Silver refining in the New World: A singularity in the history of useful knowledge.

Historians have thoroughly documented the development of mercury-based silver refining in Spanish America in the late sixteenth century, and its use for over 300 years on an industrial scale unknown in Europe. However, we currently lack any consensus about the significance of this technology in the global history of knowledge. This article critically reassesses the invention and improvement of this refining method with the aim of addressing two interrelated issues. Firstly, how experiential knowledge and practical skills in silver refining were deliberately harnessed to solve a specific technical problem. Secondly, how economic incentives and patronage set the stage for empirical practices and a collaborative culture that facilitated the widespread use of this novel technique. In so doing, this article places silver refining within the theoretical constructs and historiography of useful knowledge, and bridges narratives that have remained largely isolated.

The uses of useful knowledge and the languages of vernacular science: Perspectives from southwest India.

In the first half of the eleventh century, a group of scholars in southwest India did something new. They began composing systematic texts about everyday life in a register of language sometimes called New Kannada. While looking back toward earlier texts composed in Sanskrit - and even translating portions of them - these scholars centered their poetic ability and their personal experiences as opposed to prior authoritative texts. They described themselves as authoring "worldly sciences" that were "useful to the people of the world," and they provided extensive reflections on the systematics of knowledge. Epistemic, linguistic, and political concerns were significantly renegotiated in this moment as local context was turned into a virtue for the production of technical treatises. This article uses this moment to interrogate recent discussions of useful knowledge and vernacular science. Usefulness can mean different things at different times and vernacular sciences change according to their language. This article argues for a usage of both terms that is more attuned to historical particulars. A history of useful knowledge from a place that now appears under the double effacement of the non-modern and non-West offers an opportunity to think through central concepts of the history of science without relying on economic or utilitarian discourses. This paper presents one possible example of what a more global history of useful knowledge might look like.

BIGO: A web application to analyse gene enrichment analysis results.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE: Gene enrichment tools enable the analysis of the relationships between genes with biological annotations stored in biological databases. The results obtained by these tools are usually difficult to analyse. Therefore, researchers require new tools with friendly user interfaces available on all types of devices and new methods to make the analysis of the results easier. METHODS: In this work, we present the BIGO Web tool. BIGO is a friendly Web tool to perform enrichment analyses of a collection of gene sets. On the basis of the obtained enrichment analysis results, BIGO combines the biological terms to organize them and graphically represents the relationships between gene sets to make the interpretations of the results easier. RESULTS: BIGO offers useful services that provide the opportunity to focus on a concrete subset of results by discarding too general biological terms or to obtain useful knowledge by means of the visual analysis of the functional connections between the sets of genes being analysed. CONCLUSIONS: BIGO is a web tool with a novel and modern design that provides the possibility to improve the analysis tasks applied to gene enrichment results.

Planes de Universitas Odontologica para el bienio 2019-2020 / Universitas Odontologica Plans for the Biennium 2019-2020

La desmesurada dependencia de las universidades, los académicos y las revistas científicas de Colombia y el mundo de los servicios bibliográficos de indización y resumen nos han generado una gran preocupación por la deformación y mercantilización que han sufrido la comunicación científica y los propósitos mismos de la educación superior y la investigación. Nos hemos preguntado: ¿Qué hacer para que Universitas Odontologica tenga un mayor impacto en la sociedad? La sociedad aquí debemos entenderla como el gremio odontológico, las facultades/escuelas de odontología y la sociedad civil a la que sirven los profesionales y equipos humanos de la salud oral.

Imagining uses for things: Teaching "useful knowledge" in the early eighteenth century.

There has been an explosion of interest in "innovation-oriented knowledge" and utility in early modern knowledge economies. Despite this, a healthy skepticism surrounding the category of "useful knowledge" persists, at least in part because of its association with intentional concealment. Helpful in many ways, this skepticism has fostered a tendency to overlook a variety of efforts to teach "useful knowledge" in the period: efforts that were anchored in engagement with the real and involved the cultivation of an ability to direct the powers of the imagination. Indeed, for some the imagination served as a faculty central to an epistemology of use. This article takes as its example a handbook written by an early political economist (c. 1700) who endeavored to teach readers how to imagine uses for things they observed in collections while traveling so they would be better prepared to participate in a new, transnational culture of innovation.