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Books > Science & Mathematics > Science: general issues > Science funding & policy
The explosive growth in information technology has ushered in unparalleled new opportunities for advancing public service. Featuring 24 chapters from foremost experts in the field of digital government, this Handbook provides an authoritative survey of key emerging technologies, their current state of development and use in government, and insightful discussions on how they are reshaping and influencing the future of public administration. This Handbook explores: Key emerging technologies (i.e., big data, social media, Internet of Things (IOT), GIS, smart phones & mobile technologies) and their impacts on public administration The impacts of the new technologies on the relationships between citizens and their governments with the focus on collaborative governance Key theories of IT innovations in government on the interplay between technological innovations and public administration The relationship between technology and democratic accountability and the various ways of harnessing the new technologies to advance public value Key strategies and conditions for fostering success in leveraging technological innovations for public service This Handbook will prove to be an invaluable guide and resource for students, scholars and practitioners interested in this growing field of technological innovations in government.
With thorough analysis and balanced reporting, Ghost Guns: Hobbyists, Hackers, and the Homemade Weapons Revolution is an essential resource for readers seeking to understand the rise of homemade firearms and future options for managing them. For more than a century, strict gun control was possible because firearms were produced in centralized industrial factories. Today, the Fourth Industrial Revolution, combining old and new technologies, threatens to upend this arrangement. An increasing number of hobbyists, "makers," technology provocateurs, and sophisticated criminals are proving that you don't need a factory to make guns anymore. The security challenges of this transformation are increasingly apparent, but the technologies behind it hold tremendous potential, and while ignoring the security implications would entail risks, the costs of new policies also must be evaluated. "Do-it-yourself," or DIY, weapons will bring significant ramifications for First and Second Amendment law, international and homeland security, crime control, technology, privacy, innovation, and the character of open source culture itself. How can a liberal society adjust to technologies that make it easier to produce weapons and contraband? Informative and thought-provoking, Ghost Guns: Hobbyists, Hackers, and the Homemade Weapons Revolution carefully analyzes the technical, legal, social, political, and criminological trends behind this challenging new area of illicit weapons activity. Provides readers with informative background on DIY gun laws and legislative trends and fascinating descriptions of legal and illegal practices with homemade weapons around the world Presents in-depth explanations of the consumer appeal, technology, economics, politics, and enforcement challenges behind America's quickly growing DIY gun-making phenomenon Evaluates the current and future appeal of homemade weapons for differing types of crime and terrorism Offers a series of forward-looking recommendations for weapons control and security policy in an increasingly "post-industrial" 21st century
Few people question the importance of science education in American schooling. The public readily accepts that it is the key to economic growth through innovation, develops the ability to reason more effectively, and enables us to solve the everyday problems we encounter through knowing how the world works. Good science teaching results in all these benefits and more - or so we think. But what if all this is simply wrong? What if the benefits we assume science education produces turn out to be an illusion, nothing more than wishful thinking? In Why We Teach Science (and Why We Should), former high school teacher and historian of science education John L. Rudolph examines the reasons we've long given for teaching science and assesses how they hold up to what we know about what students really learn (or don't learn) in science classrooms and what research tells us about how people actually interact with science in their daily lives. The results will surprise you. Instead of more and more rigorous traditional science education to fill the STEM pipeline, Rudolph challenges us to think outside the box and makes the case for an expansive science education aimed instead at rebuilding trust between science and the public - something we desperately need in our current era of impending natural challenges and science denial.
This book develops foresight techniques to turn future societal challenges into opportunities. The authors present foresight approaches for innovation policy and management. Future developments in fields such as education, energy, new materials, nanotechnologies are highlighted for different countries. Readers will discover tools and instruments to capture the potentials of the grand societal challenges as defined by the United Nations. This book is a valuable resource for researchers and scholars with an interest in foresight methods and gives practical hints for policy makers and managers to take account of the grand opportunities in their business and policy strategies.
In the midst of several large cyberattacks in 2017, the European Commission adopted its multi-sector cybersecurity package in September of that same year. Whereas this initiative can be expected to contribute to strengthening the cyber-resilience and response of EU financial firms, several policy issues and unanswered questions remain. In order to analyse the issues that are considered to be relevant to financial fields (retail banking, corporate banking, capital markets, financial infrastructure and insurance), CEPS-ECRI organised a Task Force between September 2017 and May 2018 with a group of experts from the financial industry, tech industry, national supervisors and European institutions, as well from a consumer association and a law firm. In this book, based on the Final Report, the Task Force members identify nine policy issues that need to be further addressed in order to bolster the financial industry's cyber-resilience against current and future threats.
