Miguel A. Quintanilla

The Teaching and Research Relationship Within an Institutional Evaluation.

The authors present an analysis of the relationship between research and teaching in universities. The aim is to determine to what extent this relationship is strong enough to support the idea that teaching and research should be analyzed together from an institutional evaluation point of view. Two main questions are presented: (a) should research be evaluated from an institutional point of view? And, if so, (b) which specific aspects of research activities can be evaluated within each institution? Empirical data have been obtained within the Spanish National Program for the Evaluation of Quality of Universities and there are supplemented by interviews. Evidence is found of strong connections between research and teaching and in particular areas analysis of the two dimensions together will help in designing better improvement strategies for universities.

Why do I publish research articles in English instead of my own language? Differences in Spanish researchers' motivations across scientific domains

Previous studies have reported the increased use of English as the “lingua franca” for academic purposes among non-Anglophone researchers. But despite data that confirm this trend, little is known about the reasons why researchers decide to publish their results in English rather than in their first language. The aim of this study is to determine the influence of researchers’ scientific domain on their motivation to publish in English. The results are based on a large-scale survey of Spanish postdoctoral researchers at four different universities and one research centre, and reflect responses from 1717 researchers about their difficulties, motivations, attitudes and publication strategies. Researchers’ publication experiences as corresponding authors of articles in English and in their first language are strongly related to their scientific domain. But surprisingly, Spanish researchers across all domains expressed a similar degree of motivation when they write research articles in English. They perceive a strong association between this language and the desire for their research to be recognized and rewarded. Our study also shows that the target scientific audience is a key factor in understanding the choice of publication language. The implications of our findings go beyond the field of linguistics and are relevant to studies of scientific productivity and visibility, the quality and impact of research, and research assessment policies.

The quality challenge for universities: A view from Spain

Universities are centuries-old institutions that inrecent times have undergone important changes as aresult of the expansion of the system of highereducation, the diversification of social demands onthe university, and the increase in public spending onhigher education. In this new context, universitieshave the opportunity to show their capacity foradaptability and their social and intellectualleadership, reacting to the new situation in acreative manner. But to do this they must accept thequality challenge, that is, the responsibilityfor showing that they can do things right and meetsocietys demands with the highest levels of qualityand efficiency. This paper presents how thischallenge must be approached in Spanishuniversities.

The Incompleteness of Technics

Some philosophical views share a deterministic teleological idea of technical progress linked to the myth of the completeness of technics, that is to say, to the idea that the ultimate objective of technical progress is the complete technification of reality. Here, a theory of the progress of technics is proposed according to which its character is cumulative, not teleological, contingent, not deterministic, and radically incomplete. One notable consequence of this model is that it emphasizes our moral responsibility for the development of technics.

The Design and Evaluation of Technologies: Some Conceptual Issues

Technical change is brought about by the modification or combination of previously available techniques or by new inventions and technical discoveries. These can result from non-systematic trial and error or from systematic programs of research and technological development. In either case, there are two kinds of intellectual operations in the processes of technical discovery: design and evaluation. Both can be carried out in a rational, systematic, and scientific way, or in an empirical and intuitive (though not necessarily irrational) way.

Materialist Foundations of Critical Rationalism

The main argument Popper puts forward for making his metaphysical theory of the three worlds plausible is based on the idea that World 2 of the consciousness or human subjectivity and World 3 of ideas, problems, myths and theories invented by man are essential in order to understand the meaning of rationality, in other words, to understand the possibility and value of rational criticism. On the other hand Popper considers that the theory of the three worlds is incompatible with a materialist ontology. In fact a good deal of his contribution in Popper and Eccles [1977] is devoted to the criticism of materialism and the defense of the metaphysical hypothesis of the immaterial reality of the mind and its products. Obviously this means that for Popper rationalism and materialism are incompatible.

Ten years of science news: A longitudinal analysis of scientific culture in the Spanish digital press

This article presents our study of science coverage in the digital Spanish press over the last decade. We employed automated information retrieval procedures to create a corpus of 50,763 text units dealing with science and technology, and used automated text-analysis procedures in order to provide a general picture of the structure, characteristics and evolution of science news in Spain. We found between 6% and 7% of science coverage, a clear high proportion of biomedicine and predominance of science over technology, although we also detected an increase in technological content during the second half of the decade. Analysing the extrinsic and intrinsic features of science culture, we found a predominance of intrinsic features that still need further analysis. Our attempt to use specialised software to examine big data was effective, and allowed us to reach these preliminary conclusions.

The implications of Wikipedia for contemporary science education: using social network analysis techniques for automatic organisation of knowledge

Wikipedia is an Open Content resource, which is constructed by a users community, and is widely employed in educational contexts by both students and teachers. Wikipedia articles have hyperlinks that connect them, so it is possible to represent Wikipedia as a network, in which the nodes are the articles and the edges are hyperlinks. In this paper we analyze a complete copy of the Spanish Wikipedia. We apply Social Networks Analysis Techniques and, more precisely, Communities Detection Techniques, in order to identify clusters of articles with similar content. As the number of clusters is relatively small we use manual analyses to detect science articles. In addition we identify the most representative scientific fields and their main features. We conclude that science articles are about 11.66 % of Spanish Wikipedia articles and that the most important clusters of scientific articles do not always coincide with classical Science disciplines. This kind of analyses contributes to understanding better Wikipedia as an educational tool.