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A Sourcebook for the Worldwide Discovery of a Creative Organic Universe
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II. Pedia Sapiens: A Planetary Progeny Comes to Her/His Own Actual Factual Knowledge

B. The Spiral of Science: Manican to American to Earthicana Phases

Borner, Katy and Andrea Scharnhorst. Visual Conceptualizations and Models of Science. Journal of Informetrics. 3/3, 2009. Indiana University and VKS Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences information theorists introduce a special issue on the “Science of Science” for its 21st century phase of global cumulative collaboration. Typical papers are Spatial Scientometrics, and Untangling the Web of e-Research. Yet, similar to the 2012 volume Models of Science Dynamics herein, edited by these authors, the project becomes immersed in abstract schemata with little inquiry or wonder about what hath humankind wrought.

Bowler, Peter and Iwan Morus. Making Modern Science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. An introductory text for the historic pathways and achievements of scientific inquiry. Two main parts cover the revolution itself and its domains from cosmology to human beings, while noting relevant themes such as gender, religion and ideology.

Brush, Stephen. The History of Modern Science. Ames: Iowa State University Press, 1988. A comprehensive sourcebook and bibliographic essay. The reign of a “clockwork universe” of insensate objects devoid of spirit is well documented.

Bryson, Bill, ed. Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery and the Genius of the Royal Society. New York: Morrow, 2010. Leading scientists and writers chronicle and exclaim the 350 year course of this “Fellowship of the world's most eminent scientists and is the oldest scientific academy in continuous existence.” The first woman was admitted in 1945. Its history provides a good capsule from Isaac Newton to the ends of the earth, matter and multiverse. For a sample, James Gleick sets the outset scene, Margaret Wertheim notes an early parting of religion and cosmology, Henry Petroski lauds engineering technology, Ian Stewart revels in mathematical insights, while Georgina Ferry tells about x-ray crystallography. Add Paul Davies, Richard Dawkins, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Schneider, Maggie Gee, John Barrow, and a view ahead by Martin Rees, and others, for a grand ride on the spiral of science. But as usual sans any imagination of a greater reality and creation, the metaphysical quest that inspired Newton, indeed the very thought seems so remote today.

Buettel, Jessie, et al. Astro-Ecology? Shifting the Interdisciplinary Collaboration Paradigm. Ecology and Evolution. 8/19, 2018. An editorial by University of Tasmania biologists which cites a 1994 article by Paul Keddy (Applications of the Hertzsprung-Russell Star Chart to Ecology) in Trends in Ecology and Evolution (9/6, 1994) which then refers to Robert MacArthur’s 1972 work Geographical Ecology that scientific studies whether about bioregion ecosystems or celestial environs should be pay attention to common patterns amongst their separate pieces. Some decades later, as this website seeks to document, a revival of this broad vista is evoked by comparing how trees fall in a forest to topological arrays of sunny stars.

Robert MacArthur's Geographical Ecology turned 21 last year. As it enters adulthood, we may ask whether or not it is still influencing contemporary approaches to ecology. The opening sentence, “To do science is to search for repeated patterns, not simply to accumulate facts...”, sets a theme for the entire book. As ecologists, we are faced with the problem of finding patterns when there is a large number of species, an even larger number of possible pairwise interactions, and when these are dispersed across a bewildering array of habitat types. How do we look for general patterns in nature? The Hertzsprung-Russell star diagram provides an inspiring example for meeting MacArthur's challenge. (Abstract)

Burns,, Randal, et al. From Cosmos to Connectomes: The Evolution of Data-Intensive Science. Neuron. 83/6, 2014. A robust neuroinformatics community, with journals and international conferences, search Google, is underway in this field. Johns Hopkins University neuroscientists here draw upon data analysis methods in astronomy, aka astroinformatics, to further bolster these efforts. Our interest is to note their disparate, far flung affinity as a common project to discern and sequence universe and human. Might one propose an overall cosmoinformatics?

The analysis of data requires computation: originally by hand and more recently by computers. Different models of computing are designed and optimized for different kinds of data. In data-intensive science, the scale and complexity of data exceeds the comfort zone of local data stores on scientific workstations. Thus, cloud computing emerges as the preeminent model, utilizing data centers and high-performance clusters, enabling remote users to access and query subsets of the data efficiently. We examine how data-intensive computational systems originally built for cosmology, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS), are now being used in connectomics, at the Open Connectome Project. We list lessons learned and outline the top challenges we expect to face. Success in computational connectomics would drastically reduce the time between idea and discovery, as SDSS did in cosmology. (Abstract)

Callebaut, Werner. Scientific Persepctivism. Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences. Online January, 2012. The University of Vienna and Konrad Lorenz Institute philosopher worries that the rush to “big data biology” as digital machines take over will cause life to become an engineering subject. He decries the absence of any natural philosophy, which used to lead, such as Carl Woese’s 2004 call for a “guiding vision.” (search) But the paper seems to get caught in the very internal jargon that impedes such a traditional project. There is no perception of an historic, major evolutionary transition to such a worldwide collaborative noosphere as they may commence to learn on their own.

