A romp through science fiction

Teaching Societal and Ethical Implications of Nanotechnology Through Science Fiction

Societal and ethical implications of nanotechnology have become a hot topic of public debates in many countries because both revolutionary changes and strong public concerns are expected from its development. Because nanotechnology is, at this point, mostly articulated in visionary and futuristic terms, it is difficult to apply standard methods of technology assessment and even more difficult t...

Fiction informed by science.

“But Is It Science Fiction?”: Science Fiction and a Theory of Genre

If science fiction is a genre, then attempts to think about the nature of science fiction will be affected by one’s understanding of what genres are. I shall examine two approaches to genre, one (genres as regions of conceptual space) dominant but inadequate, the other (genres as historical particulars) better, but only occasionally making itself seen. I shall then discuss several important, in...

Developing Emotion-Oriented Morality through Fiction

Background: As a peculiar epistemological procedure to understand and represent world facts, literature has ‎constantly imparted major contributions to human knowledge. Literature’s epistemological ‎effects bear on both cognitive and affective measures; however, its emotional functioning is ‎more remarkable. Fiction resorts to mimesis on readers’ mind in developing such moral emotions as empath...

Science Fiction and Macdonald's Polynomials

This work studies the remarkable relationships that hold among certain m-tuples of the Garsia-Haiman modules M and corresponding elements of the Macdonald basis. We recall that in 10], M is deened for a partition`n, as the linear span of derivatives of a certain bihomogeneouspolynomial (x; y) in the variables x 1 ; x 2 conjecturedin 6], 10] that M has n! dimensionsand that its bigraded Frobeniu...