The Allure of Technology: How France and California Promoted Electric Vehicles to Reduce Urban Air Pollution

All advanced industrialized societies face the problem of air pollution produced by motor vehicles. In spite of striking improvements in internal combustion engine technology, air pollution in most urban areas is still measured at levels determined to be harmful to human health. Throughout the 1990s and beyond, California and France both chose to improve air quality by means of technological innovation, adopting legislation that promoted clean vehicles, prominently among them, electric vehicles (EVs). In California, policymakers chose a technology-forcing approach, setting ambitious goals (e.g., zero emission vehicles), establishing strict deadlines and issuing penalties for non-compliance. The policy process in California called for substantial participation from the public, the media, the academic community and the interest groups affected by the regulation. The automobile and oil industries bitterly contested the regulation, in public and in the courts. In contrast, in France the policy process was non-adversarial, with minimal public participation and negligible debate in academic circles. We argue that California's stringent regulation spurred the development of innovative hybrid and fuel cell vehicles more effectively than the French approach. However, in spite of the differences, both California and France have been unable to put a substantial number of EVs on the road. Our comparison offers some broad lessons about how policy developments within a culture influence both the development of technology and the impact of humans on the environment.Environmental policy, Electric vehicles, Air pollution, Technology policy, Sustainable transport

Genomics Era for Plants and Crop Species – Advances Made and Needed Tasks Ahead

Historically, unintentional plant selection and subsequent crop domestication, coupled with the need and desire to get more food and feed products, have resulted in the continuous development of plant breeding and genetics efforts. The progress made toward this goal elucidated plant genome compositions and led to decoding the full DNA sequences of plant genomes controlling the entire plant life. Plant genomics aims to develop high-throughput genome-wide-scale technologies, tools, and methodologies to elucidate the basics of genetic traits/characteristics, genetic diversities, and by-product production; to understand the phenotypic development throughout plant ontogenesis with genetic by environmental interactions; to map important loci in the genome; and to accelerate crop improvement. Plant genomics research efforts have continuously increased in the past 30 years due to the availability of cost-effective, high-throughput DNA sequencing platforms that resulted in fully sequenced 100 plant genomes with broad implications for every aspect of plant biology research and application. These technological advances, however, also have generated many unexpected challenges and grand tasks ahead. In this introductory chapter, I aimed briefly to summarize some advances made in plant genomics studies in the past three decades, plant genome sequencing efforts, current state-of-the-art technological developments of genomics era, and some of current grand challenges and needed tasks ahead in the genomics and post-genomics era. I also highlighted the related book chapters contributed by different authors in this book

Opportunities to accelerate extracellular vesicle research with cell-free synthetic biology

Extracellular vesicles (EVs) are lipid-membrane nanoparticles that are shed or secreted by many different cell types. The extracellular vesicle (EV) research community has rapidly expanded in recent years and are leading efforts to deepen our understanding of EV biological functions in human physiology and pathology. These insights are also providing a foundation on which future EV-based diagnostics and therapeutics are poised to positively impact human health. However, current limitations in our understanding of EV heterogeneity, cargo loading mechanisms and the nascent development of EV metrology are all areas that have been identified as important scientific challenges. The field of synthetic biology is also contending with the challenge of understanding biological complexity as it seeks to combine multidisciplinary scientific knowledge with engineering principles, to build useful and robust biotechnologies in a responsible manner. Within this context, cell-free systems have emerged as a powerful suite of in vitro biotechnologies that can be employed to interrogate fundamental biological mechanisms, including the study of aspects of EV biogenesis, or to act as a platform technology for medical biosensors and therapeutic biomanufacturing. Cell-free gene expression (CFE) systems also enable in vitro protein production, including membrane proteins, and could conceivably be exploited to rationally engineer, or manufacture, EVs loaded with bespoke molecular cargoes for use in foundational or translational EV research. Our pilot data herein, also demonstrates the feasibility of cell-free EV engineering. In this perspective we discuss the opportunities and challenges for accelerating EV research and healthcare applications with cell-free synthetic biology

HOMMEXX 1.0: a performance-portable atmospheric dynamical core for the Energy Exascale Earth System Model

