Science-Based Business Initiative SeminarsSEWP in cooperation with the SBBI at the Harvard Business School has been a regular part of a Fall and spring lecture series that meets at the Harvard Business School and other weeks at the Department of Economics, Harvard University.
Upcoming Seminar :
"Envisioning Science and Technology"
Katy Borner
Indiana University
May 7, 2010 (Friday), noon
Baker 102, Harvard Business School
Cartographic maps of physical places have guided mankind's explorations for centuries. They enabled the discovery of new worlds while also marking territories inhabited by unknown onsters. Domain maps of abstract topic spaces, see http://scimaps.org, aim to serve today's explorers understanding and navigating the world of science and technology. The maps are generated through scientific analysis of large-scale scholarly data sets in an effort to connect and make sense of the bits and pieces of knowledge they contain. They can be used to objectively identify major research areas, experts, institutions, collections, grants, papers, journals, and ideas in a domain of science and/or technology. Local maps provide overviews of a specific area or institution: its interdisciplinarity, import-export factors, or relative speed. They allow one to track the emergence, evolution, and disappearance of topics and help to identify the most promising areas of research. Global maps show the overall structure and evolution of our collective knowledge. This talk will present recent developments in the advanced analysis and interactive visualization of large-scale static data sets and real-time data streams.
Past topics included:
Is Medicine an Ivory Tower? Incentives in the Non-Profit Production of Medical Knowledge
Contracting Over the Disclosure of Scientific
Knowledge: Intellectual Property Protection and Academic Publication
The Scientific Life
The Long Tail of Scientific Problem-Solving: Reflecting on InnoCentive's Experience
Private Equity and Long-Run Investment: The Case of Innovation
Population modeling of the emergence and development of scientific fields
Of Mice and Academics: Examining the Effect of Openness on Innovation
Patents, Business Models, and Permanent Injunctions
The Future of Engineering in the USA
Conference, November 17, 2008, held at Heldrich Center for Workforce Development, Rutgers University in cooperation with Labor & Worklife Program, Harvard Law School and SEWP -
[More information to come]
The Labor & Worklife Program at Harvard Law School
and the [National Bureau of Economic Research] (NBER)
[SEWP Digest: Offshoring, PhDs, the Year 2009 in Review, and more, Winter 2010 ]
Previous Editions of SEWP Digest:
[ SEWP Digest: President-Elect Obama and S&E Workers, December 2008 ]
[ SEWP Digest: Nanotechnology & Society II, June 2008
]
[ SEWP Digest: Measuring Innovation in Science and Engineering, February 2008
]
[SEWP Digest, Nanotechnology Edition, November 2007]
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The Harvard Medical School Catalyst is an over $200 million HMS and HMS affiliate project to improve clinical and translational research. From their website: the purpose of Catalyst is to develop "systematic way[s] for investigators from disparate disciplines and institutions to find each other and form teams, to gain open access to tools and technologies, and to obtain seed funding to embark upon new areas of investigation. This demands a systematic effort to remove the barriers and obstacles to cross-institutional collaboration. A catalyst lowers the barriers to reaction, and thus speeds a reaction that would normally have occurred at a much slower rate. Speeding the reduction of human illness is the only function of the Harvard Catalyst."
SEWP is working with the Lee Nadler, the Director of Catalyst and the PI on the founding NIH grants. He has two pilot projects. One combines an "open science" platform to develop new research strategies to combat disease with a novel team-building process to implement these strategies. The "open science" part will, hopefully, generate novel strategies that will be successful where previous strategies have failed because they arise from skill sets and perspectives that are traditionally not utilized. The team-building is novel because of incentives for collaboration across disciplines and institutions.
The second project addresses the waste due to duplication in medical science. This pilot catalogues and uploads into a virtual network information about research resources located within research laboratories in nine universities across the U.S. These resources include reagents, tissue samples, mice, lab equipment. The idea here is by making these resources that are available for swapping known, "eagle-i" (as it has been dubbed) will greatly reduce the cost of science, increase research productivity, and increase participation and diversity in science.
The economics blogger Mike Mandel found that 35 percent of college graduates have a degree beyond the B.A., up from 32.7 percent in 1999. ant to help foster innovation." The growth is at the masters (and professional) level, however: the proportion of workers with Ph.D's is on a slight downward curve, dipping under 4.5 percent in 2007 and still dropping. While the inflation-adusted earnings of workers with bachelor's or masters degrees have increased very slightly since 1999--a rise of one percent or less--the story was quite different for the doctorate. Employees with Ph.D.'s can expect to earn 10 percent less, in real dollars, than they would have a decade ago.
Federal funding of academic science and engineering (S&E) R&D failed to outpace inflation for the second year in a row.
According to a study by NSF a 2-year decline in federal funding in constant dollars is unprecedented for this data series, which began in 1972
[Read Full Report]
University of California Post doc Union Wins Official Recognition
After a failed attempts in 2006, the PRO/UAW, has successfully organized the post docs on the 10 University of California (UC) campuses. The move brings an estimated 10% of U.S. post docs into UAW. The union faced no noticeable opposition..
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The Future of the Biomedical Sciences
Paula Stephan, SEWP network member and economist at Georgia State University, spoke about the future of the biomedical sciences in her talk: "Early Careers for Biomedical Scientists: Doubling (and Troubling) Outcomes" at Harvard University on Feb. 27th, 2007. The message: employment opportunities are getting worse for future biologists a trend that has to be reversed for the future of the biomedical sciences in the US.
***NEW***
Call for Proposals – Initial Access to Nanobank Data
Be One of the First to Tap into the Nanobank!
By Donna K. Ginther and Shulamit Kahn
Many studies have shown that women are under-represented in tenured ranks in the sciences.
We evaluate whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a tenure track job,
promotion to tenure, and promotion to full professor explain these facts using the 1973-2001
Survey of Doctorate Recipients.
[full paper]
By George Borjas
The rapid growth in the number of foreign students enrolled in American universities has transformed the higher education system, particularly at the graduate level. [full paper]
Improving the Postdoctoral Experience: An Empirical ApproachBy Geoff Davis
Recent reports have called for changes to the training of postdoctoral scientists and
engineers. We tested the hypothesis that the practices advocated make a measurable difference
in the experiences and productivity of postdoctoral researchers...
[full paper]
For all recent articles: [full article list]
