Vol. 39, No. 1, April 2010
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Notes from the Inside
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News
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Member News
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Disturbingly Historical: Reinventing a Museum
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Teaching Tricks
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Program Profile, Georgia Institute of Technology
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Feeding a War: Q & A with Daniel Ragussis
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Honoring Scientists with Stamps
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Searching Smartly in the HistSciTechMed Database
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Jobs, Conferences, Grants
Peder Anker recently published From Bauhaus to Ecohouse: A History of Ecological Design (LSU Press). Anker explores key moments of inspirationbetween designers and ecologists from the Bauhaus projects of the interwar period to the eco-arks of the 1980s, thus illuminating connections between humans and the built environment.
Bert Hansen, Baruch College of CUNY, was honored with the 2010 Ray and Pat Browne Award of the Popular Culture/American Culture Association "for the best single-authored work published in 2009" at its annual meeting in St. Louis for his book, Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio: A History of Mass Media Images and Popular Attitudes in America (Rutgers University Press).
Angelina Long has passed her comprehensive exams with John Krige, Douglas Flamming and Steven Usselman. Her status in the School of History, Technology and Society at Georgia Institute of Technology is ABD.
Alain Touwaide, Historian of Sciences at the Smithsonian Institution and Scientific Director of the Institute for the Preservation of Medical Traditions, delivered a public lecture entitled "Why Does the Medicine of the Past Matter? Ancient Remedies for the 21st Century," at the Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, VA, on Tuesday, 9 March 2010. More information visit: http://medicaltraditions.org/institute/ news/2-general/116-march-2010-events.
John Harley Warner has been named recipient of the 2010 Graduate Mentor Award in the Humanities by the Yale University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. The award is the University’s top honor for teaching, advising, and mentoring.
On 20 February, at the 2010 AAAS annual meeting in San Diego, the George Sarton Memorial Lecture was presented by Jed Z. Buchwald, the Doris and Henry Dreyfuss Professor of History at California Institute of Technology. The title of Professor Buchwald’s talk, given to an audience of around 140, was"Knowledge in the Early Modern Era: The Origins of Experimental Error." Buchwald began by relating the origin of his interest in this topic to a book project currently under way in collaboration with his colleague Mordechai Feingold, on Isaac Newton’s last major published work, an attempt to redate the past using astronomical evidence. Their analysis of the details of that evidence has led to a new understanding of how data was treated before the development of modern statistical methods. Buchwald described examples of early modern methods for handling experimental error from published and unpublished work of not just Newton, but also of such varied figures as Descartes, Hevelius, Flamsteed, and Halley. He argued that instead of striving for averages, medians, or means as the closest approach to truth, the typical early modern natural philosopher tended to take a more artisanal approach, selecting for publication a single measurement that represented what he regarded as the one best performance of the act of measuring. The lecture succeeded in engagingboth scientists and historians, and was greeted by warm approval of the audience.