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We have collaborations per email, hold telephone seminars, organize virtual networks, write blogs, and make our seminars available on the internet.

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Without any doubt, these technological developments influence the way science is done, and they also redefine our relation to the society we live in.

About

Times are changing. In the earlier days, we used to go to the library, today we search and archive our papers online.

Topics

Web/Web 2.0. Communication, Social and Information Networks, Wikis, Blogs, Information Overflow, and the Illusion of…

Program

All talks will be held in the Bob Room on the fourth floor; the discussions…

Abstracts

Abstracts (in alphabetic order) Download as PDF Börner, Katy 21st Century Science Maps Abstract: Cartographic maps…

Science in Everyday Life and Its Importance

August 4, 2021

You can see the use of science in each and every aspect of our life. Science is an essential element in daily life. We can’t escape from the importance of science and its uses in our daily life. Basic knowledge of science is mandatory for everyone as it makes life easier and open our mind in many ways. As science is completely based on facts and experiments so, it doesn’t change with time, basics always remain same. You can get explanation of everything through science from magic performed by magician to vehicles running by using hydrogen gas. Every new technology relied on science. Science and technology complement each other. Science deals with natural phenomenon on the basis of facts and gives rise to new technology which makes our life easier. Science always promotes curiosity and asking questions. Once Einstein said – Importance of Science in Our Daily Life Science is very essential in our daily life. We use science in day to day life. We wake up and use paste and brush which both are given by science. We use science in cooking, eating, clothing etc. Baking involves basic knowledge of science and baking machines such as oven, microwave are endowments of science. Can you imagine your life without electricity? If no, then u must know that electricity is also given by science. Examples of use of science in everyday life are as follows – We use cars, bike or bicycles to go from one place to another, these all are inventions of science. We use soaps, these are also given by science. We use LPG gas, stove etc. for cooking, these all given by science. Even the house in which we live is a product of science. The iron which we use to iron our cloths is an invention of science even the cloths we wear are given by science. Uses of Science in Different Fields Uses of science in different fields are as follows – In agriculture – In the field of agriculture, science has made its mark by contributing so much. In present days machines are available even for sowing the seeds on fields. Tractor, thresher, drip irrigation system, sprinkler irrigation system etc. all are given by science. All fertilizers are also given by chemical science. In medicine – The medical field is based entirely on usage of science. All the drugs are given by medicinal chemistry. Tools used in the medical field are also given by science. Machines such as stretchers, ECG machine, MRI machines even injections are invented by science. In transportation – All the vehicles are invention of science. Science has made the world a small place. You can reach from Kashmir to Kanyakumari in just few hours. Cycle, scooter, cars, aircrafts etc. all are inventions of science. We can transport goods easily and faster by the use of machines given by science. In communication – Science has made the world very small. You can talk to anyone anywhere in fraction of seconds. Telephones, mobile phones etc. all are the inventions of science. All these medium of communications are available at very low cost as well. So, all are in the reach of common man. Science has made is very easy and cheap to talk to someone using a mobile phone. In construction – Science is the base of all buildings constructed by us. Construction of buildings is completed based on the technology given by science. Machines used in the construction work such as motor graders, buildozers, backhoe loaders etc. given by science. In photography – Science has given many machines for photography. Now a days it’s very easy to click a picture. Camera has been inserted even in your small mobiles phones. Apart from these, science has given many machines which are useful in each and every aspect of our life such as computers. Thus, science has vast use in all fields of human life. It is of great importance to make our life easier it gives answer of all curiosities of us related to life. It gives wings to our imagination by its facts and theories. Contact us for more information.

