In this book, Martyn Hammersley argues that many social scientists are ambivalent about methodology because of a wider problem: the gradual decline of a previously influential academic model of inquiry. This has occurred as a result of ideological challenges and the erosion of the institutional conditions that support academic work. He defends this model, spelling out the demands it places upon social scientists, and examining such issues as the proper role of methodology, the nature of objectivity, the false idea that social scientists should be intellectuals or social critics, the dialectic of academic discussion, the ethics of belief, and the limits of academic freedom.
English is often regarded as one of the most difficult languages to master. Yet while the English language has a vocabulary of upwards of 500,000 words, it only uses nine parts of speech, and all of these words fall into one (or more) of those nine categories. Scientific English: A Guide for Scientists and Other Professionals, Third Edition contains many simple revelations like this that make effective scientific writing in English easy, even for those whose fluency is in another language. The book is organized around a basic guide to English grammar that is specifically tailored to the needs of scientists, science writers, science educators, and science students.
British theoretical physicists Cox and Forshaw offer lay readers a fascinating account of modern scientists' view of the world, and how it got that way. Without using complicated mathematics, Cox and Forshaw show how the search for "mathematical consistency" can guide scientists in finding the "laws that describe physical reality." The authors provide the historical context that set the stage for Einstein's discovery.
In our multimedia age, text description presents many conceptual problems: texts, as cultural objects, cannot be interpreted without descriptions of genre, communicative conditions, and language, which positivist approaches have proved unable to provide. Semantics for Descriptions addresses itself as much to linguists as to computer scientists, arguing that rational hermeneutics can offer better descriptive methods by allowing the theoretical and practical conditions of text interpretation to be defined.
Scientific Writing and Communication in Agriculture and Natural Resources
The purpose of this book is to help early career professionals in agriculture and natural resources write their research papers for high-quality journals and present their results properly at professional meetings. Different fields have different conventions for writing style such that the authors of the book have found it difficult to recommend to young scientists in these fields a specific book or source material out of the several that are available as the “go to” guide.