We present an architecture-portable and performant implementation of the atmospheric dynamical core (High-Order Methods Modeling Environment, HOMME) of the Energy Exascale Earth System Model (E3SM). The original Fortran implementation is highly performant and scalable on conventional architectures using the Message Passing Interface (MPI) and Open MultiProcessor (OpenMP) programming models. We rewrite the model in C++ and use the Kokkos library to express on-node parallelism in a largely architecture-independent implementation. Kokkos provides an abstraction of a compute node or device, layout-polymorphic multidimensional arrays, and parallel execution constructs. The new implementation achieves the same or better performance on conventional multicore computers and is portable to GPUs. We present performance data for the original and new implementations on multiple platforms, on up to 5400 compute nodes, and study several aspects of the single- and multi-node performance characteristics of the new implementation on conventional CPU (e.g., Intel Xeon), many core CPU (e.g., Intel Xeon Phi Knights Landing), and Nvidia V100 GPU.</p

Argonne Leadership Computing Facility 2011 annual report : Shaping future supercomputing.

The ALCF's Early Science Program aims to prepare key applications for the architecture and scale of Mira and to solidify libraries and infrastructure that will pave the way for other future production applications. Two billion core-hours have been allocated to 16 Early Science projects on Mira. The projects, in addition to promising delivery of exciting new science, are all based on state-of-the-art, petascale, parallel applications. The project teams, in collaboration with ALCF staff and IBM, have undertaken intensive efforts to adapt their software to take advantage of Mira's Blue Gene/Q architecture, which, in a number of ways, is a precursor to future high-performance-computing architecture. The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) enables transformative science that solves some of the most difficult challenges in biology, chemistry, energy, climate, materials, physics, and other scientific realms. Users partnering with ALCF staff have reached research milestones previously unattainable, due to the ALCF's world-class supercomputing resources and expertise in computation science. In 2011, the ALCF's commitment to providing outstanding science and leadership-class resources was honored with several prestigious awards. Research on multiscale brain blood flow simulations was named a Gordon Bell Prize finalist. Intrepid, the ALCF's BG/P system, ranked No. 1 on the Graph 500 list for the second consecutive year. The next-generation BG/Q prototype again topped the Green500 list. Skilled experts at the ALCF enable researchers to conduct breakthrough science on the Blue Gene system in key ways. The Catalyst Team matches project PIs with experienced computational scientists to maximize and accelerate research in their specific scientific domains. The Performance Engineering Team facilitates the effective use of applications on the Blue Gene system by assessing and improving the algorithms used by applications and the techniques used to implement those algorithms. The Data Analytics and Visualization Team lends expertise in tools and methods for high-performance, post-processing of large datasets, interactive data exploration, batch visualization, and production visualization. The Operations Team ensures that system hardware and software work reliably and optimally; system tools are matched to the unique system architectures and scale of ALCF resources; the entire system software stack works smoothly together; and I/O performance issues, bug fixes, and requests for system software are addressed. The User Services and Outreach Team offers frontline services and support to existing and potential ALCF users. The team also provides marketing and outreach to users, DOE, and the broader community

The Argonne Leadership Computing Facility 2010 annual report.

Researchers found more ways than ever to conduct transformative science at the Argonne Leadership Computing Facility (ALCF) in 2010. Both familiar initiatives and innovative new programs at the ALCF are now serving a growing, global user community with a wide range of computing needs. The Department of Energy's (DOE) INCITE Program remained vital in providing scientists with major allocations of leadership-class computing resources at the ALCF. For calendar year 2011, 35 projects were awarded 732 million supercomputer processor-hours for computationally intensive, large-scale research projects with the potential to significantly advance key areas in science and engineering. Argonne also continued to provide Director's Discretionary allocations - 'start up' awards - for potential future INCITE projects. And DOE's new ASCR Leadership Computing (ALCC) Program allocated resources to 10 ALCF projects, with an emphasis on high-risk, high-payoff simulations directly related to the Department's energy mission, national emergencies, or for broadening the research community capable of using leadership computing resources. While delivering more science today, we've also been laying a solid foundation for high performance computing in the future. After a successful DOE Lehman review, a contract was signed to deliver Mira, the next-generation Blue Gene/Q system, to the ALCF in 2012. The ALCF is working with the 16 projects that were selected for the Early Science Program (ESP) to enable them to be productive as soon as Mira is operational. Preproduction access to Mira will enable ESP projects to adapt their codes to its architecture and collaborate with ALCF staff in shaking down the new system. We expect the 10-petaflops system to stoke economic growth and improve U.S. competitiveness in key areas such as advancing clean energy and addressing global climate change. Ultimately, we envision Mira as a stepping-stone to exascale-class computers that will be faster than petascale-class computers by a factor of a thousand. Pete Beckman, who served as the ALCF's Director for the past few years, has been named director of the newly created Exascale Technology and Computing Institute (ETCi). The institute will focus on developing exascale computing to extend scientific discovery and solve critical science and engineering problems. Just as Pete's leadership propelled the ALCF to great success, we know that that ETCi will benefit immensely from his expertise and experience. Without question, the future of supercomputing is certainly in good hands. I would like to thank Pete for all his effort over the past two years, during which he oversaw the establishing of ALCF2, the deployment of the Magellan project, increases in utilization, availability, and number of projects using ALCF1. He managed the rapid growth of ALCF staff and made the facility what it is today. All the staff and users are better for Pete's efforts

