Strategic approaches to science and technology in development

Watson, Crawford, and Farley examine the ways in which science and technology (S&T) support poverty alleviation and economic development and how these themes have been given emphasis or short shrift in various areas of the World Bank's work. Central to their thesis is the now well-established argument that development will increasingly depend on a country's ability to understand, interpret, select, adapt, use, transmit, diffuse, produce, and commercialize scientific and technological knowledge in ways appropriate to its culture, aspirations, and level of development. The authors go beyond this tenet, analyzing the importance of S&T for development within specific sectors. They present policy options for enhancing the effectiveness of S&T systems in developing countries, review previous experience of the World Bank and other donors in supporting S&T, and suggest changes that the World Bank and its partners can adopt to increase the impact of the work currently undertaken in S&T. The authors'main messages are: 1) S&T has always been important for development, but the unprecedented pace of advancement of scientific knowledge is rapidly creating new opportunities for and threats to development. 2) Most developing countries are largely unprepared to deal with the changes that S&T advancement will bring. 3) The World Bank's numerous actions in various domains of S&T could be more effective in producing the needed capacity improvements in client countries. 4) The World Bank could have a greater impact if it paid increased attention to S&T in education, health, rural development, private sector development, and the environment. The strategy emphasizes four S&T policy areas: education and human resources development, the private sector, the public sector, and information communications technologies.Public Health Promotion,Environmental Economics&Policies,ICT Policy and Strategies,Decentralization,Health Economics&Finance,Environmental Economics&Policies,ICT Policy and Strategies,Health Economics&Finance,Poverty Assessment,Agricultural Research

Enforcing public data archiving policies in academic publishing: A study of ecology journals

To improve the quality and efficiency of research, groups within the scientific community seek to exploit the value of data sharing. Funders, institutions, and specialist organizations are developing and implementing strategies to encourage or mandate data sharing within and across disciplines, with varying degrees of success. Academic journals in ecology and evolution have adopted several types of public data archiving policies requiring authors to make data underlying scholarly manuscripts freely available. Yet anecdotes from the community and studies evaluating data availability suggest that these policies have not obtained the desired effects, both in terms of quantity and quality of available datasets. We conducted a qualitative, interview-based study with journal editorial staff and other stakeholders in the academic publishing process to examine how journals enforce data archiving policies. We specifically sought to establish who editors and other stakeholders perceive as responsible for ensuring data completeness and quality in the peer review process. Our analysis revealed little consensus with regard to how data archiving policies should be enforced and who should hold authors accountable for dataset submissions. Themes in interviewee responses included hopefulness that reviewers would take the initiative to review datasets and trust in authors to ensure the completeness and quality of their datasets. We highlight problematic aspects of these thematic responses and offer potential starting points for improvement of the public data archiving process.Comment: 35 pages, 1 figure, 1 tabl

Determining Adult Perceptions of Youth on Southern Region Ffa Nominating Committees

Southern region state FFA nominating committees utilize adults and students to elect state FFA officers. However, the role of the adult nominating committee members is up to the discretion of the state FFA nominating committee coordinators. In the nine states studied in the southern FFA region, five states utilized adults as voting members of the nominating committee, and four states utilized them as consultants. Adults completed a modified version of the Inventory of Adult Attitudes and Behaviors instrument, and the majority’s preferred style of working with students was “regarding youth as resources.” However, students had mixed feelings about working with adults. They explained they were excited to work with them, but as they began the nominating committee process, they felt their thoughts were not being heard by the adults. No statistically significant relationship existed between adult preferred styles and student character and connection

A qualitative study to investigate service user experience of participating in research

