Knowledge Transfer Yields Dividend for the NSF Science and Technology Centers Program

Atlanta Conference on Science and Innovation Policy 2011This paper presents the performance and policy questions raised in a recent review of the STC program by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). Specifically, the AAAS study assessed of the value added in each of five objectives of the STC program: research, education, diversity, knowledge transfer and integrative partnerships. The AAAS review analyzed the work of the 17 centers funded in three cohorts: 2000, 2002, 2005-06. It is the first evaluation of the STC program since 1995. Several sources of evidence were employed by the research team to triangulate the findings. These ranged from self-reported accomplishments by the centers to primary data collected from site visits and surveys. The presentation here will focus on the study’s exploration of the knowledge transfer objective of the STCs, with respect to its mechanisms, value-added and contributions to human and structural capacity building to promote excellence in science and engineeringNational Science Foundation (U.S.

A Science of Science and Innovation Policy Research Agenda

Dr. John Marburger’s recent calls for a new science of science policy open up new opportunities to reconceptualize, retest, and revise as needed the theories, models, descriptions, and mainstream propositions underlying United States’ science and innovation policies and programs. We respond to these calls by presenting a research agenda directed at two objectives. First, as academic researchers who have long worked in the field of science and innovation policy, albeit from different analytical and disciplinary perspectives, we seek to insure that efforts to promote the "science" of science and technology, or innovation policy produce substantive scholarly work that in fact advances our fundamental understanding of underlying processes. Second, as participants in numerous U.S. and international science and innovation policy advisory forums and commissions, we seek to promote a closer, better fitting, coupling between the research communities who are addressing questions of the science of science policy -- themselves a disparate disciplinary lot -- with the policy communities who are seeking improved understandings of whether or how the decisions they have made or are being called upon to make in fact have led to the intended results. Our strategy to achieve these two objectives is to identify questions that are simultaneously intellectually challenging and policy relevant

Effective surface motion on a reactive cylinder of particles that perform intermittent bulk diffusion

In many biological and small scale technological applications particles may transiently bind to a cylindrical surface. In between two binding events the particles diffuse in the bulk, thus producing an effective translation on the cylinder surface. We here derive the effective motion on the surface, allowing for additional diffusion on the cylinder surface itself. We find explicit solutions for the number of adsorbed particles at one given instant, the effective surface displacement, as well as the surface propagator. In particular sub- and superdiffusive regimes are found, as well as an effective stalling of diffusion visible as a plateau in the mean squared displacement. We also investigate the corresponding first passage and first return problems.Comment: 26 pages, 5 figure

Screening of Microorganisms Producing Cold-Active Oxidoreductases to Be Applied in Enantioselective Alcohol Oxidation. An Antarctic Survey

Several microorganisms were isolated from soil/sediment samples of Antarctic Peninsula. The enrichment technique using (RS)-1-(phenyl)ethanol as a carbon source allowed us to isolate 232 psychrophile/psychrotroph microorganisms. We also evaluated the enzyme activity (oxidoreductases) for enantioselective oxidation reactions, by using derivatives of (RS)-1-(phenyl)ethanol as substrates. Among the studied microorganisms, 15 psychrophile/psychrotroph strains contain oxidoreductases that catalyze the (S)-enantiomer oxidation from racemic alcohols to their corresponding ketones. Among the identified microorganisms, Flavobacterium sp. and Arthrobacter sp. showed excellent enzymatic activity. These new bacteria strains were selected for optimization study, in which the (RS)-1-(4-methyl-phenyl)ethanol oxidation was evaluated in several reaction conditions. From these studies, it was observed that Flavobacterium sp. has an excellent enzymatic activity at 10 °C and Arthrobacter sp. at 15 and 25 °C. We have also determined the growth curves of these bacteria, and both strains showed optimum growth at 25 °C, indicating that these bacteria are psychrotroph

The Global Renormalization Group Trajectory in a Critical Supersymmetric Field Theory on the Lattice Z^3

