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Trust is a key concept in science studies (cf. Ted Porter’s excellent book Trust in Numbers, 1995, just to take one example). Now the Canadian Society for the History and Philosophy of Science are organising a workshop on “Trust in Science” to take place at Toronto’s CBC Conference Centre 15-16 October. What’s interesting with this meeting is […]

Today’s big news in the Copenhagen health and life science community is the £55 mill. (600 mill. DKK) grant from the Novo Nordisk Foundation to create a brand new center for protein research (proteomics, bioinformatics etc.) at the university’s Faculty of Health Sciences. The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Protein Research, as it will be called, is planned to […]

In the last issue of Nordisk Museologi (Journal of Nordic Museums and Museology), Kristian Hvidtfeldt Nielsen from the Steno Institute in Aarhus argues that science museums today are caught in a paradox. On the one hand museums wish to establish two-way interactions with the public about science and its relations with culture and society in a mode-2 fashion, á la […]

I think the three-day symposium on presence and meaning cultures in museums held at the Medical Museion last week worked quite well. Jens Hauser‘s seminar has already been reported here. Sepp Gumbrecht’s Wednesday guest lecture “Do Productions of Presence Yield a Presence Culture? A Retrospective” was attended by about 75 scholars and students who were treated with a 1hr45min impassioned tour-de-force […]

As contemporary biomedicine — the use of molecular and digital biological and medical technologies — is coming of age, its pioneer practitioners are passing away. As a consequence ‘life writing’ (biography) becomes increasingly important as a genre for understanding its development and workings.

Traditional Danish university freedom was severely restricted by a new university law introduced by the present conservative-liberal (in the European sense) government in 2003. A group of Copenhagen university professors are now opening up for blog discussions about the law and its consequences. The new blog was initiated last autumn by Curt Hansen, an associate professor in education, under the (slightly ironical?) […]

As you can see (and like last year), we’ve had a few days of (well-deserved) Easter break. By the way, when googling “easter break”, the highest ranked page coming up is the post “Easter Break” from the Information aesthetics: form follows data – data visualization & visual communication”-blog — which is one of the best newsblogs on visual […]

When thinking about collecting contemporary medical objects we are constantly haunted by the question ‘Why?’. Why collect? What is collecting about? What’s its cultural significance? There are shelves of books that try to answer these and similar questions. The last in the row is Paul van der Grijp’s (Professor of Anthropology at the University of Science and […]

The Department of Comparative Literature at Cornell University is organising a potentially interesting meeting about “Logics of the living”, 12-14 October, 2007. The purpose of the meeting is to address the phenomenon of an emerging ‘life paradigm’ which is gradually replacing the ‘linguistic turn’ that informed theoretical inquiry in the humanities in the last decades of the 20th century. As the organisers say, “crucial questions of literature, philosophy and politics […]

I’m afraid I have a secret crush on decay — not only decay of physical things, like MR scanners (see this earlier post on “Objects of decay”), but also decaying living things. Like most others I register bio-decay by the visual and olfactory senses. I still vividly remember the movie A Zed & Two Nougths (1985) in which Peter Greenaway […]

The Poynter Institute has just published the initial findings of a recent study of news reading behaviour using EyeTrack technology. The most interesting result was that readers are significantly more attentive and read more text when reading online than when reading newspapers. And once online readers had began to read a piece of text they stayed on until […]

The Deutsches Museum in Munich is organising a workshop “Die Sichtbarmachung des Unsichtbaren: Mikroskopische Verfahren in der Laborpraxis”, 18-19 Oktober 2007, as part of the programme “Knowledge Production at the Nanoscale. Images, Visions and Instruments in the Practice of Nanotechnology“. Here is their call for papers: