National innovation rates: the evidence for/against domestic institutions

Why are some countries more technologically innovative than others? The dominant explanation amongst political-economists is that domestic institutions determine national innovation rates. However, after decades of research, there is still no agreement on precisely how this happens, exactly which institutions matter, and little aggregate evidence has been produced to support any particular hypothesis. This paper will review the equivocating evidence for domestic institutions explanations of national innovation rates. Its survey will show that, although a specific domestic institution or policy might appear to explain a particular instance of innovation, they generally fail to explain national innovation rates across time and space. Instead, the empirical evidence suggests that certain kinds of international relationships (e.g. capital goods imports, foreign direct investment, educational exchanges) affect national innovation rates in the aggregate, and that these relationships are not themselves determined by domestic institutions. In other words, explaining national innovation rates may not be so much a domestic institutions story as it is an international story.technology; technological; innovation; politics; institutions; research

Everything’s Bigger in Texas: Examining the Mandatory (and Additional) Financial Burden of Postsecondary Education

Student fees remain an under-researched aspect of postsecondary education and finance (Kelchen, 2016). This study examines the mandatory and additional fees charged to full-time, in-state undergraduate students by public and private not-for-profit four-year institutions in Texas (n=96). Findings demonstrate the average four-year institution in Texas charges over $1,500 per academic year in mandatory fees,$500 higher than the national average. Moreover, private institutions charge an average of $1,100 less than publics, while fees comprise 6.8% of the total cost of attendance at private and 29.1% at publics. Institutions of higher education compose fee explanations above the 12th-grade reading level and only 5.2% of the sample provided fee explanations in a language other than English, thus further marginalizing non-English speaking language populations in Texas. Implications for policy makers, practitioners, and future research are addressed.Educatio

The power of weakness

This article was originally published in The Prophet -- a journal created by and for the students at the Boston University School of Theology (BUSTH) to amplify the voices of STH students by promoting and sharing a range of perspectives on matters of concern including, but not limited to, spiritual practices, faith communities and society, the nature of theology, and current affairs. It serves as a platform for STH students to share their academic work, theological reflections, and life experiences with one another and the wider community."Personally, I find myself wondering how God will use me in my brokenness. It isn’t easy to wake up in the morning and not feel anxious even though I shouldn’t be anxious about anything. My day is always structured, and if I keep to that structure, then I avoid any chance of having a panic attack. However, as I become more aware of my suffering, and see that it isn’t an inherent flaw, but a problem with how my brain is wired, then I’m content to know that God will be with me in my time of trial – in my weakness, fear, and trembling. Every time I walk out the door to go to class or to run daily errands, I’m taking a risk – a risk to put myself into an uncomfortable situation that exposes me to dark memories from my childhood, and I retreat into myself, for fear of public embarrassment, into the murky depths of my mind, where I feel the safest... " [EXCERPT

Safe Local Exploration for Replanning in Cluttered Unknown Environments for Micro-Aerial Vehicles

In order to enable Micro-Aerial Vehicles (MAVs) to assist in complex, unknown, unstructured environments, they must be able to navigate with guaranteed safety, even when faced with a cluttered environment they have no prior knowledge of. While trajectory optimization-based local planners have been shown to perform well in these cases, prior work either does not address how to deal with local minima in the optimization problem, or solves it by using an optimistic global planner. We present a conservative trajectory optimization-based local planner, coupled with a local exploration strategy that selects intermediate goals. We perform extensive simulations to show that this system performs better than the standard approach of using an optimistic global planner, and also outperforms doing a single exploration step when the local planner is stuck. The method is validated through experiments in a variety of highly cluttered environments including a dense forest. These experiments show the complete system running in real time fully onboard an MAV, mapping and replanning at 4 Hz.Comment: Accepted to ICRA 2018 and RA-L 201

PRIVACY IS INFRINGED IN PLAIN SIGHT AND HOW TO DISSAPEAR

This culminating project explored how Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, and Microsoft infringe on their user\u27s information privacy. Focus was on tools and techniques one can use to strengthen their information privacy. Privacy or information privacy was defined as the right to have some control over how your personal information is collected and used. This project will also introduce a verity of open-source tools and techniques that would help the unsuspected user to maintain their privacy.The questions asked were: what are some common techniques that Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, or Microsoft use to gain personal information?, At what cost would it take for someone to maintain their privacy online without interacting with Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, or Microsoft ?, What are some reasonable recommendations would I recommend to the average unsuspecting user ? The project findings were: that major technology companies make money from intruding on their user’s privacy, and that the upkeep cost for one to maintain their privacy can be expensive, and that it will be difficult for one to maintain their privacy overtime. Some of the recommendations for further suggested research include: cell phones, faraday bags, and Redundancy

Of Flyers and Free Speech: How Student Activism Defined the Contours of One University’s 21st-Century Hate and Bias Policy

Since 1999, The University of Texas at Austin (UT Austin) operated under a Student Policy on Race Relations when handling hate and bias incidents. In February 2017, an anti-Muslim flyer was posted near campus, prompting UT administration to hold a town hall for UT student activ-ists to vocalize their concerns. Through Kezar’s (2010) description of modern student protests and Barnhardt’s (2014) framework for modern student protests, this study analyzes the marginal-ized UT Austin student voices of that town hall meeting, demonstrating how modern student activism influenced presidential rhetoric and a new Hate and Bias Incidents Policy, the first in nearly two decades at UT Austin.Educatio

Spatial Variation in Organic Carbon and Stable Isotope Composition of Lake Sediments at Laguna Zoncho, Costa Rica

Lake sediments are valuable paleoenvironmental archives that provide information on past climate and land-use change. Most lake sediment studies rely on a single core, usually recovered from the center of a lake, and do not consider spatial variability in the lake basin. My dissertation presents a spatially-explicit record of prehistoric agriculture from Laguna Zoncho, Costa Rica and evaluates spatial variability in lake sediment proxies based on a network of five sediment cores. Results extend earlier proxy analyses of a single core collected near the center of the lake, which documented prehistoric agriculture and forest clearance from 3000 to about 500 years ago, followed by strong forest recovery at the time of the Spanish Conquest. Analyses of the new suite of cores show that agricultural activities increased erosion in the watershed, which lowered organic content from 16% to 5%, and resulted in a shift in bulk sediment stable carbon isotope values from –27 ‰ to –23 ‰ VPDB due to forest clearance. Agriculture made the lake slightly more productive, shown by a decrease in carbon/nitrogen ratios from 16 to 13 and an increase in stable nitrogen ratios from 1 to 3 ‰. Basinwide trends in organic matter and stable carbon isotopes ratios show two distinct periods of agricultural decline (1150–960 and 840–650 cal yr BP) that coincide with intervals of drought detected in regional paleoclimate records. This finding suggests that climate change, not the Spanish Conquest, was the driving force of site abandonment at Laguna Zoncho, and by extension throughout the region. Inter-core variability in proxies for agricultural activity reveals that crop cultivation may have continued longer in some portions of the watershed, and highlights the influence of sediment-focusing processes on proxy signatures of agriculture in lake basins. Maize pollen concentrations in the sediment cores did not correspond to geochemical and isotopic agricultural indicators, suggesting a need for caution in using the abundance of maize pollen to infer the scale of agriculture in neotropical watersheds

Graduate Recital: Zachary Taylor, Trumpet

Kemp Recital Hall November 4, 2018 Sunday Afternoon 3:00 p.m