We installed Google Analytics tracking code last Sunday to follow the traffic on this blog. Here the “executive overview” of the last four days (~100 visits and ~250 pageviews):
Most visitors are from Europe and Eastern US — but there are also IP-numbers from Madras, India; Muscat, Oman; and Federal, Argentina. 35% of the visits are returnings, but only 11% are in-house. 56% are visiting via Google. We’ll be back with more self-indulgent observations later!
(Semi-internal discussion in Danish:)
Jeg synes diskussionen om Sørens plan for indsamlingsprocedurer på seminaret i går var meget interessant, og Ion og jeg snakkede lidt opfølgende om det her i formiddags.
Som flere var inde på, så kredsede diskussionen mere eller mindre direkte omkring integrationen af forskning, indsamling og samlinger.
In co-operation with BioCampus, University of Copenhagen and the Schools of Visual Arts, Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Medical Museion is arranging a free public conference “Art and Biomedicine: Beyond the Body”, Monday 3 September, 2007.
Confirmed speakers include:
Ingeborg Reichle, Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities (www.kunstgeschichte.de/reichle)
Ben Fry, MIT Media Lab (http://benfry.com)
Wolfgang Knapp, Art in Context, University of the Arts, Berlin (www.kunstimkontext.udk-berlin.de/lehrende/knapp/knapp.html)
Steve Kurtz, Critical Arts Ensemble (www.critical-art.net)
Richard Wingate, UK Medical Research Council Centre, King’s College, London (www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/biomedical/mrc/index.php?page=http://www.kcl.ac.uk/depsta/biomedical/mrc/Researcher.php?PersonID=19)
Ken Arnold, Wellcome Trust, London (www.wellcome.ac.uk/node6510.html)
James Elkins, Department of Art History, Theory, and Criticism of the Art Institute of Chicago (www.jameselkins.com).
A detailed program has been posted, see www.ku.dk/satsning/biocampus/artandbiomedicine
For inquiries, contact Monica Lambert, mbl@mm.ku.dk
See also the workshop ‘Biomedicine and Aesthetics in a Museum Context’, Copenhagen 30 August – 1 September, 2007.
Apropos the earlier discussion of MRI scanners on this blog – here’s the manuscript for a short talk I gave to the Danish Radiological Society’s annual meeting in Copenhagen, Wednesday 24 January 2007.The full title of the talk was “MRI scanners and Madeleine cakes: Contemporary radiological heritage and professional identity”.
The fourth Swiss STS meeting (“ScienceFutures”, 6-9 February 2008) will focus on future scenarios of sci-med-tech in society. Here’s the brief (which is also a good summary of some of the main issues in the field):
ScienceFutures is a provocative reaction to the notion that with the millennium, utopian thinking has come to an end. While in early modern thought utopia was the site of happiness removed in space, it increasingly became a good place in the future in nineteenth-century progressionism. Subjected to différance in space and time, utopias acquired a technical and scientific makeup. Trust in the calculability of the future was also a necessary condition for the rise of the modern welfare state, leading to a heyday of social planning. However, in high modernism the future lost its character of being a ‘storehouse of possibilities’. Rather, confronted with risks and uncertainties, the futurology of the 1960s tried to ‘colonize’ the time ahead and reduce its openness, now conceived not as a chance but as a potential danger. The result was a ‘defuturizing’ of the present, and a technocratic stance towards social change. In the aftermath of the traumatic outgrowths of totalitarianism, the utility of prospective thinking remained fundamentally questionable, and the dynamics of scientific and technological innovation made it difficult to anticipate future developments with plausible certainty.
Where do we stand today? Read More
The research group “Creating Science: Crafting Stem Cells in a Moral Landskape” are inviting to a seminar + reception to launch their new book (in Danish) Håbets teknologi. Samfundsvidenskabelige perspektiver på stamcelleforskning (Technology of Hope: Social Science Perspectives on Stem Cell Research). Join them Monday 12 March, 3-5pm at Center for Sundhed og Samfund, Øster Farimagsgade 5, Building 5, room 5.1.28.