Calude, Cristian and Giuseppe Longo. The Deluge of Spurious Correlations in Big Data. Foundations of Science. Online March, 2016. Senior philosophers of science explain how this much touted new method and paradigm based on analyses of massive amounts of computational bits is misplaced and erroneous. Rather than revealing hidden patterns, the more data that is being processed, the more spurious and fragmentary any such correlations will become.

Cao, Longbing. Data Science: A Comprehensive Overview. ACM Computing Surveys. 50/3, 2017. The University of Technology Sydney computer and intelligence scientist is also editor of International Journal of Data Science and Analytics (Springer, see below). While a bit breezy, it is can be a working entry with regard to how the profusion of giga bytes from astronomy to social media and commerce, if properly perceived and treated, can be of much beneficial service.

The 21st century has ushered in the age of big data and data economy, in which data DNA, which carries important knowledge, insights, and potential, has become an intrinsic constituent of all data-based organisms. An appropriate understanding of data DNA and its organisms relies on the new field of data science and its keystone, analytics. This article provides a comprehensive survey and tutorial of the fundamental aspects of data science: the evolution from data analysis to data science, the data science concepts, a big picture of the era of data science, the major challenges and directions in data innovation, the nature of data analytics, new industrialization and service opportunities in the data economy, the profession and competency of data education, and the future of data science. (Abstract)

Data-driven scientific discovery is a key emerging paradigm driving research innovation and industrial development in domains such as business, social science, the Internet of Things, and cloud computing. The field encompasses the larger areas of data analytics, machine learning, and managing big data, while related new scientific chal¬lenges range from data capture, creation, storage, search, sharing, analysis, and visualization, to integration across heterogeneous, interdependent complex resources for real-time decision-making, collaboration, and value creation. (International Journal of Data Science and Analytics)

Capra, Fritjof. The Science of Leanardo. New York: Doubleday, 2007. The Austrian-American physicist and environmentalist has spent the last three decades since the publication of his classic The Tao of Physics advocating a revolution in our thinking about cosmos and earth from mechanistic to organically systemic and dynamic in nature. Long a student of Da Vinci’s vision, Capra here insightfully recounts his life and work by which to situate him, a century (1452 – 1519) before Galileo, as a prime precursor of this later Romantic school. For the universe is not a material machine, but a viable organism of recurrent, analogous macrocosm and microcosm. Rather than particulate matter in random motion, one ought to observe via a holistic science the presence of common ecological patterns that grace a living bioplanet.

Carroll, Joseph, et al, eds. Darwin’s Bridge: Uniting the Humanities and Sciences. New York: Oxford University Press, 2016. The chapters of this unique collection began as a 2012 conference Consilience: Evolution in Biology, the Human Sciences, and the Humanities at the University of Missouri. It drew from Edward O. Wilson’s 1998 work Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge both for its utility into the 21st century, and how such a synthesis might help join these two cultural domains. An authoritative array spoke from their expertise on primate, hominid, psychological, and social aspects. An especial theme was how evolutionary influences might show up in literary works. Christopher Boehm, Herbert Gintis, Ellen Dissanyake, Dan McAdams, Catherine Salmon, and Jonathan Gottschal, are among the contributors.

A final chapter by Massimo Pigliucci, however, found Wilson’s method of reduction to chemistry and physics inadequate and inappropriate. He went on to note that current denunciations of philosophy by Steven Weinberg, Stephen Hawking, and others are a further impediment to any valid natural unification, as obviously must be there. A Foreword by the medical historian, social activist and author Alice Dreger offers a similar qualm that science seems concerned only with what exists or happened, while questions about why they are so remain unanswered.

Casadevall, Arturo and Ferric Fang. Revolutionary Science. mBio. 7/2, 2016. In this American Society for Microbiology journal, a Johns Hopkins immunologist and a University of Washington microbiologist post their latest exploratory essay about the many facets of this most human endeavor. Its references will guide to prior essays from 2007 on descriptive, mechanistic, important, competitive, historical, and field aspects.

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