Urban development and traffic accidents in Brazil.

Brazil started to experience high traffic accident rates since the 1960s, when road transportation began to be dominant and the number of motorized vehicles increased sharply. The severity of the problem was also related to the fast and uncontrolled urban growth, which allowed for the organization of an inherently dangerous circulation space, characterized by a complex pattern of traffic conflicts. With respect to traffic accidents, the results have been highly negative: national statistics report about 28,000 fatalities a year, with more than 340,000 injured people. The paper analyses current patterns of traffic accidents in urban areas, using the data from two of the three largest cities in the country. Hospital data is analyzed to understand the true social impacts of such accidents. Several causal factors are identified, at the political, cultural and technical sides. Challenges to change current conditions are also identified. Practical measures are suggested, especially the change of the dangerous environment and the need to improve the technical approach to the problem, education programs and enforcement logistics.     

Measurement in clinical vs. biological medicine: the Rasch model as a bridge on a widening gap

In the dominant Bio-medical paradigm Medicine is mostly Biology applied to Man. Measurement in Biology stems from physical sciences and has established validity. This is not the case for whole-person variables such as behaviors and psychic conditions (disability, pain, knowledges). The very existence of these variables can only be inferred by observing samples of representative behaviors. The quantity of the inferred variable may only come from subjective and discrete counts (scores) of events (coming in a questionnaire). Contemporary statistics demonstrated that raw scores intrinsically lack fundamental properties for scientific measurement, whatever their algebraic manipulations. This adds to the stigmatization of Clinical Medicine as "soft science", compared to Bio-medicine. In the 1960s Georg Rasch inaugurated a new statistical approach allowing transformation of raw scores into objective linear measures comparable to physical measures. This may help the Bio-medical paradigm to redirect resources from laboratory bench back to bedside.     

Ten years of the genomic era in Brazil: Impacts on technological development assessed by scientific production and patent analysis

Over ten years ago Brazil entered the era of genome projects with the launch of its first sequencing effort. Since then, a series of projects have been undertaken in the country, greatly contributing to the formation of scientific research networks, related infrastructure and specialized labor. Today, Brazil’s competence in this area is internationally recognized and it is one of the main countries in the number of genomes sequenced. This article examines the effects of these genome initiatives on Brazilian technological innovation, through a broad bibliometric review, comprising the analysis of academic and patent publications, which revealed that the development of technology has not kept pace with scientific output.     

Scientific and technological results from the Consort rocket program

The Consort suborbital rocket program was initiated to allow industrial researchers working through the various NASA Centers for Commercial Development of Space to have ready access to 6 to 7 min of microgravity environment for the purpose of trying out new ideas and for testing apparatus being developed for longer duration Shuttle flights. The 6 Consort flights have provided a wealth of experimental data, some of which has not been published in the open literature. The purpose of this paper is to document the experiments that have been flown and what has been learned. A fairly extensive bibliography of the published results has been included, and the investigator team responsible for the various experiments has been included so that interested parties may contact the various investigators directly for more details.     

The citation gap between printed and instrumental output of technological research: The case of the electron microscope

The merits and shortcomings of bibliometric evaluation techniques are well known; the reliability of the techniques varies according to the discipline. For technology the reliability is small. The electron microscope is a clear case of extreme mismatch between the number of citations received and the impact of the instrument in a wide area of science. The instrument is comparable to a scientific publication in the way in which it is used and referred to in the literature. In this paper we estimate the size of the citation gap, i.e. the number of citations an author misses because the results of his research are made public in the form of an instrument instead of via an article in a journal.     

中药膜分离领域的科学与技术问题

从分离的物质基础、分离的目标及可用于分离的性质等方面,探讨中药复杂体系的膜分离科学与技术问题,提出中药膜分离技术的工艺设计原则及膜污染防治思路．     

Scientific and technological performance evaluation of the Spanish Council for Scientific Research (CSIC) in the field of Biotechnology

An evaluation of the Spanish CSIC performance in Biotechnology, as compared with those of the French CNRS and the Italian CNR, has been carried out to determine the balance between the generation of scientific knowledge and the transfer of technology. This study shows a high scientific productivity mostly in journals with moderate impact factor, a low generation of patents and an insufficient transfer of knowledge to the Spanish companies. Other indicators confirm the existence of competitive human resources in biotechnological research producing scientific knowledge of interest for the development of patents and that cooperates successfully at European level.     

Scientific production in Computer Science: A comparative study of Brazil and other countries

In this paper we present a study about scientific production in Computer Science in Brazil and several other countries, as measured by the number of articles in journals and conference proceedings indexed by ISI and by Scopus. We compare the Brazilian production from 2001 to 2005 with some Latin American, Latin European, BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China), and other relevant countries (South Korea, Australia and USA). We also classify and compare these countries according to the ratio of publications in journals and conferences (the ones indexed by the two services). The results show that Brazil has by far the largest production among Latin American countries, has a production about one third of Spain’s, one fourth of Italy’s, and about the same as India and Russia. The growth in Brazilian publications during the period places the country in the mid-range group and the distribution of Brazilian production according to impact factor is similar to most countries.     

Scientific collaboration in biotechnology: the case of the northeast region in Brazil

The objective of this study is to investigate scientific collaboration in biotechnology in the northeast region of Brazil. The data presented refer to the 1980–2010 period and were collected from the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development platform database known as Lattes (a compilation of curricula vitae of researchers in Brazil, including a record of their scientific production) and from the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science database. Our analysis involved the use of bibliometric indicators, specifically co-authorship between or among institutions, as well as the evaluation of social networks and multivariate statistics. Overall, we verified that collaboration takes place mostly at the intra-institutional level. At intra-regional scale, we could observe the development of four clusters in relation to the collaboration dynamics, in which geographic proximity stands out as grouping factor. At the interregional level, the partnerships revolve around institutions that count with laboratory infrastructure and research tradition in the field of biotechnology. Regarding international collaboration, it remains connected to national scientific cooperation programs.     

