We present a set of case studies in which students create, customize, and personalize their own scientific instruments-and thus become engaged in scientific inquiry not only through observing and measuring but also through designing and building. Although computational technologies have, in general, contributed to making today's scientific instruments more "opaque" (that is, less understandable) and less aesthetically pleasing than their predecessors, we argue that these same technologies can be used to bring back a sense of transparency and aesthetics to the design of scientific instruments. We analyze how students, by building their own scientific instruments, can pursue a broader range of scientific investigations of their own choosing, feel a stronger sense of personal investment in their scientific investigations, and develop deeper critical capacities in evaluating scientific measurements and knowledge.

/pdf/beyond-black-boxes-bringing-transparency-and-aesthetics-back-c30q9soqor.pdf

Beyond Black Boxes: Bringing Transparency and Aesthetics Back to Scientific Investigation

This bibliography is a continuation of and a complement to those published in the Urban History Yearbook 1974–91 and Urban History 1992–2002. The arrangement and format closely follows that of previous years. There is an index of towns on pp. 504–507. The list of abbreviations identifies only those periodicals from which articles cited this year have been taken.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0963926800011299

Current bibliography of urban history

This article describes two years of work done under the project "Beyond Black Boxes" (BBB), which focuses on developing new computational tools and design materials that enable students to create, modify and customize their scientific instruments.

Beyond Black Boxes: bringing transparency and aesthetics back to scientific investigation

Occupational guilds in medieval and early modern Europe offered an effective institutional mechanism whereby two powerful groups, guild members and political elites, could collaborate in capturing a larger slice of the economic pie and redistributing it to themselves at the expense of the rest of the economy. Guilds provided an organizational mechanism for groups of businessmen to negotiate with political elites for exclusive legal privileges that allowed them to reap monopoly rents. Guild members then used their guilds to redirect a share of these rents to political elites in return for support and enforcement. In short, guilds enabled their members and political elites to negotiate a way of extracting rents in the manufacturing and commercial sectors, rents that neither party could have extracted on its own. First, I provide an overview of where and when European guilds arose, what occupations they encompassed, how large they were, and how they varied across time and space. I then examine how guild activities affected market competition, commercial security, contract enforcement, product quality, human capital, and technological innovation. The historical findings on guilds provide strong support for the view that institutions arise and survive for centuries not because they are efficient but because they serve the distributional interests of powerful groups.

/pdf/the-economics-of-guilds-4bohc7bk49.pdf

The Economics of Guilds

The recent discovery that the fatty acid composition of tissue phospholipids varies in a systematic manner among species has lead to the proposal that membrane fatty acid composition is an important determinant of the metabolic rate characteristic for each species. Endotherms (mammals and birds) have a basal metabolic rate (BMR) that is several times that of ectotherms and have more polyunsaturated membranes. In both birds and mammals, as species size increases there is a decrease in mass-specific BMR and a decrease in membrane polyunsaturation. Membrane-associated processes are significant components of BMR and important membrane proteins operate at much faster rates in species with high BMR than in those with low BMR. A series of "species-crossover" experiments show that the rate of this molecular activity is largely due to the nature of the membrane bilayer surrounding these membrane proteins such that polyunsaturated membranes are associated with fast membrane-associated processes. It is suggested that this influence is due to the physical properties that such polyunsaturated membranes possess. This has been called the membrane pacemaker theory of metabolism and provides a framework to understand factors such as the influence of diet on metabolism. It is noted that in the rat membrane fatty acid composition is a regulated parameter being more influenced by the balance between n-3 and n-6 polyunsaturates in the diet than it is by general diet content of saturated, monounsaturated and total polyunsaturated fats.

Membrane fatty acids as pacemakers of animal metabolism.

Part 1: Instrument-making industry in the 17th century scientific instruments at the end of the 16th century the inventions of the 17th century the workshops of the 17th century. Part 2: contributory factors in the evolution of the instrument-making industry economic and social factors industrial and technical factors major scientific problems the collections of philosophical instruments. Part 3: the instrument-making industry in the 18th century the evolution of optical instruments surveying and astronomical instruments the technique of graduating the arcs and rules of instruments the evolution of physical instruments the English workshops the instrument industry of the Continent the French workshops.

Scientific instruments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their makers

Note: Index des Noms et index des matieres, table des figures et tableaux Reference Record created on 2004-09-07, modified on 2016-08-08

Maurice Daumas

Papers

Scientific instruments of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and their makers

Histoire générale des techniques

Histoire de la science

Les instruments scientifiques aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siècles

A history of technology & invention : progress through the ages