APS200 project – the place of science in policy development in the public service

The report aims to achieve better government outcomes through facilitating the effective use of scientific input in policy development in the public service. The Australian Public Service (APS) is increasingly tasked with solving complex policy problems that require significant input from science in order to address them fully and appropriately. Policy making within the APS needs to be based on a rigorous, evidence‐based approach that routinely and systematically draws upon science as a key element. The Australian Government’s investment in science, research and innovation capacity supports a long‐term vision to address national challenges and open up new opportunities. This investment is also significant, with the Commonwealth providing $8.9 billion to support science, research and innovation in 2012‐13. There is an opportunity to harness this investment to address complex societal challenges, by ensuring that scientific research and advice is more effectively incorporated in the development of evidence‐based policy. There is an opportunity for policy makers to make better use of the science capacity provided by our science institutions, including publicly funded research agencies and other science agencies, universities, Cooperative Research Centres and Medical Research Institutes. There is also an opportunity to capitalise on the willingness of scientists to contribute their research results to the policy making process

Science on television : how? Like that!

This study explores the presence of science programs on the Flemish public broadcaster between 1997 and 2002 in terms of length, science domains, target groups, production mode, and type of broadcast. Our data show that for nearly all variables 2000 can be marked as a year in which the downward spiral for science on television was reversed. These results serve as a case study to discuss the influence of public policy and other possible motives for changes in science programming, as to gain a clearer insight into the factors that influence whether and how science programs are broadcast on television. Three factors were found to be crucial in this respect: 1) public service philosophy, 2) a strong governmental science policy providing structural government support, and 3) the reflection of a social discourse that articulates a need for more hard sciences

Industrial Policy, Innovation Policy, and Japanese Competitiveness

Japan faces significant challenges in encouraging innovation and entrepreneurship. Attempts to formally model past industrial policy interventions uniformly uncover little, if any, positive impact on productivity, growth, or welfare. The evidence indicates that most resource flows went to large, politically influential “backward” sectors, suggesting that political economy considerations may be central to the apparent ineffectiveness of Japanese industrial policy. Rather than traditional industrial or science and technology policy, financial and labor market reforms appear more promising. As a group, Japan’s industrial firms are competitive relative to their foreign counterparts. Japan falls behind in the heavily regulated service sector. The problems are due less to a lack of industrial policy than to an excess of regulation. Japan may have more to gain through restructuring the lagging service sector than by expending resources in pursuit of marginal gains in the industrial sector.Japan, industrial policy, innovation policy

Epistemic Communities Facing a New Type of Agora? Centres of Science, Technology and Innovation as Defining the New Research Landscape in Finland

We analyse the question of what role and positions epistemic communities have in the agora, and more specifically in the new mediating organizations that are established at the interface of the state, businesses and universities. These new organizational structures embody the present politics of knowledge that reign in national science policy globally. The new organizational structures, as potentially new agoras, also epitomize several of the changes that have taken place in the science and industry landscape of the past decades all over Europe and the world. We are interested in understanding how epistemic communities are situated vis-�-vis agora in knowledge production. The empirical example comes from Finland, where major new institutional reforms in science policy, the new strategic centres of science, technology and innovations, have been implemented to create possibilities for new knowledge creation and new product and service development. These centres of science, technology and innovations (CSTIs) were originally planned as functioning agoras, open, simultaneous and joint platforms for the state, businesses, researchers and universities. In the article we show how the organizational structure and decision making processes adopted in the CSTIs have changed the original idea of agora, thus changing also the position of epistemic communities involved. In the process, we evaluate Nowotny\'s interpretation of agora.Epistemic Communities, Agora, Science Policy, Finland, Research Landscape, STS Studies, Critical Research, Qualitative Study, Company, Power