We consider an Euclidean supersymmetric field theory in $Z^3$ given by a supersymmetric $\Phi^4$ perturbation of an underlying massless Gaussian measure on scalar bosonic and Grassmann fields with covariance the Green's function of a (stable) L\'evy random walk in $Z^3$. The Green's function depends on the L\'evy-Khintchine parameter $\alpha={3+\epsilon\over 2}$ with $0<\alpha<2$. For $\alpha ={3\over 2}$ the $\Phi^{4}$ interaction is marginal. We prove for $\alpha-{3\over 2}={\epsilon\over 2}>0$ sufficiently small and initial parameters held in an appropriate domain the existence of a global renormalization group trajectory uniformly bounded on all renormalization group scales and therefore on lattices which become arbitrarily fine. At the same time we establish the existence of the critical (stable) manifold. The interactions are uniformly bounded away from zero on all scales and therefore we are constructing a non-Gaussian supersymmetric field theory on all scales. The interest of this theory comes from the easily established fact that the Green's function of a (weakly) self-avoiding L\'evy walk in $Z^3$ is a second moment (two point correlation function) of the supersymmetric measure governing this model. The control of the renormalization group trajectory is a preparation for the study of the asymptotics of this Green's function. The rigorous control of the critical renormalization group trajectory is a preparation for the study of the critical exponents of the (weakly) self-avoiding L\'evy walk in $Z^3$.Comment: 82 pages, Tex with macros supplied. Revision includes 1. redefinition of norms involving fermions to ensure uniqueness. 2. change in the definition of lattice blocks and lattice polymer activities. 3. Some proofs have been reworked. 4. New lemmas 5.4A, 5.14A, and new Theorem 6.6. 5.Typos corrected.This is the version to appear in Journal of Statistical Physic

Towards an Economy of Higher Education

This paper draws a distinction between ways thinking and acting, and hence of policy and practice in higher education, in terms of different kinds of economy: economies of exchange and economies of excess. Crucial features of economies of exchange are outlined and their presence in prevailing conceptions of teaching and learning is illustrated. These are contrasted with other possible forms of practice, which in turn bring to light the nature of an economy of excess. In more philosophical terms, and to expand on the picture, economies of excess are elaborated with reference, first, to the understanding of alterity in the work of Emmanuel Levinas and, second, to the idea of Dionysian intensity that is to be found in Nietzsche. In the light of critical comment on some current directions in policy and practice, the implications of these ways of thinking for the administrator, the teacher and the student in higher education are explored

Accounting for Impact? The Journal Impact Factor and the Making of Biomedical Research in the Netherlands

The range and types of performance metrics has recently proliferated in academic settings, with bibliometric indicators being particularly visible examples. One field that has traditionally been hospitable towards such indicators is biomedicine. Here the relative merits of bibliometrics are widely discussed, with debates often portraying them as heroes or villains. Despite a plethora of controversies, one of the most widely used indicators in this field is said to be the Journal Impact Factor (JIF). In this article we argue that much of the current debates around researchers’ uses of the JIF in biomedicine can be classed as ‘folk theories’: explanatory accounts told among a community that seldom (if ever) get systematically checked. Such accounts rarely disclose how knowledge production itself becomes more-or-less consolidated around the JIF. Using ethnographic materials from different research sites in Dutch University Medical Centers, this article sheds new empirical and theoretical light on how performance metrics variously shape biomedical research on the ‘shop floor.’ Our detailed analysis underscores a need for further research into the constitutive effects of evaluative metrics

Gothic Revival Architecture Before Horace Walpole's Strawberry Hill

The Gothic Revival is generally considered to have begun in eighteenth-century Britain with the construction of Horace Walpole’s villa, Strawberry Hill, Twickenham, in the late 1740s. As this chapter demonstrates, however, Strawberry Hill is in no way the first building, domestic or otherwise, to have recreated, even superficially, some aspect of the form and ornamental style of medieval architecture. Earlier architects who, albeit often combining it with Classicism, worked in the Gothic style include Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, William Kent and Batty Langley, aspects of whose works are explored here. While not an exhaustive survey of pre-1750 Gothic Revival design, the examples considered in this chapter reveal how seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Gothic emerged and evolved over the course of different architects’ careers, and how, by the time that Walpole came to create his own Gothic ‘castle’, there was already in existence in Britain a sustained Gothic Revivalist tradition

Neoliberalism, Performance Measurement, and the Governance of American Academic Science

The international thrust of neoliberal liberal policies on higher education systems has generally been to reduce governmental control over the operations of universities in de facto exchange for these institutions assuming increased responsibility for generating a larger share of their revenues and for providing quantitative evidence of performance. Differences in the structural and financial arrangements of the U.S. higher education and academic science system from those of other countries — especially the greater importance of private research universities and the modest share of state government appropriations in the operating budgets of public research universities — produce a different set of impacts and dynamics. Political demands for increased accountability, as in the recent, if rejected proposals of the U.S. Department of Education, would have increased government control of the operations of higher education institutions. Performance measurement systems used in some countries to allocate a portion of public sector funds for academic research are infrequently used in the U.S. Instead, these mechanisms and metrics increasingly reflect the displacement of professional and collegial decision-making by quantitatively based administrative procedures