre of speculative fiction. Previous analyses of mind style are reconsidered using cognitive grammar, alongside original analyses of four novels by Margaret Atwood, Kazuo Ishiguro, Richard Matheson and J.G. Ballard. Responses to the texts in online forums and literary critical studies ground the analyses in the experiences of readers, and support an investigation of this effect as an embodied experience cued by the language of a text. Mind Style and Cognitive Grammar advances both stylistics and cognitive linguistics, whilst offering new insights for research in speculative fiction.
eBook
Olga and the smelly thing from nowhere
Discovering a smelly creature in her garbage can that she names after herself, Olga befriends and studies the eccentric Olgamus using the scientific method, the practices of Jane Goodall, and other scientific concepts.
Book
Fear of AI: an inquiry into the adoption of autonomous cars in spite of fear, and a theoretical framework for the study of artificial intelligence technology acceptance
Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming part of the everyday. During this transition, people’s intention to use AI technologies is still unclear and emotions such as fear are influencing it. In this paper, we focus on autonomous cars to first verify empirically the extent to which people fear AI and then examine the impact that fear has on their intention to use AI-driven vehicles. Our research is based on a systematic survey and it reveals that while individuals are largely afraid of cars that are driven by AI, they are nonetheless willing to adopt this technology as soon as possible. To explain this tension, we extend our analysis beyond just fear and show that people also believe that AI-driven cars will generate many individual, urban and global benefits. Subsequently, we employ our empirical findings as the foundations of a theoretical framework meant to illustrate the main factors that people ponder when they consider the use of AI tech. In addition to offering a comprehensive theoretical framework for the study of AI technology acceptance, this paper provides a nuanced understanding of the tension that exists between the fear and adoption of AI, capturing what exactly people fear and intend to do.
Journal Article
Ada Lace and the impossible mission
Eight-year-old Ada uses new skills she learned from Milton to see if he sabotaged the social studies project Nina and the two of them worked on together.
Book
Expert views about missing AI narratives: is there an AI story crisis?
Stories are an important indicator of our vision of the future. In the case of artificial intelligence (AI), dominant stories are polarized between notions of threat and myopic solutionism. The central storytellers—big tech, popular media, and authors of science fiction—represent particular demographics and motivations. Many stories, and storytellers, are missing. This paper details the accounts of missing AI narratives by leading scholars from a range of disciplines interested in AI Futures. Participants focused on the gaps between dominant narratives and the untold stories of the capabilities, issues, and everyday realities of the technology. One participant proposed a “story crisis” in which these narratives compete to shape the public discourse on AI. Our findings indicate that dominant narratives distract and mislead public understandings and conceptions of AI. This suggests a need to pay closer attention to missing AI narratives. It is not simply about telling new stories, it is about listening to existing stories and asking what is wanted from AI. We call for realistic, nuanced, and inclusive stories, working with and for diverse voices, which consider (1) story-teller; (2) genre, and (3) communicative purpose. Such stories can then inspire the next generation of thinkers, technologists, and storytellers.
Journal Article