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The ecological risk sociology developed by Ulrich and Elizabeth Beck share with process sociology common commitments to understanding the means of orientation. There has been little engagement between process sociology and the risk scholarship of the Becks. This is attributable to their perceived use of reductive concepts such as modernity/modernisation associated with the work of Anthony Giddens. In response, this chapter engages with processual critiques of the Becks and clarifies their particular strand of risk sociology. Both process and the risk sociology of the Becks confront the uncertainties of human relations via mutual concerns with the growth of knowledge processes, interdependence and power relations. The chapter concludes by demonstrating the opportunities for further engagement between process and risk scholarship. This through understanding how globalised double binds in the form of overlapping ecological, economic, violence, health and migration struggles continue to pressurise contemporary societies.

Karl Popper is one of the few philosophers of science who is well-known to scientists and respected by them. Apart from the direct influence of his views on science it is his methodology that most appeals to scientists. He earned the highest accolades for his emphasis on criticism as the essence of progress in science. His methodological principle of criticism is the core of a dynamic epistemology, requiring an adventurous spirit and expressing the high-risk nature of the cognitive process. Via the falsification of proposed hypotheses, the positive role of erring is exploited to further the discovery of new problems, leading to the growth of knowledge. Despite various criticisms of his imperative of falsification I claim that Popper proposes an original model of rationality rid of all justificationist ingredients, in which he divorces reason from positive reasons, truth from certainty and argument from belief. In this challenging philosophical vision Popper defines reason in negative terms, as an agent of destruction of knowledge claims, and views all knowledge as conjectural, hypothetical and provisional.

Interactions between commercial and industrial exploitation of the seabed and archaeological and scientific investigation have been at the heart of developments in the understanding of Europe’s submerged landscapes and prehistory since at least the early twentieth century. This introduction considers some of the ways in which that relationship has evolved since that time, including the adoption of international laws under the aegis of United Nations Conventions, the development of close relationships between Dutch fishermen operating beam-trawl fishing nets in the North Sea and a network of private collectors specialising in Pleistocene fossils and artefacts, the imposition of European Union regulations on offshore industrial projects to include monitoring of underwater archaeology and palaeoenvironments and most recently the incorporation of seabed mapping and underwater cultural heritage in the European Union’s 2020 Blue Growth agenda. These developments have played an important role in the growth of knowledge about the underwater cultural heritage notwithstanding the potentially destructive effects of offshore industrial activity. The impact of economic growth and industrial exploitation in the coastal zone, coupled with sea-level rise, is likely to intensify the threats to the underwater cultural heritage in the coming decades, posing new challenges as well as opportunities in the further development of relationships between industrial operators, government agencies and scientific and archaeological researchers.

With the rapid growth of knowledge bases (KBs), question answering over knowledge base, a.k.a. KBQA has drawn huge attention in recent years. Most of the existing methods follow the simply matching method and search the answer from the whole knowledge bases. Despite the effectiveness of above approaches, there are two key issues should be settled, i.e., how to reconstruct knowledge bases effectively and how to search answer efficiently. In this paper, we introduce a simple model to construct large-scale knowledge base as graph and generate a set of candidate answer from efficient answer search. To verify our model, we conduct extensive experiments on Simple Question benchmarks. The experimental results greatly confirm the effectiveness of our model.

Studies of bias in science have conventionally sought their origins in such factors as ideological dispositions, careerism, groupthink, and parochial intellectual mindsets. In contract, the history of public health science points to the role of capital markets in the distortion of the growth of knowledge by key extra-scientific stakeholders including manufacturers, legal institutions, the media, and public relations firms in the management of scientific evidence of harm from legal, but potentially toxic, products. We examine evidence of the juxtaposition of public versus private interests, the cultivation of doubt, and the role of legal forces in the case of tobacco and its disastrous health consequences. We also examine the question of extending the analysis to CO2 emissions and fears of catastrophic climate change.

The emergence and development of neuroethics over the last two decades has occurred in parallel with progress and advancement in several separate sciences, including various neurosciences, comparative psychology, comparative cognition, and ethology. The rapid growth of knowledge about animal brains, minds, intelligence, culture, behaviors, and capacities made by these sciences continues to be integrated into the philosophical discourse on animal ethics, but has thus far had little impact on animal research regulations. Our aim is to bend what have heretofore been more or less parallel tracks into convergence and intersection, and examine the implications of neuroscientific research for our understanding of the minds of other animals, the moral status of these animals, and our moral obligations to them. We challenge neuroethics to adopt a less anthropocentric focus and explore how growing knowledge of nonhuman minds challenges human supremacy.

