The National Nanotechnology Initiative: Supplement to the President’s 2017 Budget

This Supplement to the President’s Budget is the annual report of the National Nanotechnology Initiative (NNI), a partnership of 20 Federal agencies and departments with activities in nanotechnology research and development (R&D), policy, and regulation. Since the inception of the NNI in 2001, participating agencies have invested nearly 24 billion (including the President’s 2017 Budget request) in fundamental and applied nanotechnology R&D; technology transfer; world-class characterization, testing, and fabrication facilities; education and workforce development; and efforts directed at understanding and controlling the environmental, health, and safety (EHS) aspects of nanotechnology. In 2015, Federal agencies invested a total of 1.5 billion in nanotechnology-related activities. The 2017 request calls for a total investment of over $1.4 billion, affirming the important role nanotechnology continues to play in the Administration’s innovation agenda. This report highlights accomplishments over the past year, discusses activities currently underway, and outlines plans for how agencies will work both in dividually and collectively in 2017 to build upon these accomplishments and further advance the goals of the NNI

(at)america.jp: Identity, nationalism, and power on the Internet, 1969-2000

america.jp explores identity, nationalism, and power on the Internet between 1969 and 2000 through a cultural analysis of Internet code and the creative processes behind it. The dissertation opens with an examination of a real-time Internet Blues jam that linked Japanese and American musicians between Tokyo and Mississippi in 1999. The technological, cultural, and linguistic uncertainties that characterized the Internet jam, combined with the inventive reactions of the musicians who participated, help to introduce the fundamental conceptual question of the dissertation: is code a cultural product and if so can the Internet be considered a distinctly American technology?;A comparative study of the Internet\u27s origins in the United States and Japan finds that code is indeed a cultural entity but that it is a product not of one nation, but of many. A cultural critique of the Internet\u27s domain name conventions explores the heavily-gendered creation of code and the institutional power that supports it. An ethnography of the Internet\u27s managing organization, The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), investigates conflicts and identity formation within and among nations at a time when new Internet technologies have blurred humans\u27 understanding of geographic boundaries. In the year 2000, an effort to prevent United States domination of ICANN produced unintended consequences: disputes about the definition of geographic regions and an eruption of anxiety, especially in China, that the Asian seat on the ICANN board would be dominated by Japan. These incidents indicate that the Internet simultaneously destabilizes identity and ossifies it. In this paradoxical situation, cultures and the people in them are forced to reconfigure the boundaries that circumscribe who they think they are

The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies

"The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has played a remarkable role in the creation new transformative technologies, revolutionizing defense with drones and precision-guided munitions, and transforming civilian life with portable GPS receivers, voice-recognition software, self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and, most famously, the ARPANET and its successor, the Internet. Other parts of the U.S. Government and some foreign governments have tried to apply the ‘DARPA model’ to help develop valuable new technologies. But how and why has DARPA succeeded? Which features of its operation and environment contribute to this success? And what lessons does its experience offer for other U.S. agencies and other governments that want to develop and demonstrate their own ‘transformative technologies’? This book is a remarkable collection of leading academic research on DARPA from a wide range of perspectives, combining to chart an important story from the Agency’s founding in the wake of Sputnik, to the current attempts to adapt it to use by other federal agencies. Informative and insightful, this guide is essential reading for political and policy leaders, as well as researchers and students interested in understanding the success of this agency and the lessons it offers to others.

The DARPA Model for Transformative Technologies

"The U.S. Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has played a remarkable role in the creation new transformative technologies, revolutionizing defense with drones and precision-guided munitions, and transforming civilian life with portable GPS receivers, voice-recognition software, self-driving cars, unmanned aerial vehicles, and, most famously, the ARPANET and its successor, the Internet. Other parts of the U.S. Government and some foreign governments have tried to apply the ‘DARPA model’ to help develop valuable new technologies. But how and why has DARPA succeeded? Which features of its operation and environment contribute to this success? And what lessons does its experience offer for other U.S. agencies and other governments that want to develop and demonstrate their own ‘transformative technologies’? This book is a remarkable collection of leading academic research on DARPA from a wide range of perspectives, combining to chart an important story from the Agency’s founding in the wake of Sputnik, to the current attempts to adapt it to use by other federal agencies. Informative and insightful, this guide is essential reading for political and policy leaders, as well as researchers and students interested in understanding the success of this agency and the lessons it offers to others.

