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Unforgettable congressional hearings in 1978 revealed that fallout from American nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s had overexposed hundreds of soldiers and other citizens to radiation. Faith in governmental integrity was shaken, and many people have assumed that such overexposure caused great damage. Yet important questions remain--the most controversial being: did the radiation overexposure in fact cause the cancers and birth defects for which it has been blamed? Elements of Controversy is the result of a decade of exhaustive research in AEC documentary records and the full clinical and epidemiological literature on radiation effects. More concerned with uncovering the historical story than with assigning blame, Barton Hacker concludes that every precaution was taken by the AEC to avoid harming test participants or bystanders. And, he points out, the biomedical literature suggests that these precautions worked. Yet top officials in Washington--for whom the success of nuclear weapons was of overriding importance--had asserted that testing involved no risks at all. Discrepancies between unverifiable government claims and the revelations that some actual risk was present explain the origins and angry persistence of the controversies, Hacker argues. The Department of Energy delayed publication of Hacker's study for five years, and while his controversial book is sure to draw objections from both sides of the radiation-hazard debates, it will provide a much-needed guide to understanding their polemics. Unforgettable congressional hearings in 1978 revealed that fallout from American nuclear weapons testing in the 1950s had overexposed hundreds of soldiers and other citizens to radiation. Faith in governmental integrity was shaken, and many people have assumed that such overexposure caused great damage. Yet important questions remain--the most controversial being: did the radiation overexposure in fact cause the cancers and birth defects for which it has been blamed? Elements of Controversy is the result of a decade of exhaustive research in AEC documentary records and the full clinical and epidemiological literature on radiation effects. More concerned with uncovering the historical story than with assigning blame, Barton Hacker concludes that every precaution was taken by the AEC to avoid harming test participants or bystanders. And, he points out, the biomedical literature suggests that these precautions worked. Yet top officials in Washington--for whom the success of nuclear weapons was of overriding importance--had asserted that testing involved no risks at all. Discrepancies between unverifiable government claims and the revelations that some actual risk was present explain the origins and angry persistence of the controversies, Hacker argues. The Department of Energy delayed publication of Hacker's study for five years, and while his controversial book is sure to draw objections from both sides of the radiation-hazard debates, it will provide a much-needed guide to understanding their polemics.
Explores how we justify our beliefs - and try to influence those of others - both soundly and effectively.
Science and technology are embedded in virtually every aspect of modern life. As a result, people face an increasing need to integrate information from science with their personal values and other considerations as they make important life decisions about medical care, the safety of foods, what to do about climate change, and many other issues. Communicating science effectively, however, is a complex task and an acquired skill. Moreover, the approaches to communicating science that will be most effective for specific audiences and circumstances are not obvious. Fortunately, there is an expanding science base from diverse disciplines that can support science communicators in making these determinations. Communicating Science Effectively offers a research agenda for science communicators and researchers seeking to apply this research and fill gaps in knowledge about how to communicate effectively about science, focusing in particular on issues that are contentious in the public sphere. To inform this research agenda, this publication identifies important influences â€" psychological, economic, political, social, cultural, and media-related â€" on how science related to such issues is understood, perceived, and used.
Controversies may be particularly prominent in one or another culture. Yet, there is hardly any culture where they do not exist. This book assumes that the practice of controversy, along with its theorization, constitutes – in each of the cultures and disciplines where it develops – a tradition. Whether there are enough shared elements in these traditions to consider them as, fundamentally, universal or not is something that can only be determined on the basis of a rich sample of controversies and theorizations thereof belonging to different traditions. This is what this volume provides to the reader. By presenting side by side controversies from the East and from the West, from the ancient past up to the present, from different domains of scholarship and action, the reader is in a position not only to admire the widespread nature, role, and richness of the phenomenon, but also to begin to evaluate its variety as well as universality. While the editors have purposefully avoided comparative studies of traditions of controversy, in order to focus on each tradition so to speak from its practitioners' point of view, some of the chapters take a bird's eye view and exemplify how such studies can be systematically conducted. In a world that is globalizing itself at a fast pace, the awareness of the multiplicity of traditions of controversy is fundamental for ensuring both that the integration of the various perspectives is harmonious and that each one of them is granted its place in a plural universe.