Networks and informational technologies caused mammoth growth of knowledge volume and sophistication. Serious cognitive and educational problems of scientific big data understanding have arisen. The part and parcel of coming system-informational culture is inter-disciplinary activity based on labor with meanings ensuring knowledge integrity and obviousness. Presented by the utmost mathematical abstractions they are formed by genus in natural science knowledge. Cogno-ontological knowledge base (CogOnt) as core of these scientific presentations consists of them. Achieving personal transcendentality by means of self-reflection secures cognogenesis success. Man’s life-long partnership technology with deep-learned artificial intelligence (DL IA) is contributed to do it. In order to carry out subject’s auto-poiesis (rational self-building) it is impossible to do without continuous assistance of DL IA using CogOnt and applying axiomatic method. Elaboration of CogOnt for DL IA implantation is displayed on example of some universalities study.

The chapter illustrates some outcomes of a teacher education intervention designed to promote pre-service teachers’ learning of the epistemic core which includes the aims and values, practices, methods and knowledge of chemistry. The purpose is to demonstrate what is likely to be observed when the epistemic core ideas are infused in chemistry teacher education. Thematic outcomes are discussed relative to the target themes that were promoted in the teacher education sessions, such as the definition of aims and values in science, types of scientific practices, diversity of methods and coherence between forms of knowledge and growth of knowledge. Example outcomes from three chemistry pre-service teachers are used to provide evidence for how the teacher education intervention influenced pre-service teachers’ representations and their perceptions as captured in their visual and verbal communication. The outcomes are reported through a qualitative and in-depth description. Pre-service teachers were able to express the key themes introduced in the sessions, and they creatively used analogies to situate and communicate their understanding.

The provision of links across RDF knowledge bases is regarded as fundamental to ensure that knowledge bases can be used joined to address real-world needs of applications. The growth of knowledge bases both with respect to their number and size demands the development of time-efficient and accurate approaches for the computation of such links. This is generally done with the aid of machine learning approaches, such as e.g. Decision Trees. While Decision Trees are known to be fast, they are generally outperformed in the link discovery task by the state-of-the-art in terms of quality, i.e. F-measure. In this work, we present Dragon, a fast decision-tree-based approach that is both efficient and accurate. Our approach was evaluated by comparing it with state-of-the-art link discovery approaches as well as the common decision-tree-learning approach J48. Our results suggest that our approach achieves state-of-the-art performance with respect to its F-measure while being 18 times faster on average than existing algorithms for link discovery on RDF knowledge bases. Furthermore, we investigate why Dragon significantly outperforms J48 in terms of link accuracy. We provide an open-source implementation of our algorithm in the LIMES framework.

This chapter builds on the theory of learning, and encourages educators to consider the nature of learning to encompass a change in being, and a subsequent challenge to identity. Who the learner perceives him- or her-self to be evolves alongside their growth of knowledge, experiences and skill set. This crucial chapter also faces the well accepted notion that the role of a paramedic is special in many ways, including the critical and emotionally demanding nature of work we are sometimes called to do. The impact of what paramedics see is known to have serious potential to hurt us deeply. More and more research is now being conducted to consider how we might equip students for such a clinical role, however little attention is given around other threats to student wellbeing. This chapter will explore the less prominent potential sources of student stress: competition, poor job security, and the surrender of other careers as examples. Paramedic students have vulnerabilities which aren’t publicised, and within this context they are expected to learn, develop, pass assessments, and excel even though the biological effects of stress may impair this.

The purpose of the work is to study the possibilities of formation of Industry 4.0 as a new vector of growth and development of knowledge economy by the example of modern Russia and to develop recommendations for their practical implementation. For this, the method of dynamics (horizontal and trend) analysis of time rows and correlation analysis are used. The indicator of development of knowledge economy is the corresponding index that is prepared by the World Bank. The vectors of growth and development of knowledge economy are share of innovations-active companies in the structure of entrepreneurship, number of developed completely new leading production technologies, and share of high-tech spheres in economy (as the indicator of development of the sphere of science and education) according to the Federal State Statistics Service. The author shows that knowledge economy, which was developing dynamically at the initial stage of its formation, has slowed down. The existing growth vectors—innovational entrepreneurship, high-tech spheres of economy, and the sphere of science and education—have depleted their potential and cannot ensure its further development. It is necessary to look for such vectors, of which the most perspective is Industry 4.0, as formation of Industry 4.0 leads to growth of knowledge economy: innovational development, increase of the values of indicators of socio-economic development of economic system, and increase of the role of intellectual component of economy—the sphere of science and education.

