Public concern about the risk of BSE and its demand for food safety were the primary mover of the BSE controversy and the candlelight demonstration in 2008. There have been relatively few studies, however, addressing the risk perceptions of BSE and the co…

Public concern about the risk of BSE and its demand for food safety were the primary mover of the BSE controversy and the candlelight demonstration in 2008. There have been relatively few studies, however, addressing the risk perceptions of BSE and the consumption behaviors among Korean, while most previous studies focused on the candlelight demonstration. This study thus examines public perceptions of BSE and risk-avoidance behaviors in beef consumptions and, also, the determinants of them. This study shows that public concern about BSE was not an impulse of the moment. The level of concern about BSE remains rather high even 3 years after the controversy in Korea. Also, the perceptions of BSE turn out the most important determinant of risk-aversion behaviors in beef consumptions. Conservative political ideology reduces the level of concern about BSE, which is mediated by the level of trust in government. The higher the household income is, the lower the level of concern about BSE. These findings suggest that the BSE controversy and the candlelight demonstration cannot be understood solely as reflecting life politics and that they might be reflecting traditional political orders more than we have assumed. Finally, this study confirms the conviction that public mistrust of government resulted in the BSE controversy as much as did the concern about the unknown risk. Click the following link for downloading the article: http://kiss.kstudy.com/journal/thesis_name.asp?tname=kiss2002&key=3072190

The back cover of its third edition says that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the 100 most influential books since the Second World War. I wonder what the other 99 were. In remarkably few pages, Kuhn assembled provocative lines of contem…

The back cover of its third edition says that The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is one of the 100 most influential books since the Second World War. I wonder what the other 99 were. In remarkably few pages, Kuhn assembled provocative lines of contemporary thought in history, philosophy and psychology into a coherent, seductive and unforgettable, neo-Hegelian vision of what science is and how it changes. Too seductive, in fact, possibly even for the man himself. I doubt whether anyone, including Kuhn, ever saw a pristine example of a new paradigm arising like a phoenix from the flames of its predecessor’s self-immolation. It might be time to disaggregate Kuhn’s story: I want to open up his theme of ‘different worlds’ without worrying too much about slotting it into a big master narrative of the history of science. Click the following link for downloading the article: http://www.riss.kr/fsearch/DetailView.do?dbId=edselc&an=edselc.2-52.0-84862022170

This study examines public perceptions of climate change and determinants of the perceptions in Korea. Relying on a single question to measure public perceptions of climate change, previous studies reported that Korean showed the highest level of concern …

This study examines public perceptions of climate change and determinants of the perceptions in Korea. Relying on a single question to measure public perceptions of climate change, previous studies reported that Korean showed the highest level of concern about climate change. However, utilizing a more reliable scale, this study reveals that only about 25% of respondents are categorized as proponents of climate change while about 13% as skeptics. The majority of Korean public is in the middle. In general, Korean do not deny the scientific claims on climate change but tend to be optimistic of and prefer modest steps for overcoming the problem. Efforts to seek information decrease the skeptical view of climate change, so proponents tend to actively seek information of climate change compared to the others, including skeptics. Unlike our initial expectation, the level of confidence in science-in general tends to increase the skeptical view. This finding may reflect that the higher level of confidence in science leads people to a belief that climate change can be overcome by advance of science and technology. Conservative political orientation also tends to increase a skeptical view of climate change, because policy efforts for climate change are often perceived as the state regulation over industry and the sacrifice of economy for environment, which are against the conservative political ideology. Click the following link for downloading the article: http://www.dbpia.co.kr/Article/2757199

This paper interprets the 2008 candlelight movements in Korea, caused by the import of American beef, as a trans-boundary movement mobilized by the post-mass. Here "trans-boundary movement" means a collective action that goes beyond the binaries of online…

This paper interprets the 2008 candlelight movements in Korea, caused by the import of American beef, as a trans-boundary movement mobilized by the post-mass. Here "trans-boundary movement" means a collective action that goes beyond the binaries of online/offline, movement/non-movement, protest/festival, and citizen/expert, and that transcends any categorical distinctions among daily life, science and politics. In this paper, I examined the candlelight movement in terms of four aspects: its subject, its repertoire and site, its issue, and its effect. Based upon findings gained from that research, first of all, I conceptualized movement participants as the ``post-mass.`` The reason is that participants in the movement do not conform to contemporary theories of the ``multitude`` and the middle class. The post-mass designates a decentralized and networked group whose members transcend class and gender, age and generation, race and region, and many other types of social grouping and forming solidarities for a certain purpose. Such groups are hybrid and plural, but they lack coherence and teleology. The community they form is emotional as well as rational. Second, the mobilizing structure of the candlelight movement was decentered, and there was no boundary in the space and site that its movement participants deployed their struggle. Its operation relied on both bottom-up and top-down approaches as it combined citizens` voluntary participation and movement organizations` strategic involvement. The candlelight movement also defied such categories of online / offline, old media / new media, and local / national / global. In the demonstrations, diverse strategies were mobilized and the struggle was transformed into a carnival. Third, the movement issues were hybridized, going beyond the distinctions between daily life, science, and politics. In the processes of setting and then disseminating an agenda, citizens, experts, and media were allied. Because the issues were complex and mixed, multiple types of cooperation and coordination took place among diverse scientific, social, legal, and economic areas. Fourth, the movement`s long-term effects were multi-dimensional, leading to political, institutional, organizational, and biological changes. The candlelight protest not only led to political, but also to legal and institutional changes, especially in the area of food safety. At the same time, movement organizations gained momentum that attracted more members and produced more movement activities, and many new movement organizations were founded to pursue concerns initially raised by the candlelight protest. Citizens who participated in the movement were changed into different subjects as they engaged in political and social issues: they empowered themselves, believing that they could change society and their lives. In conclusion, it might be said that the trans-boundary movement by this post-mass contributed to the diversification of social movements in Korea, and thus that it calls for more studies on the post-mass and on trans-boundary movements this case study addressed. Click the following link for downloading the article: http://kiss.kstudy.com/journal/thesis_name.asp?tname=kiss2002&key=3026547

