A LOOK AT PAST AND PRESENT SCIENTISTS WOMEN

http://focus.tv5monde.com/femmesetsciences/

Ada Lovelace, Lord Byron's daughter, was world's first computer programmer:
http://mentalfloss.com/article/53131/ada-lovelace-first-computer-programmer

Emilie du Chatelet studied the nature of light and heat, especially fire:
http://www.humantouchofchemistry.com/emilie-du-chatelet.htm

Marie Curie is one of  the most famous scientists that ever lived and only one that won Nobel Prize twice:
http://departments.kings.edu/womens_history/mariecurie.html

Amalie Emmy Noether, Creative Mathematical Genius
https://www.sdsc.edu/ScienceWomen/noether.html

Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin discovered that the sun is made of mostly hydrogen.
http://berkeleysciencereview.com/the-magnifying-glass-ceiling-the-plight-of-women-in-science/

Marguerite Perey discovered a new element which she named francium in honor of her country
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/12/07/magazine/my-great-great-aunt-discovered-francium-and-it-killed-her.html?ref=magazine

Sexism against women in the world of science

We have been for 14 years deep into the XXI Century and still women suffer because of discrimination in the world of science.  Several examples that have happened over time can be found on this blog.

This article addresses the issue in its current situation:

http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2014/mar/15/women-science-research-university-discrimination-academics-anonymous

Women in Science: Dr. Marthe Gautier, French scientist

French Dr. Marthe Gautier discovered in 1957 that trisomy 21 is the cause of Down syndrome, " a genetic problem associated with physical growth delays, characteristic facial features and mild to moderate intellectual disability" (Wikipedia).

Dr. Marthe Gautier has been denied credit for her discovery so far, but at 88 years old, she is still living.  It is still possible to right this old wrong.  You can read on this link the whole story:


 http://rrresearch.fieldofscience.com/2014/02/who-really-discovered-trisomy-21.html


 http://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/down-syndrome/basics/causes/con-20020948

Women in science: Emilie, Marquise du Chatelet

This exquisite article by Michelle Legro tells the story of the love and collaboration relationship between the French philosopher Voltaire and a French lady who was also a gifted mathematician, Emilie, Marquise du Chatelet.

The Philosopher and the Prodigy: How Voltaire Fell in Love with a Remarkable Female Mathematician

 

http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2014/02/14/voltaire-in-love/?utm_content=buffer8a00c&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Women in Science

This is a round-up of women working in scientific matters from the Smithsonian archives:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/smithsonian/sets/72157614810586267/

The punishment procedure and its undesirable consequences

Within the framework of the B.F. Skinner`s Operant Conditioning model, any unpleasant experience ranging from an unexpected cold shower to a beating, you name it, is considered punishment, stimulus that follow behavior and weaken the future probability of such behavior.  Punishment involves presenting aversive stimuli (physical, verbal punishment) or withdrawing reinforcing stimuli (deprivation of privileges or isolation from people).

Punishment as a method to control behavior should be avoided due to its major side effect:  people learn to avoid and escape from sources of punisment.  But if it is necessary to use it to control a behavior too intense or too frequent, punishment must be used humanely.  Otherwise is utterly immoral.

Escape is when people get away from a punishing stimulus: leave a room or a house, close a telephone call.
Avoidance is when people do not get close to a punishing stimulus: do not attend certain places or take some telephone calls, children do not want to go to school, adults get sick in order not to go to the job.

Much of the problem behavior both children and adults show, has come from punishment treatment by other people or from a hostile environment.  Punishment causes frustration, and aggresiveness is quicker and most
common response to frustration.

Francisco Josè Arnàiz says about this topic:  "Dollard and with him many authors define aggression as an instinctive reaction to any frustration. This explains at length the presence and virulence of the phenomenon of aggression and violence in modern society, supersaturated with frustrations. Personal, professional, political, social and economic frustrations:

Frustrations over the current unemployment and underemployment, the erratic behavior of public authorities,
the inequality of fundamental opportunities, the absence of clear rules of play, the competitiveness, the subterranean discriminations, the perversion of the judicial practice, the lack of defined criteria, the absence of ethical principles equally mandatory, the confusion of ideas, the success of rogues, the ridicule of the honest and clean, the precariousness of basic social services, the mismatch between labor compensation and the real cost of living, the emergence of criminal ways to get large sums of money, the triumplant injustice, the lack of understanding between parents and children, the prevailed lack of solidarity." (free translation)

It should not come as a suprise the amount of violence in the current social life utterly controlled by punishment procedures.  Please read on this same blog the article Walden Two, an Utopian community imagined by B.F. Skinner, where punishment is never used.

http://listindiario.com/puntos-de-vista/2011/10/8/206416/Violencia-psicologica

http://www.psychologyandsociety.com/operantconditioning.html

http://duke.edu/~dandan/Papers/dishonesty.pdf
http://www.workthesystem.com/pdfs/Skinner_(1986)_What_is_Wrong_with_Daily_Life.pdf

The influence of Biology on Psychology

I had stressed before the influence of Biology on Psychology, but not with the synthesis power R.S. Peters can do it; and since this is such an important stage in the history and development of Psychology as a science, I have a third excerpt invited:

"The influence of biology has proved to be the farther-reaching influence sustained by psychology, besides the philosophical, religious and medical traditions that had mainly conditioned its development.  But that influence did not show with all intensity until the end of XIXth Century and the beginnings of the XXth one, when those who knew Darwinian biology began to study man in the same way they studied the animal, and using for the human conduct the same type of explanatory hypothesis.  There was, however, a time of transition, before the different psychology schools of XXth Century appeared; during that time, the biologic approach did not have a radical influence on the old traditions of the psychology of "ideas" but, rather, corrected them.  Psychology continue being essentially introspective.  We must wait until the beginnings of XXth Century to see reflected in different "schools" the concrete result, for Psychology, of the Darwinian statement that men are, after all, animals, and that the same kind of problem can be considered with regard to men as with regard to animals." (p. 464)

Free translation from:
Historia de la Psicologìa by G.S.Brett
Editorial Paidòs, Buenos Aires
Edited and abridged by R.S.Peters




considered with regard to men as with regard to animals.