The notion of controversy space is the key element of the new model of scientific and philosophical change introduced in this book. Devised as an alternative to classical models, the model of Controversy Spaces is a heuristic tool for the reconstruction of processes of conceptual change in the history of science and philosophy. The first chapter of this volume outlines in its initial section the historical trajectory of the dialectical, adversarial approach to the progress of knowledge, from its ancient flourishing and its almost complete oblivion in modernity up to its contemporary revival. Then the main features that characterize the structure and dynamics of controversy spaces are identified and examined. In the rest of the book the reader will find a detailed, fascinating series of case studies that apply the CS model in a variety of scientific areas, ranging from physics to linguistics, as well as the philosophy of mind and the philosophy of historiography.
The idea that a claim for international protection can be rejected on the basis that the claimant behave 'discreetly' in their country of origin has remained resilient in asylum claims based on sexual orientation, but also other grounds of claim. This is significant because requiring an asylum-seeker to forgo the reason for which they are persecuted questions the very rationale of refugee protection. This book represents the first principled examination of concealment in refugee law. Janna Wessels connects the different strands of the long-standing debate in both common and civil law jurisdictions and scholarship concerning the question of whether and under which circumstances a claimant must conceal to avoid persecution. In so doing, Wessels uncovers a fundamental tension at the core of the refugee concept. By using sexuality as a lens, this study breaks new ground regarding sexual orientation claims and wider issues surrounding the refugee definition.
"Hosts of all kinds, this is a must-read!" --Chris Anderson, owner and curator of TED From the host of the New York Times podcast Together Apart, an exciting new approach to how we gather that will transform the ways we spend our time together—at home, at work, in our communities, and beyond. In The Art of Gathering, Priya Parker argues that the gatherings in our lives are lackluster and unproductive--which they don't have to be. We rely too much on routine and the conventions of gatherings when we should focus on distinctiveness and the people involved. At a time when coming together is more important than ever, Parker sets forth a human-centered approach to gathering that will help everyone create meaningful, memorable experiences, large and small, for work and for play. Drawing on her expertise as a facilitator of high-powered gatherings around the world, Parker takes us inside events of all kinds to show what works, what doesn't, and why. She investigates a wide array of gatherings--conferences, meetings, a courtroom, a flash-mob party, an Arab-Israeli summer camp--and explains how simple, specific changes can invigorate any group experience. The result is a book that's both journey and guide, full of exciting ideas with real-world applications. The Art of Gathering will forever alter the way you look at your next meeting, industry conference, dinner party, and backyard barbecue--and how you host and attend them.
Signature of Controversy is a response to the 2009 bestseller Signature in the Cell by Stephen C. Meyer, a book recognized as establishing one of the strongest pillars underlying the argument for intelligent design. To call Signature in the Cell important is an understatement. The critical response that followed the publication of Stephen Meyer's book was fascinating, but the fact is that few—if any—of the critics really grappled with the crux of Meyer's argument or with the substance of intelligent-design theory. This is remarkable and telling. In Signature of Controversy, defenders of intelligent design analyze the hostile response using the critics' own writings. Edited by David Klinghoffer and including essays by David Berlinski, Casey Luskin, Stephen C. Meyer, Paul Nelson, Jay Richards and Richard Sternberg.
For over three millennia, most people could understand the universe only in terms of myth, religion, and philosophy. Between 1920 and 1970, cosmology transformed into a branch of physics. With this remarkably rapid change came a theory that would finally lend empirical support to many long-held beliefs about the origins and development of the entire universe: the theory of the big bang. In this book, Helge Kragh presents the development of scientific cosmology for the first time as a historical event, one that embroiled many famous scientists in a controversy over the very notion of an evolving universe with a beginning in time. In rich detail he examines how the big-bang theory drew inspiration from and eventually triumphed over rival views, mainly the steady-state theory and its concept of a stationary universe of infinite age. In the 1920s, Alexander Friedmann and Georges Lemaître showed that Einstein's general relativity equations possessed solutions for a universe expanding in time. Kragh follows the story from here, showing how the big-bang theory evolved, from Edwin Hubble's observation that most galaxies are receding from us, to the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation. Sir Fred Hoyle proposed instead the steady-state theory, a model of dynamic equilibrium involving the continuous creation of matter throughout the universe. Although today it is generally accepted that the universe started some ten billion years ago in a big bang, many readers may not fully realize that this standard view owed much of its formation to the steady-state theory. By exploring the similarities and tensions between the theories, Kragh provides the reader with indispensable background for understanding much of today's commentary about our universe.