As a philosopher of mathematics and science, I have been teaching at the Pennsylvania State University for almost 40 years, and interacting with colleagues at the University of Paris, the University of Rome, the University of London, Cambridge University, Hebrew University and the Leibniz Archives and the University of Hannover. My philosophical focus was always on the growth of knowledge, the creativity of mathematics and the sciences, with issues of proof and justification lurking in the background. I have been especially interested in the way that mathematicians establish correlations and productive ambiguities that link different fields, as well as combining mathematics with the sciences: how do these correlations develop and how do they falter? I have studied the way that mathematical models link the world and formal discourse; how mathematicians make the infinite and the infinitesimal tractable; and how symmetry and periodicity are given mathematical expression, as they are encountered in the world. My historical studies extend generally from around 1600 to the present, in mathematics, though my historical interests in philosophy go further back, to Pythagoras, Plato and Aristotle, late antiquity and the Middle Ages. As a literary critic, I have found the same habits of mind that drive mathematical discovery in works of poetry. As a poet, I have also noticed that the vocabulary of mathematics, science and philosophy finds its way into my poems, even when I am writing about everyday matters, matters of the heart. During the same period, I married the medievalist Robert R. Edwards, and raised four children on the outskirts of a college town, re-creating for them the house of childhood and haphazardly cultivating a back yard that really is a middle term between the town and the wild. Between the trees, we see fields of soy and corn, and then the line of the Tussey Ridge, beyond which stretch hundreds of miles of forest.

Linked Data, a method to publish interrelated data on the Semantic Web, has rapidly developed in recent years due to new techniques which enhance the availability of knowledge. As one of the most important central hubs of Linked Data, DBpedia is a large crowd-sourcing encyclopedia that contains diverse and multilingual knowledge from various domains in terms of RDF. Existing research has mostly focused on the basic characteristics of a specific version of the DBpedia datasets. Currently, we are not aware of any evolutionary analysis to understand the changes of DBpedia versions comprehensively. In this paper, we first present an overall evolutionary analysis in graph perspective. The evolution of DBpedia has been clarified based on the comparison of 6 versions of the datasets. Then we select two specific domains as subgraphs and calculate a series of metrics to illustrate the changes. Additionally, we carry out an evolutionary analysis of the interlinks between DBpedia and other Linked Data resources. According to our analysis, we find that although the growth of knowledge in DBpedia is an overall trend in recent five years, there does exist quite a few counter-intuitive results.

“What is the problem?” If you ever were a student of Joseph Agassi, you remember this question fondly. Agassi expanded and refined Popper’s characterization of a “critical tradition,” in his philosophical writings, historical studies, and as a teacher. His challenge to his students was both to understand the growth of knowledge in past traditions, and to then take on the task of advancing one—in no matter what field. And “What is the problem?” was always the first question to begin understanding the development of ideas and traditions.

Learning and building the capacity to adapt by aligning belief and belief-driven behavior with reality is either the most basic or the most advanced of management functions or both. Management as Learning and Adaptation is defined as the intellectual grounding of the alternative paradigm, the “how” of which is explored through chapter segments identified as: (1) Individual and group cognition and behavior, which examines the dynamics of learning, the growth of knowledge and adaptation; (2) the epistemic terrain which refers to the features and contours of the belief-forming or knowledge-producing space within an organization; and (3) sustaining a learning and adaptive culture, acknowledging the profound influence of culture to determine belief and behavior.

The emergence and convergence of various ICT such as radios, televisions, computers, the Internet, telephones, cell phones, videos, multimedia, CD-ROMs, software and hardware provide unique opportunities for promoting primary and secondary education, on a mass scale, in the developing nations. There is a general consensus among practitioners and academics that in diverse socio-economic and cultural contexts ICT can be successfully employed to reach out to a greater number of students and help in promoting learning and growth of knowledge, along with exposing students to the technical skills required for many occupations.

This paper explores the scientific viability of the concept of causality—by questioning a central element of the distinction between “fundamental” and non-fundamental physics. It will be argued that the prevalent emphasis on fundamental physics involves formalistic and idealized partial models of physical regularities abstracting from and idealizing the causal evolution of physical systems. The accepted roles of partial models and of the special sciences in the growth of knowledge help demonstrate proper limitations of the concept of fundamental physics. We expect that a cause precedes its effect. But in some tension with this point, fundamental physical law is often held to be symmetrical and all-encompassing. Physical time, however, has not only measurable extension, as with spatial dimensions, it also has a direction—from the past through the present into the future. This preferred direction is time’s arrow. In spite of this standard contrast of time with space, if all the fundamental laws of physics are symmetrical, they are indifferent to time’s arrow. In consequence, excessive emphasis on the ideal of symmetrical, fundamental laws of physics generates skepticism regarding the common-sense and scientific uses of the concept of causality. The expectation has been that all physical phenomena are capable of explanation and prediction by reference to fundamental physicals laws—so that the laws and phenomena of statistical thermodynamics—and of the special sciences—must be derivative and/or secondary. The most important and oft repeated explanation of time’s arrow, however, is provided by the second law of thermodynamics. This paper explores the prospects for time’s arrow based on the second law. The concept of causality employed here is empirically based, though acknowledging practical scientific interests, and is linked to time’s arrow and to the thesis that there can be no causal change, in any domain of inquiry, without physical interaction.