Studier av HRM og ansattes ytringsrom gjennom organisasjonsmessig merkevarebygging

After decades of research there still are few studies which draw lines between research on HRM, employee voice and organizational branding. Such an academic cross-fertilization is offered by this dissertation, as a core argument in this work is that scholarship value is generated by exploring the three themes in the context of each other, and to see them as trajectories crossing each other. The intervowen nature of the present research is reflected in the main research question for the dissertation: What is the relationship between organizational branding, HRM, and employee voice in work organizations? Based on this, four sub-research questions are formulated: (i) What are the primary intra-organizational facilitators for active employee strategy support, and how do these facilitators conform to the control-commitment continuum? (ii) What is the role of HRM in reputation management, and what are the implications of reputation oriented HRM for employee voice? (iii) How do managers in public sector organizations experience and handle the tension between empowering employees as dedicated brand ambassadors while at the same time regulating their voice, and what are the possible implications for the public interest? (iv) What kind of HRM approach, as perceived by employees, facilitates internal branding, and specifically, employee brand support? The research questions are explored and answered in four academic articles. The first paper, titled "Trust and shout: HRM as facilitator for active strategy support", is based on a systematic review of the literature on factors which facilitate employees’ active support of strategies decided on by management in organizations, including branding strategies. Identified facilitators are analyzed in light of HRM approach. 12 main facilitators are identified, of which the most prevalent ones, albeit not all, gravitate towards the commitment side of the control-commitment continuum. Thus, commitment-gravitating HRM practices are found to be most effective in getting employees to actively support strategy in general, and branding strategies in particular. In the second paper, titled "When reputation management is people management: Implications for employee voice", 30 interviews are analyzed to explore the tension between organizational desires for a flattering external reputation and the risk of negative communication about the organization by employees, termed prohibitive voice. Rooted in the theoretical span between trusting employees to act as brand ambassadors and distrusting them enough to impose voice restrictions, findings reveal that organizations handle the tension with coercive HRM and technocratic control, which manifested itself as restrictions on the use of voice, and not with the brand ambassador approach. The HRM function is being utilized to protect the desired reputation, which entails that reputation management in reality is people management. Relatedly, the third paper, which is based on interviews with principals in public sector upper secondary schools in Oslo, reveals that brand ambassadorship seems to be an unrealistic approach in organizations exposed to marketization, in this case public sector schools. As a consequence, internal branding, usually an approach for ”selling” the brand to employees in order for them to ”sell” the brand to external stakeholders, is not the preferred approach by school executives. It is being trumped by voice restrictions in the form of prior message control imposed on teachers, all in order to build and protect the desired brand image. Organizations exposed to high market pressure where the brand is crucial and much is at stake do not seem allow for the trust needed to stimulate brand ambassadorship. The outcome of the restrictive approach is public silence by teachers in general, in that they shy away from taking part in public debate due to fear of sanctions. This takes part on the expense of the public interest, which, arguably, is that public sector organizations in general and public sector schools in particular shall serve the general public in a satisfactory way. Moving from a qualitative to a quantitative approach, the relationships between HRM approach, leader-member exchange (LMX), and different manifestations of employee brand support are explored in the fourth paper, titled "Mind anchors and heart grips: The role of HRM approach and LMX in internal branding". Based on data from employees at a public sector hospital, a mediated and moderated path model was tested. Findings unveil positive relationships between both high-commitment HRM and LMX and employee brand support measured through reputation strategy embeddedness, brand-congruent behaviour, and brand development participation. As hypothesized, the relationships are mediated by organizational commitment. LMX moderates the relationship between high-commitment HRM and reputation strategy embeddedness, but not between high-commitment HRM and brand-congruent behaviour and brand development participation, respectively, and none of these relationships when they are mediated by organizational commitment. Analyzed in light of internal branding theory, the findings suggest that it is mainly a commitment- leaning HRM approach, not a control-leaning approach, which facilitates internal branding. Findings also suggest that high quality LMX relationships function as facilitators for successful internal branding.Få forskere har trukket linjer mellom forskning på HRM, ansattes ytringsrom (employee voice) og organisasjonsmessig merkevarebygging (branding). Denne avhandlingen bøter på nettopp dette, i og med at jeg studerer de tre temaene i lys av hverandre. En slik interdisiplinær tilnærming er reflektert i den overordnede problemstillingen for avhandlingen: Hva er forholdet mellom