HISTORY OF SCIENCE

Under the auspices of the Williams Summer Mellon Program, in summer 2000 Frederick T. Hines ’02 continued to update, improve and expand the departmental web page created by Jennifer Dolloff ’01 in summer 1999. During the academic year 2000-2001, Fred’s supervision and amendments kept the site a useful resource for the courses offered by the department.


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Prof. Beaver in his office in Bronfman Science Center

Donald deB. Beaver, Professor of the History of Science, was invited to be keynote speaker at the First Annual Meeting of COLNET and the Second Berlin Workshop on Scientometrics and Informetrics: Collaboration in Science and in Technology, held in Berlin (Hohen Neuendorf), September 1 – 4, 2000. His speech, “The Study of Collaboration: Past and Future” can still be viewed through real time streaming video at http://www.collnet.de/index.html and under Video-Streams of Talks.
Later in September, for the Labeltalk 2000 exhibition at the Williams College Museum of Art, Prof. Beaver composed a brief textual commentary for a medieval Chinese scroll illustrating the technology of silk making.
On October 19, Prof. Beaver lectured at Berkshire Community College on “The Internet and Society: The Dark Side,” the third of three lectures of “WWW.Wonderful Wicked World of the Internet,” a course offered by the Berkshire Institute for Lifetime Learning.
As part of Earth Week 2001, Prof. Beaver participated as a panelist dealing with the topic “Can Technology Save Us?” held at Griffin Hall on April 17.
“Reflections on Collaboration” was the subject of Prof. Beaver’s Bag Lunch talk to his science colleagues on May 1, 2001.
During the year, Professor Beaver continued to review and referee scholarly work for Spectrum [an IEEE journal], Isis [journal of the History of Science Society], and papers submitted for the 3rd COLNET Meeting of Principal Investigators “Collaboration in Science and Technology,” to be held in Sydney, Australia, in July 2001.