Science and Society Series off the Press

The CAS has published the 2002 Science & Society series. The series, which consists of reports on scientific development, high-tech development and sustainable development, aims to introduce the world's scientific and technological (S&T) progress and developmental trends in 2001, review the changes in the frontiers of science and technology, pinpoint the main problems in research and development (R&D), and recount S&T development in China. Through the series, it is hoped that China's decades-long efforts at capacity building of sustainability will be made clear to the world, including theoretical exploration, contents, identification,dynamic monitoring, parametric system and quantitative analysis.……

CAS Series on Science and Society Released

The Chinese Academy of Sciences(CAS) presented the2001 edition of its regular re-ports on science and society recently. The annual work, includingseparate reports on science, hi-tech,and sustainable development pre-pared by CAS and other elite schol-ars in China, "focuses on the overalldevelopment of science

Fluidization science,its development and future

By revisiting the three stage theory for the progress of science proposed by Taketani in 1942, the footmarks of fluidization research are examined. The bubbling and fast fluidization issues were emphasized so that the future offluidization research can be discussed among scientists and engineers in a wider perspective. The first cycle of fluidization research was started in the early 1940s by an initial stage of phenomenology. The second stage of structural studies was kicked off in the early 1950s with the introduction of the two phase theory. The third stage of essential studies occurred in the early 1960s in the form of bubble hydrodynamics. The second cycle, which confirmed the aforementioned three stages closed at the turn of the century, established a general understanding of suspension structures including agglomerating fluidization, bubbling, turbulent and fast fluidizations and pneumatic transport; also established powerful measurement and numerical simulation tools.After a general remark on science, technology and society issues the interactions between fluidization technology and science are revisited. Our future directions are discussed including the tasks in the third cycle, particularly in its phenomenology stage where strong motivation and intention are always necessary, in relation also to the green reforming of the present technology. A generalized definition of ＇fluidization＇ is proposed to extend fluidization principle into much wider scientific fields, which would be effective also for wider collaborations.

Misalignment Between Skills Discovered, Disseminated, and Deployed in the Knowledge Economy

The knowledge economy is a complex and dynamical system,where knowledge and skills are discovered through research,diffused via education,and deployed by industry.Dynamically aligning the supply of new knowledge with the demand for practical skills through education is critical for developing national innovation systems that maximize human flourishing.In this paper,we evaluate the complex alignment of skills across the knowledge economy by creating an integrated semantic model that neurally encodes invented,instructed,and instituted skills across three major datasets:research abstracts from the Web of Science,teaching syllabi from the Open Syllabus Project,and job advertisements from Burning Glass.Analyzing the high dimensional knowledge and skills space inscribed by these data,we draw critical insight about systemic misalignment between the diversity of skills supplied and demanded in the knowledge economy.Consistent with insights from economic geography,demand for skills from industry exhibits high entropy(diversity)at local,regional,and national levels,demonstrating dense complementarities between them at all levels of the economy.Consistent with the economics and sociology of innovation,we find low entropy in the invention of new knowledge and skills through research,as specialist researchers cluster within universities.We provide new evidence,however,for the low entropy of skills taught at local,regional,and national levels,illustrating a massive mismatch between diversity in skills supplied versus demanded.This misalignment is sustained by the spatial and institutional mismatch in the organization of education by researchers at the site of skill invention over use.Our findings suggestively trace the societal costs of tethering education to researchers with narrow knowledge rather than students with broad skill needs.

The Contestation of Tech Ethics: A Sociotechnical Approach to Technology Ethics in Practice

This article introduces the special issue“Technology Ethics in Action:Critical and Interdisciplinary Perspectives”.In response to recent controversies about the harms of digital technology,discourses and practices of“tech ethics”have proliferated across the tech industry,academia,civil society,and government.Yet despite the seeming promise of ethics,tech ethics in practice suffers from several significant limitations:tech ethics is vague and toothless,has a myopic focus on individual engineers and technology design,and is subsumed into corporate logics and incentives.These limitations suggest that tech ethics enables corporate“ethics-washing”:embracing the language of ethics to defuse criticism and resist government regulation,without committing to ethical behavior.Given these dynamics,I describe tech ethics as a terrain of contestation where the central debate is not whether ethics is desirable,but what“ethics”entails and who gets to define it.Current approaches to tech ethics are poised to enable technologists and technology companies to label themselves as“ethical”without substantively altering their practices.Thus,those striving for structural improvements in digital technologies must be mindful of the gap between ethics as a mode of normative inquiry and ethics as a practical endeavor.In order to better evaluate the opportunities and limits of tech ethics,I propose a sociotechnical approach that analyzes tech ethics in light of who defines it and what impacts it generates in practice.