The Look and Feel of 21st Century Science

August 2, 2021

In this time of disruptive change, we need to rethink the basic structures of knowledge. Humanity is going through unprecedented global change. The systems that arose to organize societies in the last 400 years are breaking down — and now is the time to envision what will come next. I recall a talk that inspired me several years ago by the eclectic scholar, Dougald Hine where he explained that knowledge systems change in a nested manner. Some things (like the way we get news on a daily basis) can evolve quickly as new technologies alter media institutions on timescales of a few years or decades. Other things move more slowly. An example he gave for these historic sloths was the organization of academic disciplines at universities — some of which have been very slow to change in a hundred years (think about the presumed boundary between “hard” and “soft” science that is so resistant to leaving). Yet the slowest of all is in the archival institutions that we call libraries. It is to changes in these modes of information storage for long periods of time that we must look when paradigmatic change is upon us. Such a change is now upon us right now. The oldest libraries were storehouses of pottery. Data was painted onto clay pots to record important information about crop yields that go back thousands of years in places like Mesopotamia and ancient China. Later it was scrolling like those famously burned in the Great Library of Alexandria. More recently it has been bounded paper volumes that we call books, as the printing press gave rise to literate societies in the last few hundred years. Now we are fully in the digital age when it comes to information systems. And digital data is profoundly networked and ephemeral in ways that were simply not possible before. We can update the linkages and information content with ease that makes book printing look cumbersome by comparison. So it has become paradigmatic that libraries are “going digital” and building up a network ecology framework for organizing the knowledge of societies. What does this have to do with the look and feel of 21st Century science? In a word, everything. For humanity is now on the cusp of a planetary-scale crisis. According to earth system scientists at the Stockholm Resilience Institute, the Earth has now passed at least four of nine “planetary boundaries” that define a safe operating range for global civilization. We are fully in overshoot-and-collapse — living through an Easter Island type of instability on a planetary scale. At the same time, our social systems are in deep turmoil due to massive wealth inequality and the various forms of institutional decline that come with collapsing trust in an unequal world. This is apparent in the rise of authoritarian leaders in many countries in concert with a rapid drop of trust in authoritative expertise. Science is in crisis alongside the political and economic systems of the world that are in turmoil today. So we must envision a look and feel for science in the future that is networked, agile, and ever-evolving, relevant to the pressing issues of the day, and deeply, DEEPLY ecologically human. This last point bears elaboration. And a brief side comments about the fundamental importance of metaphors for organizing knowledge in societies. The guiding metaphor for the Modern Era was the “clockwork universe” of Enlightenment thinkers like René Descartes. I wrote more about this in an earlier essay, The Great Lie of Living on a Dead Planet. When we separate mind from body; humans from nature; and societies from their environments; we are doing so by presuming the Universe to be a giant mechanical device with no morality or soul inside. This metaphor gave rise to the mechanistic sciences of physics and chemistry in the 16th through 19th Centuries. Many of the systemic problems we face today — from climate change to political corruption — are traceable back to this illusion of separation between machines and living things. And so it should come as no surprise that the 20th Century was a period of ascendence for systems thinking in fields like ecology, computer science, quantum mechanics, and the study of social networks. Herein we can see the early shape of the new paradigm for 21st Century science. The guiding metaphor here is ecological networks. Living systems that function through their interdependence, networked relationships among functional parts, and dynamism of emergence that is not reducible. The science of the last few hundred years may necessarily have been reductionistic (breaking complexity down into manageably simple parts in order to make sense of it) but the science that is emerging will equally strongly require holism in order to make sense of the interwoven patterns that arise as global systemic behaviors. Let me demonstrate the difference with a concrete example from my work as the coordinator for birthing a new scientific society for the study of cultural evolution. I have worked with a team of researchers to map out the knowledge ecology of this field. We did this because a survey of our founding membership revealed a strong desire for knowledge synthesis across the divided silos of university departments. A beautiful map for