Synthetic Controls: A New Approach to Evaluating Interventions

Synthetic control methods are a novel approach to comparative case study research using observational data. Though developed within political science, the methods can potentially be applied to a wide range of evaluation problems in economics, public health, social policy and other disciplines. In the traditional approach, an area in which a new or redesigned service is being implemented is compared with another ‘control’ area (in which there is no change) and statistical adjustment used to account for any differences between areas that might bias the comparison. In the new approach, a synthetic control is derived using data on past trends in all potentially comparable areas, providing a more robust basis for identifying the impact of the service change. Synthetic control methods may be a valuable addition to the range of techniques available for non-randomised evaluations of social, economic and public health interventions. To date there have been few applications in a UK context, and none in Scotland. Published evidence suggests considerable potential to apply synthetic controls to public service innovations at NHS Board, local authority or Community Planning Partnership level, and may widen the range of policy and practice changes that can usefully be evaluated

Capital Services in U.S. Agriculture: Concepts, Comparisons, and the Treatment of Interest Rates

This is a substantially revised version of “Capital Service Flows: Concepts and Comparisons of Alternative Measures in U.S. Agriculture.” Andersen, Matt A.; Alston, Julian M.; Pardey, Philip G., St. Paul, MN: University of Minnesota, Department of Applied Economics; University of Minnesota, International Science and Technology Practice and Policy (InSTePP), 2009. (Staff paper P09-8; InSTePP paper 09-03)Agricultural Finance,

Co-Evolving Expertise in Environmental Policy Debates: Rethinking Values and Participants through an Ecological Model of Rhetoric

Environmental policy controversies reflect a struggle between “subjective” (human) and “objective” (scientific) knowledge, which a more rhetorical science could reconcile. I draw from actor network theory and rhetorical identification to suggest a model of ecological rhetoric, which I apply to two science policy projects: ecosystem service markets and adaptive management

Science and Technology (S&T) Legislative Landscape: Mapping State-Level S&T Legislation in the US

Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2009This presentation was part of the session : Policy Actors and RelationshipsOver the last four years, the Georgia Tech Research Institute's Office of Policy Analysis and Research has supported the Georgia General Assembly's Science and Technology (S&T) legislative committees with policy analysis and expert testimony. This role provides OPAR a unique perspective on the S&T policy agenda in Georgia. In our duties, we are often called upon to prepare policy bulletins on S&T topics, including health information technology, biotechnology for economic development, and science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) education. Because this research often results in comparative analysis with other US states, we recognized an opportunity not only to systematize this research, but also to provide a valuable service to the S&T policy community. The Science and Technology Legislative Landscape Project is an effort to do so. This research will inform state-level policymakers of nationwide trends in science and technology policy

Process Management in Distributed Operating Systems

As part of designing and building the Amoeba distributed operating system, we have come up with a simple set of mechanisms for process management that allows downloading process migration, checkpointing, remote debugging and emulation of alien operating system interfaces.\ud The basic process management facilities are realized by the Amoeba Kernel and can be augmented by user-space services: Debug Service, Load-Balancing Service, Unix-Emulation Service, Checkpoint Service, etc.\ud The Amoeba Kernel can produce a representation of the state of a process which can be given to another Kernel where it is accepted for continued execution. This state consists of the memory contents in the form of a collection of segments, and a Process Descriptor which contains the additional state, program counters, stack pointers, system call state, etc.\ud Careful separation of mechanism and policy has resulted in a compact set of Kernel operations for process creation and management. A collection of user-space services provides process management policies and a simple interface for application programs.\ud In this paper we shall describe the mechanisms as they are being implemented in the Amoeba Distributed System at the Centre for Mathematics and Computer Science in Amsterdam. We believe that the mechanisms described here can also apply to other distributed systems

Outputs of innovation systems: a European perspective

This paper focuses upon the performance of innovation systems from an output perspective. On it, we try to characterize some European countries according to seven innovation output indicators in the manufacturing and service sectors. The data are gathered from the Community Innovation Surveys between 1996 and 2006. Innovation performance measurement is considered as increasingly interesting by several scholars during last years. It is also important as basis for the design and implementation of innovation policies as the comparison among countries allows policy failures to be detected. The approach followed in this paper could also provide insights when applied to developing countries, which are already concerned with the collection of science and technology indicatorsinnovation systems; output indicators; community innovation survey; manufacturing sector; service sector