(Swiss) GraphoLearn: an app-based tool to support beginning readers.

We assessed the Swiss-German version of GraphoLearn, a computer game designed to support reading by training grapheme-phoneme correspondences. A group of 34 children at risk for dyslexia trained three times a week during 14 weeks, on top of their standard school instruction. The sample was divided into two groups of 18 and 16 children, who started training at either the middle or the end of first grade. We found beneficial training effects in pseudoword reading in both training groups and for rapid automatized naming skills in the group that trained earlier. Our results suggest that both the efficiency in phonological decoding and rapid access to verbal representations are susceptible to facilitation by GraphoLearn. These findings confirm the utility of the training software as a tool to support school instruction and reading-related abilities in beginning readers. We discuss ideas to improve the content and outcomes of future versions of the training software.

From the archives of scientific diplomacy: science and the shared interests of Samuel Hartlib's London and Frederick Clodius's Gottorf.

Many historians have traced the accumulation of scientific archives via communication networks. Engines for communication in early modernity have included trade, the extrapolitical Republic of Letters, religious enthusiasm, and the centralization of large emerging information states. The communication between Samuel Hartlib, John Dury, Duke Friedrich III of Gottorf-Holstein, and his key agent in England, Frederick Clodius, points to a less obvious but no less important impetus--the international negotiations of smaller states. Smaller states shaped communication networks in an international (albeit politically and religiously slanted) direction. Their networks of negotiation contributed to the internationalization of emerging science through a political and religious concept of shared interest. While interest has been central to social studies of science, interest itself has not often been historicized within the history of science. This case study demonstrates the co-production of science and society by tracing how period concepts of interest made science international.

Hermetic atomism: Christian Adolph Balduin (1632-1682), Aurum Aurae, and the 1674 phosphor.

The synthesis of phosphors, or light-bearing matter, figured largely among the activities of early scientific societies and within the first scientific journals. They were prestige objects during the formative institutionalisation of experimental natural philosophy. Nevertheless, early phosphors have often appeared within the historiography of chemistry as a throwback to an earlier era. They have been represented as a fundamental epistemic and theoretical divide between a mystical alchemy (exemplified by Christian Adolph Balduin) and modern chemistry (prefigured by progressives such as Robert Boyle). The parallel phosphoric researches of Boyle and Balduin belie this divide. Recovering the theoretical context of Balduin's phosphor can both resituate it in relation to phosphoric research of the 1670s and 1680s, as well as further illuminate the intellectual sources and development of chymical atomism.

Nero and the last stalk of Silphion: collecting extinct nature in early modern Europe.

Many studies of early modern natural history focus upon observational, empirical techniques. Early moderns also contended with entities which could no longer be observed because they no longer existed. Although it is often assumed that extinction only emerged as a concept in the eighteenth century, the concept of natural loss appeared, often unproblematically, in areas outside natural philosophy. A survey of discussions of the extinct plant silphion across Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries shows that the possibility of natural loss was well aired. Paper technologies for collecting extinct nature ran parallel to investigations of newly found nature, and thus can place the latter in a new light. Although ideas of natural mutability often drew on ideas of historical or political change rather than philosophical concepts of natural constancy, techniques developed for extinct nature, such as the list of lost things, remained influential for the research agendas of naturalists.

Mining Tacitus: secrets of empire, nature and art in the reason of state.

A new political practice, the 'reason of state', informed the ends and practices of natural study in the late sixteenth century. Informed by the study of the Roman historian Tacitus, political writers gathered 'secrets of empire' from both history and travel. Following the economic reorientation of 'reason of state' by Giovanni Botero (1544-1617), such secrets came to include bodies of useful particulars concerning nature and art collected by an expanding personnel of intelligencers. A comparison between various writers describing wide-scale collections, such as Botero, Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Jakob Bornitz (1560-1625) and Matthias Bernegger (1582-1640), reveals that seventeenth-century natural intelligencers across Europe not only were analogous to political intelligencers, but also were sometimes one and the same. Those seeking political prudence cast themselves as miners, prying precious particulars from the recesses of history, experience and disparate disciplines, including mathematics, alchemy and natural philosophy. The seventeenth-century practice of combining searches for secrets of empire, nature and art contests a frequent historiographical divide between empirical science and Tacitism or reason of state. It also points to the ways political cunning shaped the management of information for both politics and the study of nature and art.

The "New World of Sciences". The temporality of the research agenda and the unending ambitions of science.

Lists foreground multiplicity: both of objects to be pursued and, for distant objects, of far-flung networks enabling their pursuit. The future-oriented or projective list stretches such networks not only around the world but forward through time. Research agendas are one kind of future-oriented, projective list. Sketching how such lists have functioned over time, from Francis Bacon's "The New World of Sciences, or Desiderata" to today's desiderata lists, suggests how an early modern model of imperial expansion has shaped, in unintended ways, a scientific rhetoric of collaborative advance on shared targets.