Negotiating Internet Governance

What is at stake for how the Internet continues to evolve is the preservation of its integrity as a single network. In practice, its governance is neither centralised nor unitary; it is piecemeal and fragmented, with authoritative decision-making coming from different sources simultaneously: governments, businesses, international organisations, technical and academic experts, and civil society. Historically, the conditions for their interaction were rarely defined beyond basic technical coordination, due at first to the academic freedom granted to the researchers developing the network and, later on, to the sheer impossibility of controlling mushrooming Internet initiatives. Today, the search for global norms and rules for the Internet continues, be it for cybersecurity or artificial intelligence, amid processes fostering the supremacy of national approaches or the vitality of a pluralist environment with various stakeholders represented. This book provides an incisive analysis of the emergence and evolution of global Internet governance, unpacking the complexity of more than 300 governance arrangements, influential debates and political negotiations over four decades. Highly accessible, this book breaks new ground through a wide empirical exploration and a new conceptual approach to governance enactment in global issue domains. A tripartite framework is employed for revealing power dynamics, relying on: a) an extensive database of mechanisms of governance for the Internet at the global and regional level; b) an in-depth analysis of the evolution of actors and priorities over time; and c) a key set of dominant practices observed in the Internet governance communities. It explains continuity and change in Internet-related negotiations, opening up new directions for thinking and acting in this field

Scientists and the Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research

This dissertation examines scientists' views concerning the ethics of U.S. weapons research and military advising, through the changing politics and economy of the Cold War. After the development of the atomic bomb, the Manhattan Project generation of physicists posed a series of troubling ethical questions: To what extent are scientists responsible for the military applications of their work? What are the political obligations of technical experts? What are the ideal relations among academia, industry, and the military? During the post-Sputnik science boom, many elite physicists used their policy influence to encourage government support for scientific research and to secure stronger arms control measures, an effort that culminated in the ratification of the Partial Test Ban Treaty in 1963. But after the enthusiastic expansion of science advising in the late 1950s, the war in Vietnam sorely tested scientists' support for weapons research and government work. Key controversies that elicited substantial ethical debate included the use of chemical defoliants and gases in Vietnam and the participation of the secretive Jason scientists in developing an electronic barrier to prevent North Vietnamese incursions into South Vietnam. By the end of the decade, campuses and professional societies were riven by clashes over defense contracting and academic "neutrality" in the context of the war in Vietnam. Whereas ethical debates in the aftermath of the Manhattan Project tended to be framed in individualist terms, the controversies of the late 1960s and early 1970s took place on the much larger scale of governments and institutions. The upheaval produced some changes in university contracting policies, but with ambiguous results, and the public disaffection of some top scientists led the Nixon administration to dismantle the entire Eisenhower-era presidential science advisory system. The ethical debates of the Vietnam era cast a long shadow, shifting popular attitudes toward science and heavily influencing the character of scientists' opposition to the Strategic Defense Initiative during the 1980s

Reports to the President

A compilation of annual reports for the 1989-1990 academic year, including a report from the President of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as reports from the academic and administrative units of the Institute. The reports outline the year's goals, accomplishments, honors and awards, and future plans

Special Libraries, Winter 1995

Volume 86, Issue 1https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/sla_sl_1995/1000/thumbnail.jp

Harvey Mudd College : The Third Decade Plus, 1976-1988

Kenneth Baker, second president of Harvey Mudd College, describes events at Harvey Mudd College during his tenure from 1976 to 1988.https://scholarship.claremont.edu/hmc_facbooks/1000/thumbnail.jp