The political economy of research and innovation (R&I) is one of the central issues of the early twenty-first century. 'Science' and 'innovation' are increasingly tasked with driving and reshaping a troubled global economy while also tackling multiple, overlapping global challenges, such as climate change or food security, global pandemics or energy security. But responding to these demands is made more complicated because R&I themselves are changing. Today, new global patterns of R&I are transforming the very structures, institutions and processes of science and innovation, and with it their claims about desirable futures. Our understanding of R&I needs to change accordingly. Responding to this new urgency and uncertainty, this handbook presents a pioneering selection of the growing body of literature that has emerged in recent years at the intersection of science and technology studies and political economy. The central task for this research has been to expose important but consequential misconceptions about the political economy of R&I and to build more insightful approaches. This volume therefore explores the complex interrelations between R&I (both in general and in specific fields) and political economies across a number of key dimensions from health to environment, and universities to the military. The Routledge Handbook of the Political Economy of Science offers a unique collection of texts across a range of issues in this burgeoning and important field from a global selection of top scholars. The handbook is essential reading for students interested in the political economy of science, technology and innovation. It also presents succinct and insightful summaries of the state of the art for more advanced scholars.
Dramatic statements about the promise and peril of artificial intelligence for humanity abound, as an industry of experts claims that AI is poised to reshape nearly every sphere of life. Who profits from the idea that the age of AI has arrived? Why do ideas of AI's transformative potential keep reappearing in social and political discourse, and how are they linked to broader political agendas? Yarden Katz reveals the ideology embedded in the concept of artificial intelligence, contending that it both serves and mimics the logic of white supremacy. He demonstrates that understandings of AI, as a field and a technology, have shifted dramatically over time based on the needs of its funders and the professional class that formed around it. From its origins in the Cold War military-industrial complex through its present-day Silicon Valley proselytizers and eager policy analysts, AI has never been simply a technical project enabled by larger data and better computing. Drawing on intimate familiarity with the field and its practices, Katz instead asks us to see how AI reinforces models of knowledge that assume white male superiority and an imperialist worldview. Only by seeing the connection between artificial intelligence and whiteness can we prioritize alternatives to the conception of AI as an all-encompassing technological force. Bringing together theories of whiteness and race in the humanities and social sciences with a deep understanding of the history and practice of science and computing, Artificial Whiteness is an incisive, urgent critique of the uses of AI as a political tool to uphold social hierarchies.
This edited volume reports on the growing body of research in science communication training, and identifies best practices for communication training programs around the world. Theory and Best Practices in Science Communication Training provides a critical overview of the emerging field of by analyzing the role of communication training in supporting scientists' communication and engagement goals, including scientists' motivations to engage in training, the design of training programs, methods for evaluation, and frameworks to support the role of communication training in helping scientists reach their communication and engagement goals. This volume reflects the growth of the field and provides direction for developing future researcher-practitioner collaborations. With contributions from researchers and practitioners from around the world, this book will be of great interest to students, scholars and, professionals within this emerging field.
This book provides a science diplomacy outlook as a new governance tool in international cooperation. It elaborates on India's current S&T collaboration with Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives, Myanmar, Nepal, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, and science policy and science diplomacy in India. The book introduces concepts and contours of science diplomacy with international examples. It presents insights into international governance models, mega-science projects, and science diplomacy's role in addressing global climate change and sustainable development challenges. The book is a valuable reference to spark breakthroughs in India's science diplomacy with its neighbouring countries for scientists, diplomats, policymakers, government, and non-government institutions interested in science and diplomacy.
