The Consortium for Science Policy and Outcomes (CSPO) at Arizona State University has unveiled a new WWW site with new content and organization. For those of you interested in science and technology policy it is a site you’ll want to bookmark.

Here are a few links:

How science makes environmental controversies worse: A new paper in Environmental Science & Policy by Daniel Sarewitz. (This is a paper in the special issue of ESP that I co-guest edited.)

Details on a panel discussion organized by CSPO at ASU 13 October 2004 titled, “Science Defiled – Or Politics as Usual? An Interactive Panel Discussion in conjunction with the Third Presidential Debate”.

A new Perspective by Daniel Sarewitz titled “Fundamentals and Fundamentalists”. Here is an excerpt:

“For it seems that science policy discourse is remarkably, and maddeningly, bound by a set of definitions and debates that have been more or less in rigor mortis for the past fifty years for all the wonderful insights generated by focusing a variety of social science lenses on the processes of knowledge creation and innovation, in the real world it was, and continues to be, the physical and life sciences who are fighting cold wars, revitalizing industries, bringing home the bacon, remaking society. They have all of the power and influence because they produce, and this power and influence confers upon them the right to be unreflective about why and how they do what they do.

Yet this license to cluelessness may be approaching its expiration date-not because the ideas emerging from science policy scholarship are gaining traction, but because the tensions built into the current system are becoming unavoidable, and the standard response-that all problems can be resolved with more funding, more velocity, more information, more stuff-begins to strain credulity.”

Read the whole thing here.