Program of Research on the Management of Research and Development Annual Report, 1965 - 1966 and Program Summary, 1960 - 1966

Research program on management of research and developmen

GOVERNMENT PATENTING AND TECHNOLOGY TRANSFER

Intellectual property rights such as patents protect new inventions from imitation and competition. Patents' major objective is to provide incentives for invention, sacrificing short-term market efficiency for long-term economic gains. Although patents are primarily granted to private firms, policy changes over the last 25 years have resulted in greater use of patenting by the public sector. This study examines government patenting behavior by analyzing case studies of patenting and licensing by the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. ARS uses patenting and licensing as a means of technology transfer in cases in which a technology requires additional development by a private sector partner to yield a marketable product. Licensing revenue is not a major motivation for ARS patenting. More widespread use of patenting and licensing by ARS has not reduced the use of traditional instruments of technology transfer such as scientific publication. Once the decision has been made to patent and license a technology, the structure of the licensing agreement affects technology transfer outcomes. As commercial partners gain experience with the technology and learn more about the market, mutually advantageous revisions to license terms can maintain the incentives through which private companies distribute the benefits of public research.patents, licenses, intellectual property rights, technology transfer, Agricultural Research Service, agricultural research and development, Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

A Kernel Test for Three-Variable Interactions with Random Processes

We apply a wild bootstrap method to the Lancaster three-variable interaction measure in order to detect factorisation of the joint distribution on three variables forming a stationary random process, for which the existing permutation bootstrap method fails. As in the i.i.d. case, the Lancaster test is found to outperform existing tests in cases for which two independent variables individually have a weak influence on a third, but that when considered jointly the influence is strong. The main contributions of this paper are twofold: first, we prove that the Lancaster statistic satisfies the conditions required to estimate the quantiles of the null distribution using the wild bootstrap; second, the manner in which this is proved is novel, simpler than existing methods, and can further be applied to other statistics

Assessing the Benefits of Public Research Within an Economic Framework: The Case of USDA's Agricultural Research Service

Evaluation of publicly funded research can help provide accountability and prioritize programs. In addition, Federal intramural research planning generally involves an institutional assessment of the appropriate Federal role, if any, and whether the research should be left to others, such as universities or the private sector. Many methods of evaluation are available, peer review—used primarily for establishing scientific merit—being the most common. Economic analysis focuses on quantifying ultimate research outcomes, whether measured in goods with market prices or in nonmarket goods such as environmental quality or human health. However, standard economic techniques may not be amenable for evaluating some important public research priorities or for institutional assessments. This report reviews quantitative methods and applies qualitative economic reasoning and stakeholder interviewing methods to the evaluation of economic benefits of Federal intramural research using three case studies of research conducted by USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS). Differences among the case studies highlight the need to select suitable assessment techniques from available methodologies, the limited scope for comparing assessment results across programs, and the inherent difficulty in quantifying benefits in some research areas. When measurement and attribution issues make it difficult to quantify these benefits, the report discusses how qualitative insights based on economic concepts can help research prioritization.Agricultural Research Service, Federal intramural research, publicly funded research, Environmental Economics and Policy, Food Consumption/Nutrition/Food Safety, Livestock Production/Industries, Productivity Analysis,

COMPETITIVE GRANTS AND THE FUNDING OF AGRICULTURAL RESEARCH IN THE U.S.

To increase the efficiency of the public agricultural R&D system, expanded use of competitive grants to fund state institutions has been advocated. This paper characterizes different funding instruments and empirically assesses the effects of changes in mechanism use. Factors associated with greater levels of competitive grants are modeled.Research and Development/Tech Change/Emerging Technologies,

Activation of G protein-coupled receptors entails cysteine modulation of agonist binding

The increase of the affinity of agonists with an increase in pH and experiments using thiol-specific reagents indicate that G protein-coupled receptors contain an ionizable cysteine residue at the ligand binding site. Since treatment of receptors with reducing agents produces functional activation and potentiates agonist stimulation, it is likely that this free sulfhydryl modulates receptor activation. We have derived a two-state acid-base model for cysteine modulation of ligand binding which leads to a description of ligand efficacy. We have shown that pH-dependent binding of agonists is closely correlated with measurements of ligand efficacy at the 5-HT2A receptor. In general, efficacy is determined by the preference of a ligand for the base of the receptor. Efficacy may also be described in thermodynamic terms as the coupling free energy involving a ligand and the acid and base states of the receptor. Molecular modeling of the third transmembrane domain of the 5-HT2A receptor, which contains a conserved cysteine, shows that efficacy is determined by the difference between the electrostatic interaction energies of a ligand with the acid and base forms of the receptor model. The difference in interaction energy between the two forms of cysteine makes the largest contribution to this electrostatic interaction energy difference. Therefore, the cysteine makes the largest contribution to ligand efficacy. Using this approach, we can distinquish between the efficacies of agonists with varying molecular structures and account for the differences between the properties of agonists and antagonists

The Court as Archive

"Until the late 20th century, ‘an archive’ generally meant a repository for documents, as well as the generic name for the wide range of documents the repository might hold. An archive could be visited, and then also searched, to discover past actions or lives that had meaning for the present. While historians and historiographers have long understood the contests that archives contain and represent, the very idea of ‘the archive’ has, over the last 40 years, become the subject and object of widening and intensified consideration. This consideration has been intellectual (from scholars in a wide range of disciplines) and public (from communities and individuals whose stories are held captive, or sometimes hidden or excluded from official archives), as well as institutional. It has involved scrutiny and critique of official archives’ limitations and practices, as well as symbolic, affective and theoretical expansion and heightened expectation of what ‘the archive’ is or should be. The very language of ‘the archive’ now carries freight as administrative practice, normative value, metaphor, description and aspiration in different ways than it did in the 20th century. This collection offers a unique contribution to these reinvigorated and sometimes new conversations about what an archive might be, what it can do as a consequence, and to whom it bears custodial responsibilities. In particular, this collection addresses what it means for contemporary Australian superior courts of record to not only have constitutional and procedural duties to documents as a matter of law, but also to acknowledge obligations to care for those materials in a way that understands their public meaning and public value for the Australian people, in the past, in the present and for the future.

Finite-Temperature Auxiliary-Field Quantum Monte Carlo for Bose-Fermi Mixtures

We present a quantum Monte Carlo (QMC) technique for calculating the exact finite-temperature properties of Bose-Fermi mixtures. The Bose-Fermi Auxiliary-Field Quantum Monte Carlo (BF-AFQMC) algorithm combines two methods, a finite-temperature AFQMC algorithm for bosons and a variant of the standard AFQMC algorithm for fermions, into one algorithm for mixtures. We demonstrate the accuracy of our method by comparing its results for the Bose-Hubbard and Bose-Fermi-Hubbard models against those produced using exact diagonalization for small systems. Comparisons are also made with mean-field theory and the worm algorithm for larger systems. As is the case with most fermion Hamiltonians, a sign or phase problem is present in BF-AFQMC. We discuss the nature of these problems in this framework and describe how they can be controlled with well-studied approximations to expand BF-AFQMC's reach. The new algorithm can serve as an essential tool for answering many unresolved questions about many-body physics in mixed Bose-Fermi systems.Comment: 19 pages, 6 figure