If the stories they tell about themselves are to be believed, all of the tech giants-Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon-were built from the ground up through hard work, a few good ideas, and the entrepreneurial daring to seize an opportunity when it presented itself. With searing wit and blistering commentary Bit Tyrants provides an urgent corrective to this froth of board room marketing copy that is so often passed off as analysis. For fans of corporate fairy-tales there are no shortage of official histories that celebrate the innovative genius of Steve Jobs, liberal commentators who fall over themselves to laude Bill Gates's selfless philanthropy, or politicians who will tell us to listen to Mark Zuckerberg for advice on how to protect our democracy from foreign influence. In this highly unauthorized account of the Big Five's origins, Rob Larson sets the record straight, and in the process shreds every focus-grouped bromide about corporate benevolence he could get his hands on. Those readers unwilling to smile and nod as every day we become more dependent on our phones and apps to do our chores, our jobs, and our socializing can take heart as Larson provides us with maps to all the shallow graves, skeleton filled closets, and invective laced emails Big Tech left behind on its ascent to power. His withering analysis will help readers crack the code of the economic dynamics that allowed these companies to become near-monopolies very early on, and, with a little bit of luck, his calls for digital socialism might just inspire a viral movement for online revolution.
Utilizing environmental archival materials from the UK, State, Science and the Skies presents a groundbreaking historical account of the development of a state science of atmospheric pollution. Offers the most extensive historical and geographical account of atmospheric government and pollution in Britain, available today Presents archival material from 150 years of British history that represents an original contribution to our knowledge of the history of science and government Develops an innovative combination of Foucauldian history of government with a history of atmospheric science Raises crucial questions about the nature of state/science relations and the conditions under which environmental knowledge is produced
The beauty of science may be pure and eternal, but the practice of science costs money. And scientists, being human, respond to incentives and costs, in money and glory. Choosing a research topic, deciding what papers to write and where to publish them, sticking with a familiar area or going into something new-the payoff may be tenure or a job at a highly ranked university or a prestigious award or a bump in salary. The risk may be not getting any of that. At a time when science is seen as an engine of economic growth, Paula Stephan brings a keen understanding of the ongoing cost-benefit calculations made by individuals and institutions as they compete for resources and reputation. She shows how universities offload risks by increasing the percentage of non-tenure-track faculty, requiring tenured faculty to pay salaries from outside grants, and staffing labs with foreign workers on temporary visas. With funding tight, investigators pursue safe projects rather than less fundable ones with uncertain but potentially path-breaking outcomes. Career prospects in science are increasingly dismal for the young because of ever-lengthening apprenticeships, scarcity of permanent academic positions, and the difficulty of getting funded. Vivid, thorough, and bold, How Economics Shapes Science highlights the growing gap between the haves and have-nots-especially the vast imbalance between the biomedical sciences and physics/engineering-and offers a persuasive vision of a more productive, more creative research system that would lead and benefit the world.
Many students find it daunting to move from studying environmental science, to designing and implementing their own research proposals. This book provides a practical introduction to help develop scientific thinking, aimed at undergraduate and new graduate students in the earth and environmental sciences. Students are guided through the steps of scientific thinking using published scientific literature and real environmental data. The book starts with advice on how to effectively read scientific papers, before outlining how to articulate testable questions and answer them using basic data analysis. The Mauna Loa CO2 dataset is used to demonstrate how to read metadata, prepare data, generate effective graphs and identify dominant cycles on various timescales. Practical, question-driven examples are explored to explain running averages, anomalies, correlations and simple linear models. The final chapter provides a framework for writing persuasive research proposals, making this an essential guide for students embarking on their first research project.
Many students find it daunting to move from studying environmental science, to designing and implementing their own research proposals. This book provides a practical introduction to help develop scientific thinking, aimed at undergraduate and new graduate students in the earth and environmental sciences. Students are guided through the steps of scientific thinking using published scientific literature and real environmental data. The book starts with advice on how to effectively read scientific papers, before outlining how to articulate testable questions and answer them using basic data analysis. The Mauna Loa CO2 dataset is used to demonstrate how to read metadata, prepare data, generate effective graphs and identify dominant cycles on various timescales. Practical, question-driven examples are explored to explain running averages, anomalies, correlations and simple linear models. The final chapter provides a framework for writing persuasive research proposals, making this an essential guide for students embarking on their first research project.
