The gap between science and the humanities

One of the results of unavoidable specialization in our modern world is the gap between science and the humanities. Technicians often lack any coherent philosophical background, while men of general culture lose respect for a science they know little about. The outcome is regrettable. Scientific workers may pursue mere technical mastery for its own sake: they may lose sight of human problems. Others are inclined to regard science as no more than the power behind mass production, sanitation, atomic bombs and space travel: they fail to understand its vital contribution to human thought.

One of the ways of bridging this gap is that students of the humanities at the universities should learn some science. If I were asked to justify this belief I would say that anyone whose outlook and imagination are uninfluenced by science is capable of serious errors of judgment in some of the most important issues of the modern world.

The problem is not, however, whether science should be taught, but what kind of science. It can hardly be expected that classicists, modern linguists and historians should be required to perform experiments or to work out mathematical problems – they are unlikely to have any inclination in this direction. But all students should find interest in science presented historically as a human achievement and as an intellectual competition.

By A. McKenzie

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Tip 1 The subject…

How does the story begin? The facts proved the gap are mentioned in the first paragraph.

How does the middle support and move the idea along? We can see the author’s view how to bridge the gap.

How does the ending fit? The ending describes how the problems stated in article can be solved.

Tip 2 There is no highlighted items on this page so that you can read through and make your own decisions.

At the bottom of this summarizing, you will see how much information, though necessary to the article, would be considered trivial in learning how to write an annotation or an abstract.

Tip 3 One or two-sentence summary.

We can actually come up with two different one-sentence summaries:

To bridge the gap the technician students should study humanities and students of the humanities should learn some science.

All students should find interest in science presented historically as a human achievement and as an intellectual competition to bridge the gap.

NOTE: For those of you who might be called upon to write a one-sentence logline for your story or screenplay:

Learning how to write an annotation or an abstract is the way you can come up with the most accurate one or two-sentence description that’s required in the writing industry for most writing.

Tip 4 Notice that the topic of the article is put right inside the title itself.

Ø The gap between science and the humanities

Ø Technicians often lack any coherent philosophical background

Ø men of general culture lose respect for a science they know little about

Ø Scientific workers may lose sight of human problems

Ø anyone whose outlook are uninfluenced by science is capable of serious errors

Ø modern linguists should not be required to perform experiments

Ø But all students should find interest in science presented historically

Tips 5 and 6 The last point in how to write an annotation or an abstract is writing it. So, now let’s write using all the tips given.

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Tip 7 Most vital in how to write an annotation or an abstract is proofreading and editing.

What good is writing an annotation or an abstract if it’s fraught with errors of your own? J

SAMPLE ABSTRACTS

(written by native speakers of English)

IEEE Communications Magazine, February 2003

Optical packet switching promises to bring the flexibility and efficiency of the Internet to transparent optical networking with bit rates extending beyond that currently available with electronic router technologies. New optical signal processing techniques have been demonstrated that enable routing at bit rates from 10 Gb /s to beyond 40 Gb /s. In this article we review these signal processing techniques and how all-optical wavelength converter technology can be used to implement, packet switching functions.Specific approaches that utilize ultra-fast all-optical nonlinear fiber wavelength converters and monolithically integrated optical wavelength convertersare discussed and research results presented.

Language Culture & Curriculum. Volume, 14 No 2, 2001. Special Issue: French Education in Canada

In this paper, we examine the language practices in three immigrant families of South Asian ancestry who reside in Canada and have chosen French Immersion education for their children. Basing our discussion on interview data, we present a profile of the inter- and infra-generational language interactions that distinguish each family. Also, we describe their reasons for maintaining their family language and their interest in French Immersion. The findings reveal that parents adopt language maintenance strategies that vary from one family to another and they attribute value to French and English as official languages of the country and important languages internationally. Drawing on sociocultural theories of language learning, we argue that these parents support, language maintenance and opt for French Immersion education as part of a family project aimed at developing child multilingualism. Multilingualism is viewed as a means of securing advantages for their offspring nationally and internationally.

Conference workshop abstract

Bridging the Gap: Academic and Industrial Research in Dialog Technologies

In the past decade, we have seen a rapid increase of dialog systems in various industrial applications, including telephone-based services, in-car interaction systems, internet-based customer support, talking characters in computer games, and mobile devices. Industry-driven standards, such as VoiceXML, are also becoming popular. While there has been an increased amount of effort in dialog technology research in the academic world, progress from such academic research has not benefited the real world applications to a satisfactory extent. The purpose of this one day workshop is to provide a forum to bring industrial and academic researchers together to share their experiences and visions in the dialog technology development, and to identify topics that are of interest to both camps.

HOW TO WRITE THE RESEARCH ABSTRACT?

The purpose of an abstract is to serve as a link between the title of a scientific article (research study) which may be only a few words long and the full article which may be 8-10 pages long. The abstract is a useful summary of the article (your research project) that provides justification for the research. The abstract allows the reader to conclude whether the full article (your research) is worth reading.

Contents

The abstract should outline the objectives of the research study and its rationale. The materials and methods of the study should be stated with the statistical methods used. The results of the research should be concisely stated. A brief interpretation with the supporting statistics should be provided and a conclusion briefly stated.

I. Conduct research project

Formulate the research question:

1. Is it important?

2. State it as a testable hypothesis.

3. Search literature to see if your question has already been answered.

4. Revise if necessary.

II. Writing an abstract of your research process:

• Study Objective.

• Design.

• Setting.

• Population.

• Materials, Methods and Interventions.

• Results.

• Conclusions.

III. How to evaluate a good abstract.

• Originality.

• Scientific Merit.

• Clinical relevance or significance.

• Suitability for audience/meeting.

SAMPLE ABSTRACT