(For our Danish readers): I en pressemeddelelse i dag fremlægger Forskningsrådet for Teknologi og Produktion (FTP) en ny og spændende videnskabsteori:
Amerikanske og engelske forskere har for nylig vist, at det rent faktisk kan lade sig gøre at designe en “usynlighedsfrakke” .. Indtil videre er usynlighedsfrakken ganske vist kun teoretisk bevist. Men videnskabshistorien viser os, at mange teorier før eller senere bliver til virkelighed gennem eksperimenter, konstaterer FTP’s formand (min kursiv).
Jeg synes nok jeg har hørt argumentet før — men da til fordel for jordstråler, pyramideffekter og chakraer. Men det er første gang som jeg har hørt en forskningsrådsformand hævde, at noget der kun er teoretisk bevist også rent faktisk kan lade sig gøre. Og desuden med støtte i videnskabshistorisk erfaring. Et nyt og spændende tilskud til videnskabsteoriens mangefacetterede verden? Eller måske bare vrøvl?
If you understand Danish this seminar on the ethical status of aborted foetuses organised by BioCampus at the University of Copenhagen might be of interest (Tuesday 20 March, 10am-4pm, University of Copenhagen, Humanities Campus, Njalsgade 80, room 24.2.07):
Hvornår kan et foster med rimelighed siges at være en person? Seminaret tager centrale elementer i debatten op til overvejelse, herunder striden om de sene aborter, hyppigt anvendte liberale argumenter for statens neutrale rolle og fostrets juridiske status i et historisk perspektiv.
Presentations by:
Write to eva.agnete.krzeminski@sociology.ku.dk before 10 March.
One of the central features of museums is that they are venues for the visitors’ emotional confrontation with the past. Material objects add a new affective and aesthetic dimension to the relation between spectator and ‘representations’ of the past which can be described in terms like ‘authenticity’, ‘presence’ and ‘lived experience’. Those interested in such problems of historiography and museology may want to take a trip to Cambridge (UK) on 21 March to participate in a meeting on ‘Re-enactment History and Affective Knowing’ organised by Peter de Bolla and Simon Schaffer.
The last decade has witnessed the growth of a new kind of academic historical inquiry, re-enactment history. This inquiry has something in common with older traditions of historical empathy, approaches familiar from debates about history teaching in schools and about the appropriate ways of dealing with and exploiting national heritage. But in these newer approaches historians do not only seek imaginatively to enter the minds of historical agents but rather to act out the past so as to know it better. This enterprise raises fascinating questions about affect or emotion, currently topics of great interest in related fields in intellectual history, philosophy, aesthetics, cognitive science and the human sciences: it has even been suggested that a new branch of knowledge may be appearing, called by some the affective sciences. This conference will contribute to this growing field by discussing the conceptual structure of the historical modes of understanding based in affective experience. Speakers will discuss the kinds of knowledge involved in re-enactment history and explore the relations between memory and re-enactment. They will ask how a simulation can produce new knowledge and how notions of lived experience and authenticity work their effects here. Key areas where re-enactment history have been put to work, such as histories of experimental and field sciences, within museums, and in the media, will be addressed by participants. A group of internationally distinguished historians and literary scholars has been invited to present papers, each of around twenty minutes. There will be ample time for discussion and debate.
Speakers include John Brewer, Jim Chandler, Elizabeth Edwards (University of the Arts), Jonathan Lamb (Vanderbilt), Iain McCalman (Australian National University), Vanessa Agnew (Michigan) Otto Sibum (MPI Berlin), Jim Secord (Cambridge), Alison Winter (Chicago), and Mark Phillips (Carleton). For more info check out CRASSH’s website.
Reminder: the dead-line for abstracts to the “Science & Public”-conference at Imperial College, London (19 May 2007) is next Thursday, 1 March. Write to scienceandpublic@googlemail.com . For earlier announcement, see here.
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