Nano Song

just found this on YouTube today. interesting song about nano.



see ACS Nanotation for more information about the video contest.

Information about European Countries

Here are some reliable "facts" about European countries.

GENERAL INFORMATION

1. BBC established a nice database about background characteristics, political information, and even media systems in the world. Please see Country Profiles at BBC.


2. EUROPA is the portal site of the European Union (http://europa.eu). It provides up-to-date coverage of European Union affairs and essential information on European integration. It also has statistics and public opinion info. It's worth checking out! There is a specific section that devotes to some statistics in relation to science and technology in Europe.

3. Country Profiles by the Library of Congress.

4. UN Data--A world of information.

5. US Department of State, background notes.

MEDIA & INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY

6. European Journalism Center. The European Journalism Centre (EJC) is an independent, international, non-profit institute dedicated to the highest standards in journalism, primarily through the further training of journalists and media professionals. It has "media landscape" for all European countries.

7. EB68.2 E-Communications Household Survey (pdf), with summary sheet for individual 27 countries.

8. EB67.2 Scientific research in the media, accessible at European Union Public Opinion.

DEVELOPMENT OF SCIENCE

9. Science of Latvia.

10. Science and Society in Europe.

Social amplification of risk--Burns et al 1993

Incorporating Structural Models into Research on the Social Amplification of Risk: Implications for Theory Construction and Decision Making

This study empirically tests the framework of social amplification of risk, which argues that "social and economic impacts of an adverse event are determined not only by the direct biological and physical consequences of the event, but by the interaction of powerful psychological, cultural, social, and institutional processes that amplify or attenuate public response to the event" (Burns et al., p612).

In this study, the authors examined the causal relationship between "risk signals," "media coverage," "public response," and some physical consequences of adverse events.

108 hazards were identified and evaluated by experts to determine their political and economic implications. Public responses were measured by the level of political involvement, worry, and risk-reducing action induced by the hazards. Although measured at the individual level, these public responses variables were then aggregated to represent macro-level preferences. Information about media coverage was also collected to reflect the number of stories, duration of coverage, and issue half-life.

The most important finding of this study rests with the fact that both "casualties" and "property damage," indicators of the consequence of hazards, showed only marginally significant effect on the societal impact of the issues. It is, instead, the media coverage of and public reactions to the issues that matter.

However, I have several questions after reading this article.
1. What is the subject of amplification? Is it the social and political impact of the issue or the perceived risk of the issue? For example, some people may not care as much about what the risks are going to do to other people, or the whole society, as to themselves. Employing an "objective" measure of the impact of hazards does not hit the target idea. It is also difficult for me to draw a linkage between public reaction measures with the "impact" variable formed by the opinions of the experts.

2. Based on my first question, the causal order of their model (with "societal impact" being the final dependent variable ) may be open for adjustment. Can public worry and willingness to participate politically serve as the final outcome and be predicted by the "perceived" societal impact of hazards?

3. Showing a strong relationship between, for example, media coverage and societal impact does not necessarily mean that these hazards were "amplified." To what baseline does this amplification or attenuation compare? I think this is the most critical issue that scholars in this line of research should address.

Modernization and human development

The thesis of the third chapter of this book is the relationship between modernization and value change. In other words, do people living in countries with different levels of development also possess different values?

The authors, in particular, examine two sets of values--traditional vs secular and survival vs self-expression. On the other hand, modernization is operationalized as the proportion of labor forces in the industry sector and service sector.

The results confirmed two relationships. Materialism, characterized by the dominance of the industry sector, was associated with secular values; that is, less deferred to authority and religious guidance. Quite differently, post-materialism, characterized as the dominance of the service sector, was associated with self-expression values (i.e., more trust in people and higher demand in political participation).

Further analysis showed that these values were also predicted by the country's colonial legacy. For example, what values people hold depend on whether they were subject to the impact of communist, Confucianism, Catholic, or Protestant.

So, does the tradition of a country shape public values more strongly than colonial background? For instance, does an Islamic living in the middle east possess values more similar to another Islamic residing in other parts of the world than a Catholic in the same area? Their research suggests that the effect of a country overrides that of the political background. In other words, a Chinese in the US will hold values much more similar with an American in the US than another Chinese in Hong Kong.

Sjoberg (1998). Workd Views, Political Attitudes and Risk Perception

This study was published at Risk: Health, Safety & Environment in 1998 and is the first article I read about the limited power of cultural theory in predicting technological risk attitudes.

Basically, this study, with 141 subjects from a church organization in California, aimed to replicate the Dake's piece published in 1990 (Orienting dispositions in the perception of risk). Dake aruged in his study that "cultural bias and social relations" (including hierarchy, individualism, and egalitarianism) better explained people's risk perception than other political ideology and personality reasons.

However, Sjoberg criticized Dake's ideology measure for being too heterogeneous and having low reliability, compared to Rothman and Lichter's measure, in that it included many non-business and -economics related items.

Variables tested in this study, thus, included political attitudes, trust, affect, and Dake's scales, with dependent variables being 36 societal concerns and 51 risk ratings. Sjorboerg found that although trust was pervasively correlated with concerns, it explained only 2.6% of the variance of risks. The same situation is applicable to Dake's scales of world views. In addition, affect was correlated with risks and concerns well.


The more surprising finding pertains to the fact that Dake's scale were not technology related, leading Sjorberg to conclude that "Cultural Theory simply is wrong (p.149)" [in its use of explaining risks].