organisasjonsmessig merkevarebygging, HRM og ansattes ytringsrom i organisasjoner? Basert på den overordnede problemstillingen følger fire forskningsspørsmål som avhandlingen søker å gi svar til: (i) Hva er de primære intra-organisasjonsmessige fasilitatorene for at ansatte aktivt støtter virksomhetens strategi, og hvor står disse fasilitatorene i forhold til kontinuumet mellom kotrnoll og forpliktelse i HRM-forskning? (ii) Hvilken rolle har HRM i håndteringen av organisasjoners omdømme, og hva er implikasjonene av omdømmefokusert HRM for ansattes ytringsrom? (iii) Hvordan opplever og håndterer ledere i organisasjoner i offentlig sektor spenningen mellom det å gi ansatte tillit som merkevareambassadører samtidig som de regulerer ansattes ytringer, og hva er implikasjonene av dette for hensynet til samfunnets beste? (iv) Hvilken HRM- tilnærming, erfart og opplevd av ansatte, legger best til rette for intern merkevarebygging (internal branding), og spesielt, for ansattes oppslutning om og støtte av organisasjonens merkevare? Disse forskningsspørsmålene er utforsket og besvart i fire vitenskapelige artikler. Den første artikkelen, som har tittelen "Trust and shout: HRM as facilitator for active strategy support", er basert på en systematisk gjennomgang av litteraturen på fasiliterende faktorer for ansattes aktive oppslutning om og støtte av strategi initiert av ledelsen i virksomheten der de jobber, herunder strategier for merkevarebygging. Identifiserte fasilitatorer blir analysert i lys av ulike HR-tilnærminger. 12 hovedfasilitatorer blir identifisert. Av disse graviterer de fleste, men ikke alle, mot forpliktelse, altså mot forpliktelsessiden i kontroll-forpliktelse-kontinuumet. Fasilitatorene som er påvist i flest studier graviterer også mot forpliktelse. Følgelig ser det ut til at forpliktelsesbasert HRM fungerer best og er mest effektiv når det gjelder å få ansatte til aktivt å slutte opp om og støtte strategi generelt, og merkevarestrategier spesielt. I den andre artikkelen, kalt "When reputation management is people management: Implications for employee voice", ble data fra 30 intervjuer analysert for å utforske spenningen mellom organisasjoners ønske om et fordelaktig eksternt omdømme og risikoen for negative og kritiske ytringer (prohibitive voice) om organisasjonen i eksterne fora. Studien tar utgangspunkt i det teoretiske spennet mellom det å la ansatte agere som merkevareambassadører, som er basert på tillit, og innføre restriksjoner på ytringer, noe som er basert på mistillit. Studien indikerer at organisasjoner håndterer denne spenningen med kontrollorientert HRM og såkalt teknokratisk kontroll, noe som her manifesterer seg i restriksjoner på ansattes muligheter til å ytre seg. Spenningen håndteres i mindre grad ved å gi ansatte tillit som merkevareambassadører. En implikasjon av dette er at HR-funksjonen brukes for å beskytte organisasjoners omdømme, noe som innebærer at håndtering av omdømme ofte er håndtering og ledelse av mennesker. Artikkel nummer tre, som er basert på intervjuer med rektorer ved offentlige videregående skoler, tyder på at merkevareambassadør-tilnærmingen ikke er realistisk i organisasjoner eksponert for marketisering; her offentlige videregående skoler i Oslo. En konsekvens av dette er at intern merkevarebygging (internal branding), som er en strategi for å “selge” organisasjonens merkevare til ansatte slik at de i sin tur vil “selge” den til eksterne interessenter, ikke er den foretrukne tilnærmingen for skoleledere. I stedet foretrekker skoleledere restriksjoner på eksterne ytringer på føre var-vis, altså kontroll av læreres mulige ytringer før de blir ytret – alt for å bygge og beskytte skolenes ønskede merkevare. Organisasjoner eksponert for markedsmessig press der merkevaren er essensiell og mye står på spill demonstrerer ikke den nødendige tilliten til ansatte for å la dem være merkevareambassadører. Konsekvensen av denne restriktive strategien er offentlig taushet fra lærere, i og med at de ikke deltar i offentlig debatt og ordskifter av frykt for sanksjoner fra skoleledelsen. Dette går på bekostning av det som er en sentral oppgave for organisasjoner i offentlig sektor generelt og offentlige skoler spesielt, nemlig å tjene offentlighetens og samfunnets interesser. I den fjerde artikkelen, som baserer seg på kvantitative analyser av survey-data fra ansatte ved stort offentlig sykehus, studeres forholdet mellom HRM-tilnærming, forholdet mellom ansatt og leder (leader-member exchange) og ulike uttrykk for ansattes oppslutning om og støtte av organisasjonens merkevare. I artikkelen, som har tittelen "Mind anchors and heart grips: The role of HRM approach and LMX in internal branding", analyseres data med stianalyse. En modell med en mellomliggende variabel (mediator) og mulig samspill mellom to variabler blir testet. Resultatene viser at at det er statistisk signifikante sammenhenger mellom både forpliktelsesorientert HRM (high-commitment HRM) og leader-member exchange (LMX) og tre uttrykk for ansattes oppslutning om og støtte av organisasjonens merkevare (reputation strategy embeddedness, brand-congruent behaviour, and brand development participation). Som antatt er sammenhengene mediert av organisasjonsmessig forpliktelse (organizational commitment). Samspill mellom forpliktelsesorientert HRM og LMX gjør at LMX modererer forholdet mellom forpliktelsesbasert HRM og reputation strategy embeddedness, men ikke mellom forpliktelsesbasert HRM og variablene brand-congruent behaviour og brand development participation. LMX moderer ingen av disse forholdene når de medieres av organisasjonsforpliktelse (organizational commitment). Analysert i lys av teori om intern merkevarebygging (internal branding) tyder funnene på at forpliktelsesbasert HRM fasiliterer intern merkevarebygging. LMX-forhold av høy kvalitet ser også ut til å legge til rette for suksessfull intern merkevarebygging