the knowledge ecology of Cultural Evolution Society members. Research in psychology was not adequately being informed by (or informing) that which was taking place in anthropology or sociology. Historians were not in sufficient dialogue with archeologists or population ecologists. A political scientist hadn’t played well with economists. Biologists weren’t working closely with humanities scholars. What’s worse, researchers in each of these siloed fields have scarcely been in dialogue with each other either. According to one illustrative study, 90% of all peer-review journal articles have never been read! In another essay, I called this The Predicament of Knowledge and it is now chronic as humanity is clearly failing to apply all of this compartmentalized knowledge to the crises of living in a 21st Century world. The argument I made there was that we collectively have all the knowledge we need to solve every major social problem in the world. Yet we lack the capacity to synthesize and apply all this knowledge in real-time. This is where the Cultural Evolution Society comes into play. The mechanistic divisions of Modern-Era science have led to treating science as an industrial manufacturing process devoid of human sentiment or morality (think of all the animal testing done in cages throughout the last 400 years). What is needed to replace it is a living intelligence process guided by evolution for sense-making and collective learning. This requires a 21st Century understanding of (a) what it means to be a living thing, and more specifically (b) what it means to be human. Sciences of the future will need to be integrative and holistic, emergent and evolutionary, and profoundly informed by knowledge of their interdependencies. No more “Cartesian” separations. No more dividing knowledge into silos. No more treating humans as an industrial input into corporate machines. Instead, we need to apply the ecological principles of regeneration, resilience and thriving. Scientists of the future will work together as networks — an evolutionary step beyond the ad hoc interdisciplinary teams of the late 20th Century. Tools for synthesis will include group facilitation, scientific visualization, computer modeling and simulation, and iterative design practices. We will need to actively co-create in pluralistic communities where those trained in specific domains of knowledge are partnered with transdisciplinary scholars who specialize in facilitating knowledge synthesis. These are the new and improved generalists of a bygone era. They are fully human as networked ecosystems of people learning together using tools, theoretical frameworks, and social practices that are incentivized for collective intelligence. Critical for this science to emerge will be that it avoids its greatest current threat — a 21st Century version of the burning of Alexandria’s great library. We need our science to survive the potential collapse of global civilization in the next 50 years. Let this sink in. It is a very serious issue that is hardly on anyone’s radar at the moment. Yes, there is a crisis in peer-review publishing. Yes, there is a crisis in public understanding of science for policymaking. Yes, there is a crisis of impending ecological collapse of the biosphere. Yes, there is a crisis of anti-science demagogues replacing rigorous methods with ideology. Yet at the deep systemic level, there is a greater crisis of unraveling paradigms for knowledge systems as humanity goes through its next great transition as a species. It is here that the new sciences must emerge. It must not be based on a separation of theory and practice — for it will be the practices of working with, studying, and guiding the evolution of complex social systems that will enable the sciences to advance. And also what enables the social systems themselves to maintain the efficacy to continue their existence. These things are inseparable in reality and must be dealt with accordingly. Applying this back to the observation that started this essay, we must envision libraries of the future as networked living systems of interconnected human beings. The “digital divide” between those with access to the internet and those without is only one use for this phrase. Another is the deeper semantic separation presumed by disembodied rationality — that there is no digital without physical and all human knowledge is worthless if it fails to be embodied by human societies as social norms, behaviors, narratives, and institutional practices. The digital libraries of the future will be cyborgs… interwoven human-machine meshworks for active learning. The singularity is us as human beings. The look and feel of 21st Century science will be human through and through. There will be holism and integration; emotion and reason recombined in resonance with findings from the cognitive and behavioral sciences. And it will be ecological; embedded in human networks which are themselves embedded within physical and social geographies. Let us rapidly transform the look and feel of science to reflect its best face. Let it be systemic and integrative. Let it be moral and political. And let it be relevant and responsive to the crises we all face together on a daily basis in the real world. Onward, fellow humans.