In an era of corporate surveillance, artificial intelligence, deep fakes, genetic modification, automation, and more, law often seems to take a back seat to rampant technological change. To listen to Silicon Valley barons, there's nothing any of us can do about it. In this riveting work, Joshua A. T. Fairfield calls their bluff. He provides a fresh look at law, at what it actually is, how it works, and how we can create the kind of laws that help humans thrive in the face of technological change. He shows that law can keep up with technology because law is a kind of technology - a social technology built by humans out of cooperative fictions like firms, nations, and money. However, to secure the benefits of changing technology for all of us, we need a new kind of law, one that reflects our evolving understanding of how humans use language to cooperate.
From Wired senior writer Andy Greenberg comes the true story of the most devastating cyberattack in history and the desperate hunt to identify and track the elite Russian agents behind it. "Much more than a true-life techno-thriller ... a tour through a realm that is both invisible and critical to the daily lives of every person alive in the 21st century." —Los Angeles Times In 2014, the world witnessed the start of a mysterious series of cyberattacks. Targeting American utility companies, NATO, and electric grids in Eastern Europe, the strikes grew ever more brazen. They culminated in the summer of 2017, when the malware known as NotPetya was unleashed, penetrating, disrupting, and paralyzing some of the world's largest businesses—from drug manufacturers to software developers to shipping companies. At the attack's epicenter in Ukraine, ATMs froze. The railway and postal systems shut down. Hospitals went dark. NotPetya spread around the world, inflicting an unprecedented ten billion dollars in damage—the largest, most destructive cyberattack the world had ever seen. The hackers behind these attacks are quickly gaining a reputation as the most dangerous team of cyberwarriors in history: a group known as Sandworm. Working in the service of Russia's military intelligence agency, they represent a persistent, highly skilled force, one whose talents are matched by their willingness to launch broad, unrestrained attacks on the most critical infrastructure of their adversaries. They target government and private sector, military and civilians alike. A chilling, globe-spanning detective story, Sandworm considers the danger this force poses to our national security and stability. As the Kremlin's role in foreign government manipulation comes into greater focus, Sandworm exposes the realities not just of Russia's global digital offensive, but of an era where warfare ceases to be waged on the battlefield. It reveals how the lines between digital and physical conflict, between wartime and peacetime, have begun to blur—with world-shaking implications.
Following the landmark Paris agreement, policy makers are under pressure to adopt policies that rapidly deliver deep, society-wide decarbonisation. Deep decarbonisation requires more durable policies, but not enough is known about if and how they actually emerge. This book provides the first systematic analysis of the determinants of policy durability in three high-profile areas: biofuel production, car transport, and industrial emissions. It breaks new ground by exploring how key European Union climate policies have shaped their own durability and their ability to stimulate supportive political dynamics in society. It combines state-of-the-art policy theories with empirical accounts of landmark political events such as 'Dieselgate' and the campaign against 'dirty' biofuels, to offer a fresh understanding of how and why policy makers set about packaging together different elements of policy. By shining new light on an important area of contemporary policy making, it reveals a rich agenda for academic researchers and policy makers.
The National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation together fund more than $40 billon of research annually in the United States and around the globe. These large public expenditures come with strings, including a complex set of laws and guidelines that regulate how scientists may use NIH and NSF funds, how federally funded research may be conducted, and who may have access to or own the product of the research. Until now, researchers have had little instruction on the nature
of these laws and how they work. But now, with Robert P. Charrow's
"Law in the Laboratory," they have a readable and entertaining
introduction to the major ethical and legal considerations
pertaining to research under the aegis of federal science funding.
For any academic whose position is grant funded, or for any faculty
involved in securing grants, this book will be an essential
reference manual. And for those who want to learn how federal
legislation and regulations affect laboratory research, Charrow's
primer will shed light on the often obscured intersection of
government and science.
From the winner of the 2022 Royal Society Science Book Prize, a thrilling and thought-provoking account of the rise and fall of humankind. For the first time in over ten millennia, the rate of human population growth is slowing down. The global population is forecast to begin declining in the second half of this century, and in 10,000 years’ time, our species will likely be extinct. In The Decline and Fall of the Human Empire, Henry Gee shows how we arrived at this crucial moment in our history, beginning his story deep in the palaeolithic past and charting our dramatic rise from one species of human among many – teetering on the edge of extinction for more than a hundred millennia – to the most dominant animal to ever live on Earth. But rapid climate change, a stagnating global economy, falling birth rates and an unexplainable decline in average human sperm count are combining to make our chances for longevity increasingly slim. There could be a way forward, but the launch window is narrow. Gee argues that unless Homo sapiens establishes successful colonies in space within the next two centuries, our species is likely to stay earthbound and will have vanished entirely within another 10,000 years, bringing the seven-million-year story of the human lineage to an end. Drawing on a dazzling array of the latest scientific research, Gee tells the extraordinary story of humanity with characteristic warmth and wit, and suggests how our exceptional species might avoid its tragic fate.
