In recent years, historians have debated the prospect of offering new ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ perspectives in their studies. This paper introduces the reader to this special issue by analysing characteristics, merits and flaws of these approaches. It then considers how historians of science have practised transnational history without, however, paying sufficient attention to the theoretical foundations of this approach. Its final part illustrates what benefits may derive from the application of transnational history in the field. In particular, we suggest looking at the construction of transnational networks in science, and discuss some of the methodological consequences of adopting this approach.
This paper explores the history of radio echo-sounding (RES), a technique of glaciological surveying that from the late 1960s has been used to examine Antarctica's sub-glacial morphology. Although the origins of RES can be traced back to two accidental findings, its development relied upon the establishment of new geopolitical conditions, which in the 1960s typified Antarctica as a continent devoted to scientific exploration. These conditions extended the influence of prominent glaciologists promoting RES and helped them gather sufficient support to test its efficiency. The organization and implementation of a large-scale research programme of RES in Antarctica followed these developments. The paper also examines the deployment of RES in Antarctic explorations, showing that its completion depended on the availability of technological systems of which RES was an integral part.
The US monopoly of information regarding nuclear weapons was one of the distinctive features of the early Cold War. It encouraged US officials to bolster their country’s hegemonic role in post-war affairs, something that scholars have previously referred to in terms of “atomic diplomacy.” This paper shows that Cold War atomic diplomacy originated in an ancestral form of what we call today “science diplomacy,” distinctive of wartime allied relations during WW2. It first explores how science became a distinctive feature of wartime diplomacy by looking at agreements regarding exchanges of information and collaboration that shaped the relations between wartime allies (US, UK, and the Soviet Union). It then shows that their signing (and, at times, their rejection) eventually paved the way to conflicting views within allied administrations on what to share, making their officials less inclined to pool more knowledge toward the end of WW2. In conclusion, US monopolistic stances and atomic diplomacy originated in these disagreements, also marking the demise of wartime science diplomacy.
This essay is part of a special issue entitled Science Diplomacy, edited by Giulia Rispoli and Simone Turchetti.
The term “science diplomacy” broadly identifies interactions between scientific and foreign policy communities connected to the promotion of international scientific exchanges (also as a way to establish constructive relations between countries), and the provision of scientific advice on issues of relevance to more than one nation. Science diplomacy initiatives have been positively portrayed by practitioners, while recent scholarship has underscored the need for these actions to more directly address social and global challenges. In what follows we sketch the contours of a data-driven “science diplomacy 2.0” that could actually be seen as more directly tackling these challenges in two important ways. First, we outline a multi-layered approach that integrates data and meta-data from various disciplines in order to promote greater awareness about what kind of research should actually be prioritized in science diplomacy actions. Second, we argue for the creation of responsible innovation observatories for operationalizing such a methodology at both national and global levels.
The internationalization of Antarctica as a continent for science with the Antarctic Treaty (1961) was heralded as bringing about international cooperation and the free exchange of data. However, both national rivalry and proprietorship of data, in varying degrees, remained integral to Antarctic science and politics throughout the 20th century. This paper considers two large field-surveys in Antarctica: first, an aerial photographic survey carried out by the Ronne Antarctic Research Expedition of 1946—8; and second, the Scott Polar Research Institute's radio-echo sounding survey of 1967—79. Both surveys involved geoscientific data but the context in which the investigations and the exchanges of their results took place changed. We argue that the issue of control of data remained paramount across both cases despite shifting international political contexts. The control of data on Antarctic territory, once framed in terms of geopolitics and negotiated between governments, became a matter of science policy and credit to be negotiated among scientific institutions. Whereas the Ronne data were of potential strategic value for reinforcing national territorial claims, the radio-echo sounding data contained information of potential economic and environmental value.
We investigated the usage for automatic speech recognition of different acoustic features, obtained from the output bitstream of a voice over IP codec. In particular, we analyzed the influence, on recognition performance, of both analysis rate and vector quantization of acoustic parameters introduced by the codec. Particular care has to be taken to train acoustic models at the reduced analysis rate employed by the codec: some related issues are discussed in the paper. We also used a model for simulating packet loss and we measured the corresponding performance degradation. Experiments were carried out on both clean and noisy speech databases.
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