Metabolite biosensors for cell factory development

Through synergy with natural sciences and engineering disciplines, biotechnology has\ua0become a broad, interdisciplinary, scientific field with many applications. One such\ua0application is the sustainable production of industrially relevant products using living\ua0systems such as microorganisms. Transforming microorganisms to cell factories is, however,\ua0a labour-intensive and cost-ineffective process, requiring many years of extensive\ua0research. Several fields together known as systems metabolic engineering, including\ua0synthetic biology, have greatly facilitated the process of customizing microorganisms\ua0to benefit human interests. Among several emerging tools are metabolite biosensors,\ua0which can be employed in high-throughput screening endeavours for identifying productive\ua0cells and in dynamic pathway regulation for optimizing metabolic systems.\ua0Developing and engineering metabolite biosensors to fit a certain application is, however,\ua0challenging.This thesis focuses on different aspects of utilizing and engineering metabolite-responsive\ua0transcription factor-based biosensors for facilitating the development of\ua0Saccharomyces cerevisiae as a cell factory. To that end, we improved the dynamic\ua0range of a malonyl-CoA-responsive biosensor by i) evaluating different binding site\ua0locations of the bacterial transcription factor FapR within different yeast promoters\ua0and by ii) using a chimeric transcription factor based on a native repressor system\ua0from S. cerevisiae. Furthermore, we suggest the possibility of using the CRISPR (Clustered\ua0Regulatory Interspaced Short Palindromic Repeats)/Cas9 system to facilitate\ua0biosensor development by guiding binding site positioning. We also employed an acyl-CoA-responsive biosensor based on the bacterial transcription factor FadR to screen for\ua0genes boosting the fatty acyl-CoA levels, which are precursors for industrially relevant\ua0compounds such as fatty alcohols. The possibility of developing fatty acid-responsive\ua0biosensors based on other transcription factors, including the endogenous transcription\ua0factor Mga2, has also been addressed. Finally, we looked into the potential of\ua0developing an alkane-responsive biosensor based on a system from Yarrowia lipolytica.\ua0Overall, this thesis provides answers, discussions and potential future directions on\ua0using and engineering metabolite biosensors for cell factory development