25 Essential 21st Century Leadership Skills

July 20, 2021

There’s much that’s new and different about leadership, management, and communication in the digital age. There’s also significant continuity with earlier times. One might say: the principles endure, the applications change. What’s old and what’s new are both seen in the following list of 21st century leadership skills (one might as well have said 21st-century leadership traits, but the term skills better convey that leadership comprises capacities that can be learned, refined, cultivated, improved… and constantly updated to serve more effectively). The list that follows attempts to capture enduring leadership lessons within the unique, fast-moving circumstances of the early 21st century. Please share your views and share with others. Like everything today, it’s a work in progress, made better by collaborative input. 25 Essential 21st Century Leadership Skills 1. Leaders Serve. In the Information Age, everyone everywhere is potentially in a relationship with you (whether you choose it or not). A service mentality is not just an ethical plus—it’s required. 2. Cultivate Courage. Courage and sacrifice remain the foundation of leadership, service. The higher levels of service—and sacrifice—are the binding elements of effective leadership in all times and places. 3. Think in Terms of Relationships. Gaining advantage in isolated transactions cannot be the basis of a sustainable business model. Now every business is a relationship business. 4. Create Value. Value is not based on how long or hard you work, or on your commendable motivations, or what you think you deserve. It’s based solely on your customers’ judgment. Today, those you serve are empowered to seek out, compare, and measure value as never before. 5. Advance Your Customers’ Values to Create Value. In a time of customer empowerment and relentless commoditization, advancing the values of your customers can be a potent differentiator. Focusing on values is not a distraction from the hard facts of business. Today, values can create value. 6. Vision Remains the Foundation of Leadership. From the Bible to this very day, casting a vision remains an indispensable element of leadership. 7. Make Management a Vital Part of Your Leadership. Management is part of leadership. Effective leaders are effective managers. Effective managers are effective leaders. 8. Aim to be Best in the World. That’s right: in the world. Mediocrity is lethal. Best in the world is the only sustainable business model. In our digital age, people can seek out the best value from anywhere in the world. Resting on laurels, or settling for second-best has never been so hazardous. 9. Listen and Observe with the Intensity of an Artist. Listening is the master skill in a relationship-based world. An ideal is to learn to listen and observe with the focus of an actor, a writer, a painter. Merely hearing is as far from listening, as conversing at a coffee table is from presenting a speech to thousands. 10. Ask Questions. Refrain from Answers. The open ends of question marks invite engagement. The closed ends of periods are the equivalent of the body language of defensively crossed arms. Declarations fit naturally into transactions. Questions are the building blocks of relationships. 11. Master the Arts and Science of Influence. Internal and external stakeholders have greater leverage than ever before. The age of the boss is over. “The power to persuade” is now as necessary a skillset for corporate CEOs as politicians. 12. Recognize that Communication is Part of Everything You Do. Communication skills cannot be delegated or outsourced. You are your message. From new media to traditional meetings, effective 21st century leaders must master an ever-evolving range of communications expectations. 13. Collaborate to Create Value. The smartest person in the room is always the room. Think, listen, speak, and act accordingly. 14. Create a Stimulating Ecosystem. Have a personal board of advisors. Search out mentors. Comb history for “spiritual ancestors.” Connect with people of accomplishment through social media. Beware flooding your consciousness with a torrent of vacuous, popular culture effluvia. 15. Learn from Other Generations. What are you learning from various generations? Every generation now has a voice. Will you listen and learn? 16. Learn from Other Cultures. A world of customers and competitors and prospects and resources is just a mouse click away. Communicate and collaborate where they are–not where you are. 17. Learn from Public Failures and Mistakes. You’re less likely to have your falls hidden behind the walls of large institutions. Are you able to get off the mat, get back into the ring? Many of your missteps or misfortunes will be captured for eternity in all their digital glory. Get over it. 18. Cultivate an Experimenter’s Mindset. Innovation includes false leads and failures. Today’s failure may be the basis of tomorrow’s breakthrough. 19. Break Boundaries, Silos Wherever They Appear. Don’t let others’ limitations of imagination or experience or customs or organizational culture limit your capacity to serve. 20. Demand Optimism. Optimism—or negativity—can spread from a leader through her ranks faster than ever. Whether to be publicly optimistic is a leadership decision, not simply a matter of a one’s individual temperament or druthers. 21. Engender Enthusiasm. The universal spirit that flows through enthusiasm remains compelling. The very word is derived from the root, “the spirit of God in man.” Yet another breadcrumb reminder that leadership is, ultimately, a spiritual practice. 22. Be Relentlessly Adaptable. The value of your service is determined by your capacity to evolve in the rapidly unfolding circumstances of the early 21st century. Nonetheless, don’t flatter yourself that your challenges of change are the greatest in history. Thus far, they’re not comparable to those of the generations born at the dawn of the 20th century, for example. 23. Safeguard Your Physical, Mental, and Spiritual health. Your health constitutes the foundation of all your service. Not to maintain your physical health—especially as one becomes older—is to succumb to self-indulgence. Seen in this way, safeguarding your health is a moral duty of the highest order. 24. Think Like an Artist. Leadership is an art. Make every aspect of your experience a part of your evolution. 25. Achieve Integrity. The sum of your parts can be united into a whole that only you can create. Therein lies your calling. Contact us for more information.

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