In this paper, I argue that visualization and the use of figures represent genuine heuristic, knowledge-enhancing tools in scientific inquiry; in fact, visualization shows a distinctive ability in producing genuinely new knowledge by filling theoretical gaps and in solving problems. I show, then, how visualization can be rightfully appraised as a plausible model for the growth of knowledge, gaining a paramount importance when used at the frontier of research. Unrelated here to the notion of intuition, visualization is treated as an ampliative inference and, being obviously related to figures and vision it is also a way of representing knowledge: this double function justifies it as a non-trivial heuristic device, not replaceable by axiomatic-deductive reasoning. A case study is proposed, regarding the London cholera epidemic, spread between August and September 1854. I show how the recourse to dot maps and a “primitive” version of network Voronoi diagrams as instruments of inquiry helped in filling the then existing theoretical gaps consisting in the ignorance of the existence and action of bacteria in disease transmission. Visualization, on the one hand, acted as an effective problem-solving activity, as it permitted the formulation of a successful strategy to stop the spreading of the epidemic; on the other, through the identification of new causes responsible for the spreading of the epidemic, it allowed to surpass the critical theoretical gap at the frontier of epidemiological knowledge.

This paper examines the impact of a social media campaign on the environmental awareness of staff members in a Higher Education Institution (HEI). The campaign was designed based on a theoretical model and implemented in a case study of a South African HEI. A centralised website together with selected social media formed the technological foundation of the campaign. Throughout the campaign information about environmental management was distributed by means of these technologies to selected staff members in the case study. Issues related to environmental management as well as suggested strategies to deal with them was also communicated to the staff members. In order to determine the growth of knowledge related to environmental issues and to get feedback on the campaign benefits and problems, surveys and interviews were conducted at regular periods throughout the campaign. The findings revealed that the campaign had many positive benefits, particularly for promoting environmental awareness. The limitations of the study are the small sample size which could be addressed by future research.

One of the goals of digital preservation of cultural heritage is to gather, refine, maintain, and share cultural resources that can subsequently be used and developed by scholars, members of the community, and future generations. We present the details of our research dealing with one aspect of Balinese culture, the Balinese traditional communication system (kulkul), undertaken in the Indonesian island of Bali. We introduce a new framework based on Balinese cultural principles (Tri Hita Karana and Desa Kala Patra) to capture, classify, and organize cultural artefact and practice knowledge, and design and develop an online digital portal prototype to enable the sharing and growth of knowledge related to the Balinese kulkul. This knowledge is held largely in tacit form in the Balinese community, poorly documented, and fragmented, which makes the preservation difficult and yet crucial. The aim of the project is to document, preserve, and educate the Balinese community and the younger generations in particular on an important aspect of Balinese culture. This community will be encouraged not only to learn about kulkul and related practices but also contribute their own knowledge to enable the online digital portal to evolve into a living repository of Balinese cultural knowledge. The basic kulkul knowledge and understanding was obtained through in-depth interviews with selected Balinese cultural experts and knowledgeable community members (Professors from a Balinese University, spiritual leaders, senior community leaders, and craftsmen). As part of the digital portal, our project also includes the development of a basic ontology of key kulkul-related concepts and terms, and their inter-relationships to support the semantic searching and browsing of online resources.

I re-examine Enderton’s exposition of number theory in his logic textbook, and look at Godel’s incompleteness theorems, to show that there too definitional extension is both too strong and two weak; the disparity and the resultant ambiguity in both the textbook and the proofs testify to the disparity between the referential discourse of arithmetic and number theory and the analytic discourse of logic. Then I examine parts of Andrew Wiles’ proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem in more detail, since the proof combines disparate discourses in a strikingly ampliative and inspiring way. I also discuss attempts by the logicians McLarty, Friedman, and Macintyre to rewrite the proof and try to show that the aims of logicians are different from the aims of number theorists. This disparity can however contribute to the growth of knowledge as long as both sides tolerate each other and remain open to novel kinds of interaction, with neither claiming to have the Ultimate Discourse.

With the growth of knowledge sharing, an increasingly large amount of Open-Access academic resources are being stored online. This paper systematically studies the method of mining knowledge communication via Open-Access Journals. We first designed a new framework of knowledge communication analysis based on clustering and association rule mining. Then, we proposed two improved indexes named cited frequency and weighted cited frequency. Extensive evaluations using real-world data validate the effectiveness of the proposed framework of knowledge communication analysis.