Latest ArticlesWith the theoretical development of Public Understanding of Science and the failure of Deficit Model, many nations began to seek for the way for the public to participate in making decision on public affairs related to science and technology. Among those attempts, consensus conference is a typical one. This article takes the first Japanese nationwide consensus conference held in 2000 as case, briefly analyzes and discusses its background, main content, significance and problems. Such study can help us to know more about the Japanese practice of Public Understanding of Science from a specific aspect, and bring helpful reflection for us.
In the developed world, discussions about “science literacy” often focus on public knowledge of science as scientists define it: physics, chemistry, biology, etc. At a workshop held in Cape Town, South Africa, in December 2002, researchers and practitioners suggested that public understanding of research in developing countries is about much more basic issues: providing clean water for drinking and cooking, learning the essential link between unprotected sexual intercourse and HIV infection, and so on. Programs to support public understanding in developing countries must serve the disadvantaged, must work to overcome social and regional inequalities. Choices about how to allocate scientific and technological resources are not politically neutral.
This paper discusses the nature, mechanism of knowledge communication and diffusion as well as its relationship with civic science literacy from the viewpoint of national innovation systems.
The paper recalls the introduction of the idea of public understanding of science to China in 1990s and the different opinions about the suitability of the model in the particular social situation of China. It also explores the conceptualization of public scientific literacy and the 5 studies of the Chinese Public's Scientific Literacy commenced from the beginning of 1990s with modified version of the questionnaire constructed by Jon Miller and, the author suggests a reform plan with the idea of reconstructing a new questionnaire based on fully probe studies beforehand and conducting both quantitative and qualitative surveys according to complexity of Chinese society.
In this paper, the comprehensive popular science publications since 1945 in Taiwan are divided into three phases, starting with Popular Science, Science Monthly, and Newton respectively. We enumerate every kind of the publications, and make a brief analysis of them. We notice that the achievements of the publication drawing its material from foreign magazines can not surpass Newton and Scientific American, and that the achievements of the self-made publication can not surpass Science Monthly. Furthermore, the influence of the internet on the popular science publications is so great that the influence of the latter is much weakened. But the popular science publications are still of great value, because the new and developing media such as internet need substantial contents.
In comparison with activities and projects of science popularization, science education and job trainings before, the “Outline of National Action Scheme of Scientific Literacy for All Chinese Citizens” is characterized with new ideas and plans in many aspects. They are: orienting scientific literacy building to a fundamentally social engineering to break through the bottleneck in population quality; giving a new definition of the concept of “scientific literacy”; making the policy of government as leadership, public as participants to promote scientific literacy; setting short-term, mid-term, and long-term goals; planning four sub-projects in accordance with four different social groups; designing four fundamental building engineering in “hardware” and three effective measures to guarantee the implementation of the scheme; mapping out the network, which consists of the systems of organization and evaluation, to guide and control the process in the implementation of the scheme.
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