Tag: language

  • AMR and the ‘rhetoric of resistance’

    AMR and the ‘rhetoric of resistance’

    Today Helen Lambert, the ESRC‘s AMR champion, posted a blog post under the title ‘Rhetoric of resistance‘ on the AMR Social Science Champion Blog ahead of the UN General Assembly meeting on Antimicrobial Resistance (UNGA) meeting about which she also tweeted during the day. “The primary objective of the meeting is to summon and maintain strong…

  • Musings on language and life, with special reference to ‘programming’

    Musings on language and life, with special reference to ‘programming’

    This morning I opened the newspaper and read an article about a new language that lets researchers design novel biological circuits. I mumbled something about this over coffee and my husband said, oh but wasn’t that old hat, we all knew that DNA was a language, code etc. So what was new? I looked again…

  • Paddling in the shallow end of knowledge

    Paddling in the shallow end of knowledge

    This post was prompted by two things. I, a social scientist of sorts, recently tried to read two books, Smashing Physics by Jon Butterworth and Synthetic Biology: A Primer by Paul Freemont and Richard Kitney. I also listened in to some conversations where people spoke about how problematic they find it to understand social science…

  • Are they really climate deniers? Closing down debate in science and politics.

    Are they really climate deniers? Closing down debate in science and politics.

    Just had an interesting back and forth with Vanessa Heggie  about ‘what to call climate deniers/sceptics’? At the bottom of her excellent post on ‘how to debate with sceptics’, Vanessa wonders whether ‘denier‘ or ‘sceptic‘ is the right word to use around climate change. This was a handy reminder that, although I read stuff on…