Communities, Knowledge, and Innovation: Indian Immigrants in the US Semiconductor Industry

This paper investigates the influence of technological, geographic, and ethnic communities on the innovativeness of Indian inventors. We study Indian inventors in the semiconductor industry in the US and examine their patenting profiles between 1975 and 1999 to identify the influences on the quantity and quality of their innovations. We find that inventors who rely on knowledge from technological and geographic communities enhance their innovativeness. Knowledge from the ethnic Indian community is related to inventor innovativeness in the form of an inverted U. The negative effect of knowledge gained from the ethnic community on innovativeness is pronounced for experienced inventors.innovation, knowledge, semiconductor industry

Climate Justice and Sustained Transnational Mobilization

Samir Amin’s final essay called for the creation of a new international organization of progressive social forces. This essay provides evidence from twenty-first century transnational movements on the likelihood of the emergence of such an international organization and the issues and sectors most likely to facilitate coalitional unity.  More specifically, the ecological crises identified by Amin in the form of global warming and climate change create an unprecedented global environmental threat capable of unifying diverse social strata across the planet.  The climate justice movement has already established a global infrastructure and template to coordinate a new international organization to confront neoliberal forms of globalization.  Pre-existing movement organizing around environmental racism, climate justice in the global South, and recent intersectional mobilizations serve as promising models essential to building an enduring international organization representing subaltern groups

Startup Size and the Mechanisms of External Learning: Increasing Opportunity and Decreasing Ability?

An important area of investigation in the field of entrepreneurship examines how people and organizations exploit technological opportunities. Prior research suggests that alliances, the mobility of experts, and the informal mechanisms associated with geographic co-location can present firms with useful opportunities to source technological knowledge. This paper uses insights from strategic management and organizational theory to suggest that organizational size may have an important impact on the extent of external learning, since it differentially affects the likelihood of learning via formal and informal mechanisms. Examining a cross-section of semiconductor startups, we find that external learning increases with startup size. With regard to the specific mechanisms of learning, we find that firms learn from alliances regardless of their size. For the informal mechanisms of mobility and geographic co-location, however, learning decreases with firm size. These results suggest that as startups grow, they may have increasing opportunities to access and exploit external knowledge, but their motivation (and hence ability) to learn from more informal sources may decrease

Generating mass and topological terms to the antisymmetric tensor matter field by Higgs mechanism

The interaction between the complex antisymmetric tensor matter field and a scalar field is constructed. We analyze the Higgs mechanism and show the generation of mass and topological terms by spontaneous symmetry breaking.Comment: Accepted for publication in Phys. Lett.

Trends in physiotherapy education: retrospective analysis of ECPE presentations

The last decade both physiotherapy and education faced many demands. Educators are challenged to show evidence and report their best practices. An overview of what has been the focus in the ECPE conference show and the main areas of interest and the development in the European Higher Education Area. It provides the opportunity to benchmark towards the policy statement of education of the World Physiotherapy Confederation. Thus increase the consistency and perhaps assisting in formulating a relevant research agenda for the future. The purpose of this study is to give an overview of the trends in physiotherapy education of the last decennium as it is presented at the conferences of the European the World Physiotherapy Confederation (ECPE). A descriptive and retrospective study was carried out and qualitative and quantitative analysis was made on the basis of content and study design/ methodology, by 3 independent reviewers of all abstracts presented at each of the two previous ECPE conferences of 2004 (Estoril - Portugal) and 2008 (Stockholm -Sweden). Categories for content analyses were developed on base of the distribution and main themes used in the conference. This analysis was constrainted by lack of transparency on the description of methodologies in the abstracts and also by the different organization of the abstract books. We needed to create a category "Not Conclusive" and make our decisions based on the rahter classic distinction of qualitative and quantitative study types and methodology. In the results we can find an increase of total presentations from the first to the second conference. In both conference there is a clear preference for special interest issues and in the research the qualitative studies are more favored. There is a total increase in research and implementation research from the first conference to the second. We intepretate this as a logical consequence as in the first conference most of the presentations were focused on new strategies and policies. In the second conference the aim was more directed to the implementation and scientific grounding of these innovations. Educations Institutes and professionals developed more research on Continuous Professional Development, Teaching and Learning strategies, Curriculum Development and Clinical Education. Presumably these topics are related with the European movement – ‘ Europe a strong society in 2020!’, where education and professionals should meet an European standard. The next step could be a comparison with WCPT and educational networks like COHEHRE and ENPHE. It helps researchers and educators to get a better inside of the research agenda and build upon earlier work. It gives an incentive to the development of high quality methodologies. An overview of reports in conferences gives the opportunity to compare with published results and could challenge publishing criteria.N/

European benchmarking and customized learning

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