Service user and carer involvement in research and health services is mandated by policy and has been taken up with different degrees of success in the NHS. This study employs a phenomenological approach to consider the service user and carer experience of participating in a service evaluation of a health centre in the North West of England. This was a small-scale study nested within a larger knowledge transfer project. Semi-structured interviews were undertaken with members of the review team, comprising a service user and carer assuming research roles, as well as an academic, an NHS manager and a project coordinator. Data was subject to qualitative, phenomenological analysis. The service user and carer perspectives take centre stage in this thesis, but are framed by the perspectives of the other participants in the study. Findings account for the features and experiences of involvement as described by the participants and exemplify how they made sense of involvement practices. They are structured in three broad themes: Work/Occupation, Personal Identity/sense of self, and Purpose. Several subthemes reflect wider discussion around the key concepts. Work/Occupation comprises the sub-themes: Motivation/background, Professionalism, Experience transfer and Relations with staff. Personal identity/Sense has subthemes: Yearning for a different status, Duality of role and Fulfilment or reward. Finally, the Purpose theme was constituted by four subthemes including: For self/for others dichotomy, Opportunity, Gaining transferrable skills and Social relations/democratic. Notions of Professionalism were prominent in the participants’ narratives, both as perceived requirement and personal development opportunity. This contrasts with existing literature in the field of service user and care involvement on professionalism. Competition within a work context is seen as positive and motivating and is not seen as antithetical to cooperative ideals. Reflexivity is found to be an important added dimension for the participating service user and carer

Eye on Collaborative Creativity : Insights From Multiple-Person Mobile Gaze Tracking in the Context of Collaborative Design

Early Career WorkshopNon peer reviewe

Innovative Asia: Advancing the Knowledge-Based Economy - Highlights of the Forthcoming ADB Study Report

[Excerpt] The development of knowledge-based economies (KBEs) is both an imperative and an opportunity for developing Asia. It is an imperative to sustain high rates of growth in the future and an opportunity whereby emerging economies can draw from beneficial trending developments that may allow them to move faster to advance in global value chains and in position in world markets. Over the last quarter of a century, driven mostly by cheap labor, developing countries in Asia have seen unprecedented growth rates and contributions to the global economy. Sustaining Asia’s growth trajectory, however, requires developing economies to seek different approaches to economic growth and progress, especially if they aspire to move from the middle-income to the high-income level. KBE is an important platform that can enable them to sustain growth and even accelerate it. It is time for Asia to consolidate and accelerate its pace of growth. Asia is positioned in a unique moment in history with many advantages that can serve as a boost: to name a couple, an expanding middle of the pyramid—Asia is likely to hold 50% of the global middle class and 40% of the global consumer market by 2020; and the growing importance of intra-regional trade within Asia, increasing from 54% in 2001 to 58% in 2011. Many developing economies are well placed to assimilate frontier technologies into their manufacturing environment

Arts Integration as a Pathway to Unity in the Community: The (Ongoing) Journey of Pillsbury House + Theatre

This report is a 2013 study of how a nonprofit theater and a social service agency that happened to reside in the same building rediscovered their shared history as a 19th century Settlement House, and unified operations to become a 21st Century Center for Creativity and Community. In 2008, Pillsbury United Communities -- a network of five community centers, 70+ programs, and 8 business ventures in the Twin Cities -- made the unusual decision to hand over leadership of its largest facility, Pillsbury House Neighborhood Center (PHNC), to Faye Price and Noël Raymond, co-artistic directors of Pillsbury House Theatre. The theater had gained acclaim with almost two decades of professional productions reflecting contemporary social issues of relevance to its diverse South Minneapolis neighborhood. However, Price and Raymond had a larger vision to have high-quality arts underlie all of the Center's services to increase the individual and community creativity needed to tackle serious socio-economic challenges and revitalize the neighborhood. The journey is told through stories and interviews with more than 30 staff, artists, program participants, community and civic leaders, residents, and funders. It is supplemented by data from independent program evaluations from 2010-2013. The report (by veteran journalist and arts funder Nancy Fushan) documents not only what happens as the staff attempts to embed the arts in almost every aspect of the organization. It explores factors that contribute to success and thechallenges that informed further change and evolution. Pillsbury House + Theatre (PH+T), a center for creativity and community, shares lessons learned that may be of value to other nonprofit organizations that are contemplating a "re-imagination" of their work at this considerable scope and scale. The insights may also be of interest to artists, educators, evaluators and those in the human services and philanthropy fields