Indigenous Aeta Magbukún self-identity, social-political structures, and self-determination at the local level in the Philippines

The Indigenous Aeta Magbukún maintain a primarily nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in their forested ancestral lands. Through the continued encroachment of non-Indigenous populations, the Aeta Magbukún persist at a critical level. Finding it increasingly difficult to sustain their traditional livelihoods, they must engage in informal commerce to procure sufficient food throughout the year. This work explores the basis of self-identity, traditional kinship ties, evolution of sociopolitical organisation, and the developing political options that sustain the small and vulnerable Indigenous population. Despite recent tentative sociopolitical developments, securing cultural protection requires greater effort in developing political communication and representation at a local and national level. In doing so, the Aeta Magbukún can meet their basic needs, secure traditional cultural knowledge, and are able to influence their own development during a time of relatively rapid acculturation within the mainstream Philippine societal complex

Research Output From University-Industry Collaborative Projects

We study collaborative and noncollaborative projects that are supported by government grants. First, we propose a theoretical framework to analyze optimal decisions in these projects. Second, we test our hypotheses with a unique data set containing academic publications and research funds for all academics at the major university engineering departments in the United Kingdom. We find that the type of the project (measured by its level of appliedness) increases the type of both the university and firm partners. Also, the quality of the project (number and impact of the publications) increases with the quality of the researcher and firm, and with the affinity in the partners' preferences. The collaboration with firms increases the quality of the project only when the firms' characteristics make them valuable partners

Similar-to-me effects in the grant application process: Applicants, panellists, and the likelihood of obtaining funds

We analyse if and how the characteristics of grant research panels affect the applicants' likelihood of obtaining funding and, especially, if particular types of panels favour particular types of applicants. We use the UK's Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) award decisions to test the similar-to-me hypothesis for the first time in the grant context. Our main results indicate that panel members tend to favour more (or penalise less) applicants with similar characteristics to them, as the similar-to-me hypothesis suggests. We show, for instance, that the quality of the applicants is more critical for panels of high quality than for panels of relatively lower quality, that basic-oriented panels tend to penalise applied-oriented applicants, and that panels with fewer female members tend to penalise teams with more female applicants. As a whole, we show that similar-to-me effects are simultaneously at work for a wide variety of functional, job-related research characteristics as well as for more well-known demographic attributes

Early individual stakeholders, first venture capital investment, and exit in the UK startup ecosystem

We create a novel, comprehensive dataset of UK-based startups with extensive information on ownership, control, and valuation. Our database provides unique descriptive evidence about the relevance of individual stakeholders in startups, particularly before the entry of venture capital institutional investors. We compare the influence of two comparable characteristics of various groups of pre-institutional individual stakeholders: size and experience. We show that the quantity as well as the experience, of founders, directors, and other individual investors correlate with the startup's type of, and value at, exit. Success results are very different across types of diversity: functional diversity appears to have a positive relationship with success whereas that of demographic diversity is negative

Collusion through Joint R&D: An Empirical Assessment

This paper tests whether upstream R&D cooperation leads to downstream collusion. We consider an oligopolistic setting where firms enter in research joint ventures (RJVs) to lower production costs or coordinate on collusion in the product market. We show that a sufficient condition for identifying collusive behavior is a decline in the market share of RJV-participating firms, which is also necessary and sufficient for a decrease in consumer welfare. Using information from the US National Cooperation Research Act, we estimate a market share equation correcting for the endogeneity of RJV participation and R&D expenditures. We find robust evidence that large networks between direct competitors – created through firms being members in several RJVs at the same time – are conducive to collusive outcomes in the product market which reduce consumer welfare. By contrast, RJVs among non-competitors are efficiency enhancing

MINPP1 prevents intracellular accumulation of the chelator inositol hexakisphosphate and is mutated in Pontocerebellar Hypoplasia

Inositol polyphosphates are vital metabolic and secondary messengers, involved in diverse cellular functions. Therefore, tight regulation of inositol polyphosphate metabolism is essential for proper cell physiology. Here, we describe an early-onset neurodegenerative syndrome caused by loss-of-function mutations in the multiple inositol-polyphosphate phosphatase 1 gene (MINPP1). Patients are found to have a distinct type of Pontocerebellar Hypoplasia with typical basal ganglia involvement on neuroimaging. We find that patient-derived and genome edited MINPP1−/− induced stem cells exhibit an inefficient neuronal differentiation combined with an increased cell death. MINPP1 deficiency results in an intracellular imbalance of the inositol polyphosphate metabolism. This metabolic defect is characterized by an accumulation of highly phosphorylated inositols, mostly inositol hexakisphosphate (IP6), detected in HEK293 cells, fibroblasts, iPSCs and differentiating neurons lacking MINPP1. In mutant cells, higher IP6 level is expected to be associated with an increased chelation of intracellular cations, such as iron or calcium, resulting in decreased levels of available ions. These data suggest the involvement of IP6-mediated chelation on Pontocerebellar Hypoplasia disease pathology and thereby highlight the critical role of MINPP1 in the regulation of human brain development and homeostasis

Conceptual Model Interoperability: a Metamodel-driven Approach

Linking, integrating, or converting conceptual data models represented in different modelling languages is a common aspect in the design and maintenance of complex information systems. While such languages seem similar, they are known to be distinct and no unifying framework exists that respects all of their language features in either model transformations or inter-model assertions to relate them. We aim to address this issue using an approach where the rules are enhanced with a logic-based metamodel. We present the main approach and some essential metamodel-driven rules for the static, structural, components of ER, EER, UML v2.4.1, ORM, and ORM2. The transformations for model elements and patterns are used with the metamodel to verify correctness of inter-model assertions across models in different languages

Fishing for complementarities : competitive research funding and research productivity

This paper empirically investigates complementarities between different sources of research funding with regard to academic publishing. We find for a sample of UK engineering academics that competitive funding is associated with an increase in ex-post publications but that industry funding decreases the marginal utility of public funding by lowering the publication and citation rate increases associated with public grants. However, when holding all other explanatory variables at their mean, the negative effect of the interaction does not translate into an effective decrease in publication and citation numbers. The paper also shows that the positive effect of public funding is driven by UK research council and charity grants and that EU funding has no significant effect on publication outcomes