In recent years, biobanks have been identified worldwide as crucial research infrastructures of great significance for medicine and public health. Large-scale biobank projects, such as UK Biobank or BioBank Japan, have received broad public attention. Bio…

In recent years, biobanks have been identified worldwide as crucial research infrastructures of great significance for medicine and public health. Large-scale biobank projects, such as UK Biobank or BioBank Japan, have received broad public attention. Biobanks have also begun linking together internationally with the idea of establishing transnational research collaborations — for example, in the case of the European Biobank and the Biobanking and Biomolecular Resources Research Infrastructure (BBMRI). In the future, an increasing number of biobanks and an expansion of biobanking research facilities can be expected around the globe. Click the following link for downloading the article: http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v12/n11/abs/nrg3083.html

This paper surveys the current state of knowledge about the relationship between different national publics and biobanks, how different publics perceive biobanks, and which issues are identified as important by various stakeholders. We discuss existing st…

This paper surveys the current state of knowledge about the relationship between different national publics and biobanks, how different publics perceive biobanks, and which issues are identified as important by various stakeholders. We discuss existing studies and emerging governance strategies dealing with the biobank–publics interface and argue that the search for phantom (biobank) public(s) is on, but still much needs to be done. We argue that the existing data originate in a relatively few regions, among them Northern Europe, the United Kingdom, and in certain U.S. states and are often based on survey research with small samples and short questionnaires. Combined usage of qualitative and quantitative methodology in studies is still rare though of great importance in order to investigate distributions of public opinion and also to be able to explain these patterns. Many important questions in the relationship between publics and biobanks are unexplored, or the existing data are inconsistent. Click the following link for downloading the article: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00439-011-1065-y

This article explores crossovers from Eastern philosophy and spirituality to contemporary science and medicine in the West. My interest is not so much in specific lines of historical transmission, as in the channels through which they flow. In particular,…

This article explores crossovers from Eastern philosophy and spirituality to contemporary science and medicine in the West. My interest is not so much in specific lines of historical transmission, as in the channels through which they flow. In particular, my argument is that different ontologies – visions of how the world is – either facilitate or block such exchanges. As an example, think about physics. The ontology of mainstream physics is a modern, dualist one, inasmuch as physical thought revolves around a material world from which anything human is absent, and the human leftovers fall to the humanities and social sciences. This ontology, more or less by definition, blocks any resonance with Eastern ideas or practices, and, accordingly, they are almost entirely absent from the history of physics, except, importantly, in lines of work on the foundations of physics, especially quantum mechanics. If one meditates on the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, for instance, boundaries between the observer and the observed start to unravel, the dualist ontology erodes, and there, indeed, one finds all sorts of resonances with the East, as elaborated in an endless list of books that includes, for example, The Tao of Physics and The Dancing Wu Li Masters. That is my basic idea: resonances with the East spring forth in Western science whenever modern dualism starts to fray around the edges. But this essay is not about physics, and I turn now to the post-war history of cybernetics in Britain and its rather different non-modern ontology. Click the following link for downloading the article: http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPage=online&aid=8516736&fileId=S002572730000538X

Despite it involves illegal behavior, Climategate that hackers accessed and released private emails of climate scientists working at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) offers an opportunity to review questions raised b…

Despite it involves illegal behavior, Climategate that hackers accessed and released private emails of climate scientists working at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia (UEA) offers an opportunity to review questions raised by skeptics of climate change. This article examines the processes and issues of the incident, critically reviews major conflicting issues of climate science and behaviors of climate scientists, and discusses the implications of it for environmental science and environmental sociology. Above all, a lesson of Climategate is that climate scientists need to behave with absolute transparency to overcome skeptics’ attacks even if climate science involves uncertainties, which has been endorsed by the mass media and the investigation reports. The case of EPA’s research on carcinogen in the 1970s and Lavets’ concept of post-normal science suggest, however, that transparency alone will not be enough. They suggest that climate science needs to get confirmed by the independent institution and also make skeptics extended peer community with whom they communicate and collaborate for constructing more valid knowledge. Click the following link for downloading the article: http://www.dbpia.co.kr/Article/1494661

The BSE controversy in 2008 demonstrated that Korean mass media constructed news stories reflecting their own political positions even when they reported on scientific knowledge, which has been known as the most objective knowledge. While news reports cit…

The BSE controversy in 2008 demonstrated that Korean mass media constructed news stories reflecting their own political positions even when they reported on scientific knowledge, which has been known as the most objective knowledge. While news reports cited experts to deliver objective knowledge with authority, Korean media generated news from a specific position in the controversy by determining who they would use as information sources. That is, in the BSE reports, experts were used as supporters of a specific position in the controversy rather than as neutral information sources. At the same time, while scientific knowledge on BSE as an example of post-normal science has suffered from many uncertainties, experts also tended to express a specific position in the controversy as objective and indisputable knowledge rather than acknowledging uncertainties. That is, experts tended to speak for one side of the controversy as objective knowledge, while the media tended to cite selectively experts in a specific position. As the result, the media and experts failed to think over the uncertainties and limits of scientific knowledge reflexively and lead social discussion for consensus based upon them. Click the following link for downloading the article: http://kiss.kstudy.com/journal/thesis_name.asp?tname=kiss2002&key=2933674