This book examines the design and implementation of corporate social responsibility (CSR) activities in rural areas, based on collaboration between well-known corporates and an international research organization. Researchers used various scientific tools and methods to enhance rural livelihoods and improve sustainable natural resources management. Including three chapters covering the philosophy and practices of CSR, this book covers emerging policies and their implications in India. Eight case studies based on actual practices explore climate-resilient agriculture, water footprint, improving livelihoods, diversification of crop pattern, enhancing crop productivity, and sustainable development in low rainfall regions. Five further chapters cover soil health improvement, improving rural wastewater management and enhancing rural livelihoods, based on various case studies. The book offers macro and micro perspectives of CSR work and its critical benefits to both community and natural resources. This book covers: Philosophy and practices of corporate social responsibility. Impact studies on improving livelihoods and sustainable development of natural resources. Process steps across various CSR initiatives. Distinct features of each corporate agency. This book will be useful to corporates, individuals involved in CSR work as well as students and researchers focused on agricultural development and the sustainable development of natural resources.
In this book, distinguished scholars Philip A. Rea, Mark V. Pauly, and Lawton R. Burns explore the science and management behind marketable biomedical innovations. They look at how the science actually played out through the interplay of personalities, the cultures within and between academic and corporate entities, and the significance of serendipity not as a mysterious phenomenon but one intrinsic to the successes and failures of the experimental approach. With newly aggregated data and case studies, they consider the fundamental economic underpinnings of investor-driven discovery management, not as an obstacle or deficiency as its critics would contend or as something beyond reproach as some of its proponents might claim, but as the only means by which scientists and managers can navigate the unknowable to discover new products and decide how to sell them so as to maximize the likelihood of establishing a sustainable pipeline for still more marketable biomedical innovations.
In this book, distinguished scholars Philip A. Rea, Mark V. Pauly, and Lawton R. Burns explore the science and management behind marketable biomedical innovations. They look at how the science actually played out through the interplay of personalities, the cultures within and between academic and corporate entities, and the significance of serendipity not as a mysterious phenomenon but one intrinsic to the successes and failures of the experimental approach. With newly aggregated data and case studies, they consider the fundamental economic underpinnings of investor-driven discovery management, not as an obstacle or deficiency as its critics would contend or as something beyond reproach as some of its proponents might claim, but as the only means by which scientists and managers can navigate the unknowable to discover new products and decide how to sell them so as to maximize the likelihood of establishing a sustainable pipeline for still more marketable biomedical innovations.
The scientific advances that underpin economic growth and human health would not be possible without research investments. Yet demonstrating the impact of research programs is a challenge, especially in areas that span disciplines, industrial sectors, and encompass both public and private sector activity. All areas of research are under pressure to demonstrate benefits from federal funding of research. This exciting and innovative study demonstrates new methods and tools to trace the impact of federal research funding on the structure of research, and the subsequent economic activities of funded researchers. The case study is food safety research, which is critical to avoiding outbreaks of disease. The authors make use of an extraordinary new data infrastructure and apply new techniques in text analysis. Focusing on the impact of US federal food safety research, this book develops vital data-intensive methodologies that have a real world application to many other scientific fields.
As Canada was in the grips of the worst pandemic in a century, Canadian media struggled to tell the story. Newsrooms, already run on threadbare budgets, struggled to make broader connections that could allow their audience to better understand what was really happening, and why. Politicians and public health officials were mostly given the benefit of the doubt that what they said was true and that they acted in good faith. This book documents each month of the first year of the pandemic and examines the issues that emerged, from racialized workers to residential care to policing. It demonstrates how politicians and uncritical media shaped the popular understanding of these issues and helped to justify the maintenance of a status quo that created the worst ravages of the crisis. Spin Doctors argues alternative ways in which Canadians should understand the big themes of the crisis and create the necessary knowledge to demand large-scale change. |
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