Mirror-orientation noise in a Fabry-Perot interferometer gravitational wave detector

The influence of angular mirror-orientation errors on the length of a Fabry-Perot resonator is analyzed geometrically. Under conditions in which dominant errors are static or vary slowly over time, the analysis permits a simple prediction of the spectrum of short-term cavity length fluctuations resulting from mirror-orientation noise. The resulting model is applicable to the design of mirror control systems for the Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, which will monitor separations between mirrored surfaces of suspended inertial test bodies as a way to measure astrophysical gravitational radiation. The analysis is verified by measuring the response of the Laser Interferometer Gravitational- Wave Observatory's 40-m interferometer test-bed to the rotation of its mirrors

Star Scientists, Innovation and Regional and National Immigration

We follow the careers 1981-2004 of 5401 star scientists listed in ISI HighlyCitedSM as most highly cited by their peers. Their number in a US region or a top-25 science and technology (S&T) country significantly increases the probability of firm entry in the S&T field in which they are working. Stars rather than their disembodied discoveries are key for high-tech entry. Stars become more concentrated over time, moving disproportionately from areas with few peers in their discipline to many, except for a countercurrent of some foreign-born American stars returning home. High impact articles and university articles all tend to diffuse. America has 62 percent of the world’s stars as residents, primarily because of its research universities which produce them. Migration plays a significant role in some developing countries.

Going Public When You Can in Biotechnology

Scientist-entrepreneurs prominent in biotech and other high-technology industries view going public not as a cost-effective source of capital but as a cross between selling a now-proven innovation and winning a lottery. Unlike most empirical IPO analyses confined to those firms that go public, we study substantially all the non-public biotech firms founded up through 1989. The probability that one of these firms goes public in any given year increases with the quality of the firm's science base (use of recombinant DNA technology, number of articles by star scientists as or with firm employees, number of biotech patents), the percentage of eligible firms going public the year the firm was founded as a strategy indicator, recent biotech returns as an indicator of a hot market, and whether or how many rounds of venture capital has been obtained. The same key factors increase the expected proceeds raised from IPOs, but the quality of the firm's science base plays a more dominant role. All firms going public try to look like the next Genentech, but only those with the strong science base necessary for success attract large investments.

Innovation, Competition and Welfare-Enhancing Monopoly

The basic competitive model with freely available technology is suited for static industries but misleading as applied to major innovative economies for which development of new technologies equals in magnitude around 10% of gross domestic investment. We distinguish free generic technology from proprietary technologies resulting from risky investment with uncertain outcome. The totality of possible outcomes drives the national innovation system and the returns to a particular successful technology cannot be compared to its own direct investment costs. Eureka moments are hardly ever self-enabling and incentives are required to motivate investment attempting to turn them into an innovation. The alternative to a valuable proprietary innovation is not the same innovation freely available but the unchanged generic technology. Growth is concentrated in any country at any time in a few firms in a few industries that are achieving metamorphic technological progress as a result of breakthrough innovations. So long as the entry and exit of firms using the generic technology sets the price in an industry, one or more price-taking firms can coexist with proprietary technologies yielding more or less substantial quasi-rents to the sunk development costs. Consumer welfare is increased if an innovator creates a proprietary technology such that the market equilibrium price is reduced and output increased. If the technological breakthrough is sufficiently large for the innovator to drive all generic producers out of the industry and increase output as a wealth-maximizing monopolist, consumer welfare is surely increased. After some time, the innovative technology will diffuse into an imitative generic technology. The best innovators develop a stream of innovations so that technological leaders can maintain their status as dominant firm or monopolist for extended periods of time despite lagged diffusion, and consumers benefit from this stream as well. The economics of an innovative nation are different from those of the no-growth stationary state which we teach and fall back on. We propose an ambitious agenda to integrate major research streams treating innovation as an object of economic analysis into our standard models.