Related reading:

Peters, E., & Slovic, P. (1996). The Role of Affect and Worldviews as Orienting Dispositions in the Perception and Acceptance of Nuclear Power Journal of Applied Social Psychology, 26(16), 1427-1453.

Peters et al (2007). Culture and technological innovation

This is one of the greatest article I've ever read. It is enlightening both conceptually and methodologically. This study was authored by Hans Peter Peters and colleagues, who examined the impact of "institutional trust" and "appreciation of nature" on food biotechnology. Specifically, they compared the dynamics of the two factors in the context of USA and Germany.

They first explained why they study general institutional trust rather than specific trust, although trust towards specific issue or personnel responsible for that issue has been found to exert larger impact on attitudes (e.g., Siegrist & Cvetkovich, 2000 in Risk Analysis). One advantage of using general trust lies in its ability to sort out the methodological ambiguity with respect to the direction of effect. Whereas it is likely that people's level of trust affect their perception of a technology, it is equally possible that their attitudes toward the technology shape how much they trust the officials or institutions responsible for doing research or regulation about the technology.

The authors of the study conceptualize the relationship between trust and attitude by utilizing the idea of a "syndrome," which refers to "a net of concepts that are tied together and vary jointly (p.196)." Peters and colleagues argue that issue-specific trust is part of the attitudinal syndrome and is therefore inappropriate to be used as a predictor, based on the reasons outlined in the previous paragraph. General trust, however, is external to the food biotechnology attitude syndrome. Thus, if a correlation is found, the causal direction should go from general trust to attitude, but not vice versa.

They found that "appreciation of nature" was associated with attitudes towards food biotechnology in both countries. However, the different levels of appreciation results in different levels of support. Germans were found to be more appreciative of nature and therefore possessed more negative attitudes towards food biotechnology than the Americans. It should be noted that although the internal reliability of the measure of "appreciation" is not very high, it predicts the outcome very well.

Quite surprisingly, trust had a positive relationship with attitudes only in the US, not in Germany. The authors attribute the finding to several reasons.

1. The attitudes of regulatory institutions are more consistent in the US; that is, more supportive of biotechnology. However, in Germany, people saw mixed signals from the equivalent institutions. That's why trust appears to be less irrelevant in Germany.

2. The higher relevance of trust in the US also results from the "technocratic" framing of the issue, as opposed to the more "political" nature in Germany. When an issue was discussed within the technocratic discourse, its scope was restricted to the scientists and administrative realm, which rendered institutional trust more relevant in the decision making process. This point is also illustrated in the Attention Cycles and Frames in the Plant Biotechnology Debate by Nisbet and Huge.

3. The awareness of the issue also makes the Germans more likely to generate their own assessment based on the available and relevant arguments than their US counterparts.

4. Trust in institutions is a more effective mechanisms for the resolution of uncertainty in a society emphasizing individualism/ universalism than in a society emphasizing particularism/ collectivism. In the latter type of society, trust is mainly established in specific people, not impersonal actors.

In concluding, the authors suggest that the concept of trust and nature should be examined in the context of nanotechnology. They also call for studies with respect to other cultural dimensions, such as moral and religious beliefs.

The structure of public opinion (about Biotech) in The Making of Global Controversy

In a chapter in Bauer and Gaskell's book, Biotechnology: The making of a global controversy, some researchers analyzed what constitutes public opinion towards the technology.

Interestingly, they found geographical differences in terms of expectations towards biotechnology. Specifically, countries located in southern Europe are more optimistic about the technology, whereas those in the north are more pessimistic.

Another important finding pertains to the relationship between general attitudes towards biotechnology and those towards specific applications of biotechnology, such as food production, genetic testing, xenotransplant, and so on. The researchers found that these two sets of attitudes were closely related, suggesting that public opinion about biotech applications are very much based on their general impression on biotechnology. This finding somewhat parallels Kahan et. al.'s study which found that people holding positive views on other technologies also tend to be optimistic about nanotechnology. It also resonates with my own research which found that ambivalent attitudes toward Genetically Modified Food and Plants would also result in similar uncertain attitudes toward nanotechnology.

A quote from the chapter reads, "respondents applied general schema relating to biotechnology and technology to the more focused applications about which they were questioned" (p. 215).

Of course, knowledge is a critical determinants of public attitudes. However, the researchers found only moderate effects of knowledge (both subjective and objective) on the perception of risk, utility, moral acceptability, and encouragement. While knowledge was not associated with attitude differentiation, defined as the variance of attitudinal difference with respect to the six specific applications, it was connected to attitude extremity. In other words, those who had higher knowledge tended to have stronger attitudes towards biotechnology, either positive or negative.

One results that strike me is that religiosity accounted for only marginally the variance of attitudes. As we may know, the most controversial aspect of biotechnology rests with its interference with nature and the scientists' act of "playing god," it is surprising that religiosity, the main source of people's moral discipline, did not kick in as an attitudinal determinants. However, the limited effect at the individual level does not necessarily mean the same thing at the country level, as our recent study in Nature Nanotechnology has suggested.

The authors called for more well-designed information campaigns to keep people informed about the pros and cons of biotechnology. However, this call for more information should be understood in conjunction with several recent studies which identified the fact that people interpret information based on their value predispositions or worldviews. Simply providing information just does not help people understand the technology very much.