Scientific linkage and technological innovation capabilities: international comparisons of patenting in the solar energy industry

From the perspective of science-based innovation, this study introduces measures of both scientific linkage (technology-science correlation index) and technological innovation capabilities (relative growth rate, relative patent position and revealed technological advantage) to compare and analyze the international competitiveness of solar energy technologies among the United States, the European Union, Japan, China and South Korea, based on the solar energy technologies-related patents in the European Patent Office Worldwide Patent Statistical Database. After making international comparisons of their technological development and innovation paradigm, we find that there are different innovation characteristics of various technology fields within the solar energy industry and then propose some relevant policy recommendations for latecomers to implement catch-up strategies. The results show that the leading countries and regions of the solar energy industry such as the United States and the European Union focus mainly on science-based innovation, while Japan and latecomers like China and South Korea pay more attention on technology-based innovation. In addition, those two fields within the solar energy industry present opposite innovation characteristics: solar photovoltaic technologies, especially thin film and organic cells, present strong technological innovation capabilities with high scientific linkage, while solar thermal technologies show strong technological innovation capabilities with low scientific linkage.     

Exploring pathways of regional technological development in China through patent analysis

Recently, China has experienced a surge in patenting and become the leading applicant nation worldwide. The technological substance of this growth, however, has become increasingly doubted as China's governments continue to promote patenting as a target per se. Against this background, the paper explores the structure of Chinese patenting from a regional perspective. Firstly, it analyses the technological profile, public component and outward orientation of specific provinces' technological ecosystems. Secondly, it connects these specific profiles to regions' recent growth in patent applications. Concluding, it finds that there are indications of both politically induced and technologically substantial growth in applications.     

Structure and development of the scientific and technological potential in the Republic of Cuba

Scientific statistics provides the foundations necessary for every sciences policy. Against this background, special problems are posed for the developing countries. Below you find a presentation and discussion of experiences gained and results obtained in the course of the build up of statistics on science and technology in the Republic of Cuba, with assessments and conclusions drawn from an analysis into the data so far available. Therefore this paper is dealing with the scientific and technological potential of Cuba as a whole (S/T) without providing any distinction between sciences and technology.     

Hydrogen storage: The major technological barrier to the development of hydrogen fuel cell cars

In this paper, we review the current technology for the storage of hydrogen on board a fuel cell-propelled vehicle. Having outlined the technical specifications necessary to match the performance of hydrocarbon. fue1, we first outline the inherent difficulties with gas pressure and liquid hydrogen storage. We then outline the history of transition metal hydride storage, leading to the development of metal hydride batteries. A viable system, however, must involve lighter elements and be vacuum-tight. The first new system to get serious consideration is titanium-activated sodium alanate, followed by the lithium amide and borohydride systems that potentially overcome several of the disadvantages of alanates. Borohydrides can alternatively produce hydrogen by reaction with water in the presence of a catalyst but the product would have to be recycled via a chemical plant. Finally various possible ways of making magnesium hydride decompose and reform more readily are discussed. The alternative to lighter hydrides is the development of physisorption of molecular hydrogen on high surface area materials such as carbons, metal oxide frameworks, zeolites. Here the problem is that the surface binding energy is too low to work at anything above liquid nitrogen temperature. Recent investigations of the interaction mechanism are discussed which show that systems with stronger interactions will inevitably require a surface interaction that increases the molecular hydrogen-hydrogen distance.     

The effects of internal technological diversity and external uncertainty on technological alliance portfolio diversity

This research proposes internal and external determinants that influence the diversity of a firm’s alliance portfolio. Focusing on technological aspects of the firm as well as investigating internal and external factors, we suggest that the internal technological diversity of the focal firm, as well as the technological uncertainty of the industry, affects the technological diversity of the alliance portfolio. The hypotheses are tested on a sample of U.S.-listed semiconductor firms’ global R&D alliances from 1990 to 2010. We find that the internal technological diversity of a firm has a negative influence on its technological alliance portfolio diversity. However, technological alliance portfolio diversity seems unaffected by the uncertainty of the firm’s environment. This study contributes to prior literature which has extensively studied the effects of alliance portfolio diversity on firm performance but has paid little attention to its determinants.     

Structural reforms, technological gaps and economic development: a Latin American perspective

This paper explores the impact that recent structural reformshave had upon macro-to-micro linkages, as well as upon the patternof production specialization, the entry and exit of firms duringthe adjustment process, and the ‘sources’ of technicalchange in the present more open and deregulated Latin Americanmacroeconomic scenarios. From this exploration a major questionemerges: is the new ‘market-oriented’ developmentparadigm sustainable in the long run? The interpretation presentedin this paper suggests that the present pattern of productionspecialization—strongly biased in favour of industriesfeaturing low domestic knowledge generation and value-addedcontent—and the inhibition of local R&D and engineeringactivities resulting from the rapid expansion of internationallyintegrated production systems are pushing Latin American economiesinto a ‘low development trap’ from which it mightprove extremely difficult to escape on the basis exclusivelyof free market principles.     

The role of industrial design in technological innovation

This paper identifies a means of increasing the likelihood of success in technological innovation. Collated evidence is drawn from a study of nine science-based products which have received Design Council Awards. Even in this small design-conscious sample, there is enough evidence to suggest that opposition by engineers to the employment of industrial designers is fairly widespread.