Virtuous Circles of Productivity: Star Bioscientists and the Institutional Transformation of Industry

The most productive (`star') bioscientists possessed intellectual human capital of extraordinary scientific and pecuniary value for some 10-15 yrs after Cohen & Boyer's 1973 founding discovery for biotechnology. This extraordinary value was due to the union of still scarce knowledge of the new research techniques and genius to apply these techniques in valuable ways. As in other sciences, star bioscientists were particularly protective of their ideas in the early years of the revolution, tending to collaborate more within their own institution which slowed diffusion to other scientists. Therefore, close, bench-level working ties between stars and firm scientists were needed to accomplish commercialization of the breakthroughs. Where and when the star scientists were actively producing academic publications is a key determinant of where and when commercial firms began to use biotechnology. The extent of collaboration by a firm's scientists with stars is a powerful predictor of its success: for each 9 articles co-authored by an academic star and firm scientists about 3 more products in development, 1 more on the market and 1550 more employees are estimated. Such collaboration with firms, or employment, also results in significantly higher rates of citation to articles written with the firm. The U.S. scientific and economic infrastructure has been quite effective in fostering and commercializing the bioscientific revolution. To provide an indication of international competitiveness, we estimate stars' distribution, commercial involvement and migration across the top 10 countries in bioscience. These results let us inside the black box to see how scientific breakthroughs become economic growth and consider the implications for policy.

Social Construction of Trust to Protect Ideas and Data in Space Science and Geophysics

This paper applies a rational action/economic sociology approach to the central organizational theory question of whether action is embedded in pre-formed institutions that are relatively cheap in terms of time and energy, or to what extent action becomes embedded in newly constructed institutions that are more costly but perhaps better adapted to task goals. We develop a new model of the social construction of trust-producing social structure based on the initial endowment of this structure, the demand for it, and the cost of social construction. We test the model with data on construction of social structure in collaborations in space science and geophysics developed in a large number of interviews conducted by the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics. We do find that greater pre-existing endowment reduces social construction of new institutions while greater demand for trust increases that construction. We also find some evidence that social construction of trust-producing social structure in fact results in production of higher value science.

Local Academic Science Driving Organizational Change: The Adoption of Biotechnology by Japanese Firms

The local academic science base plays a dominant role in determining where and when biotechnology is adopted by existing firms or -- much more frequently -- exploited by new entrants in the U.S. In Japan this new dominant technology has almost exclusively been introduced through organizational change in existing firms. We show that for the U.S. and global pharmaceutical business -- biotechnology's most important application -- the performance enhancement associated with this organizational change is necessary for incumbent firms to remain competitive and, ultimately, to survive. Japan's sharply higher organizational change/new entry ratio compared to the U.S. during the biotech revolution is related to Japan's relatively compact geography and institutional differences between the higher-education and research funding systems, the venture capital and IPO markets, cultural characteristics and incentive systems which impact scientists' entrepreneurialism, and tort-liability exposures. Both local science base and pre-existing economic activity explained where and when Japanese firms adopted biotechnology, with the latter playing a somewhat larger role. De nova entry was determined similarly as if entry and organizational change are alternative ways of exploiting the scientific base with relative frequency reflecting underlying institutions. While similar processes are at work in Japan and America, stars in Japan induce entry or transformation of significantly fewer firms than in the U.S. and preexisting economic activity plays a greater role. We find no such significant difference for entry of keiretsu-member and nonmember firms within Japan.

Movement of Star Scientists and Engineers and High-Tech Firm Entry

This paper analyzes the effects of top nanoscale scientists on industry entry in the comparative context of 5 major areas of science and technology, extending the concept of star scientist to all areas of science and technology. The results for nanotechnology are replicated using the comprehensive list of firms from NanoBank.org that provide an alternative industry entry measure not available for other high-tech fields. We follow careers 1981-2004 for 5,401 stars as identified in ISIHighlyCited.comSM, using their publication history to locate them each year. The number of stars in a U.S. region or in one of the top-25 science and technology countries generally has a consistently significant and quantitatively large positive effect on the probability of firm entry in the same area of science and technology. Other measures of academic knowledge stocks have weaker and less consistent effects. Thus the stars themselves rather than their potentially disembodied discoveries play a key role in the formation or transformation of high-tech industries. We identify separate economic geography effects in poisson regressions for the 179 BEA-defined U.S. regions, but not for the 25 countries analysis. Stars become more concentrated over time, moving from areas with relatively few peers to those with many in their discipline. A counter-flow operating on the U.S. versus the other 24 countries is the tendency of foreign-born American stars to return to their homeland when it develops sufficient strength in their area of science and technology. In contrast high impact articles and university articles and patents all tend to diffuse, becoming more equally distributed over time.

Book Review: Moral Foundations of Constitutional Thought: Current Problems, Augustinian Prospects. by Graham Walker.

Book review: Moral Foundations of Constitutional Thought: Current Problems, Augustinian Prospects. By Graham Walker. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1990. Pp. viii, 189. Reviewed by: Michael P. Zuckert