Knowledge integrators or weak links? An exploratory comparison of patenting researchers with their non-inventing peers in nano-science and technology

Summary Policy-makers in many countries emphasize the importance of non-publication output of university research. Increasingly, policies are pursued that attempt to encourage entrepreneurial activity in universities and public research institutes. Apart from generating spin-out companies, technology licensing, and collaborative research, attention is focused on patenting activities of researchers. Some analysts suggest that there is a trade-off between scholarly publication and patenting activity. This paper explores this relationship drawing on a data set of nanoscience publications and nanotechnology patents in three European countries. In particular, this study examines whether researchers who both publish and patent are more productive and more highly cited than their peers who concentrate on scholarly publication in communicating their research results. Furthermore, this study investigates the collaborative activity of inventor-authors and their position in their respective networks of scientific communication. The findings suggest that overall there seems to be no adverse relationship between publication and patenting activity, at least not in this area of science and technology. Patenting scientists appear to outperform their solely publishing, non-inventing peers in terms of publication counts and citation frequency. However, while they are considerably over-represented in the top performance class, the data indicates that inventor-authors may not occupy top positions within that group. An analysis of co-authorship links indicates that patenting authors can also play a prominent role within networks of scientific communication. The network maps also point to groups where inventor-authors occur frequently and others where this is not the case, which possibly reflects cognitive differences between sub-fields. Finally, the data indicates that inventor-authors account only for a marginal share of publishing scholars while they play a substantial role amongst inventors.     

Uncovering hidden contracts: the .NET example

Software contracts take the form of routine preconditions, postconditions, and class invariants written into the program itself. The design by contract methodology uses such contracts for building each software element, an approach that is particularly appropriate for developing safety-critical software and reusable libraries. This methodology is a key design element of some existing libraries, especially the Eiffel Software development environment, which incorporates contract mechanisms in the programming language itself. Because the authors see the contract metaphor as inherent to quality software development, they undertook the work reported in the article as a sanity check to determine whether they see contracts everywhere simply because their development environment makes using them natural or whether contracts are intrinsically present, even when other designers don't express or even perceive them. They studied classes from the .NET collections library for implicit contracts and assessed improvements that might result from making them explicit.     

A Simulation Framework for Heterogeneous Agents

We introduce a generic simulation framework suitable for agent-based simulations featuring the support of heterogeneous agents, hierarchical scheduling, and flexible specification of design parameters. One key aspect of this framework is the design specification: we use a format based on the Extendible Markup Language (XML) that is simple-structured yet still enables the design of flexible models. Another issue in agent-based simulations, especially when ready-made components are used, is the heterogeneity arising from both the agents' implementations and the underlying platforms. To tackle such obstacles, we introduce a wrapper technique for mapping the functionality of agents living in an interpreter-based environment to a standardized JAVA interface, thus facilitating the task for any control mechanism (like a simulation manager) because it has to handle only one set of commands for all agents involved. Again, this mapping is made by an XML-based definition format. We demonstrate the technique by applying it to a simple sample simulation of two mass marketing firms operating in an artificial consumer environment.     

Full-body interface pressure testing as a method for performance evaluation of clinical support surfaces

A method for evaluating the performance of clinical support surfaces is required by designers in their efforts to produce better clinical support surfaces that will reduce the incidence of pressure ulcers. In this study, a Pressure Index (P_index) is defined which is derived from an analytical equation used to evaluate the average interface pressure, the peak pressure, the magnitude of the peak pressure, and the number of peak pressures on the entire body. The type of subjects needed to represent a population of users as well as the head of bed elevations necessary to simulate clinical applications were integrated with the P_index to create a single-value mean pressure index which can be used to evaluate any type of surface. To determine the accuracy and repeatability of the mean pressure index, three surfaces (a standard hospital innerspring, a replacement foam mattress, and a low-airloss surface) were tested and evaluated using this method. The low airloss performed the best and the standard innerspring clearly performed the worst (p < 0.0001). The method appeared to accurately and reproducibly predict the relative performance of the three surfaces in reducing pressure.     

Stable inversion and parameter variations

As part of the process of automatically guiding an aircraft, we have been successful in using stable inversion to compute a desired bounded state trajectory and corresponding bounded control. In addition to this feedforward control, we must also construct a regulator to address modeling errors and disturbances. With respect to modeling errors we find that the stable inversion procedures used are so accurate that the regulator can assume a simple form, say a linear regulator about the desired trajectory. We show that under the appropriate assumptions, the bounded state trajectory and bounded control computed through stable inversion depend continuously on the parameters of the system. This is a consequence of a mathematical result that we prove about the continuous dependence of the “particular solution” of a time varying nonlinear system driven by a bounded input. This is distinct from the usual continuous dependence of the initial value problem for systems.     

Mechanisms of Hf dopant incorporation during the early stage of chemical vapor deposition aluminide coating growth under continuous doping conditions

A laboratory-scale chemical vapor deposition (CVD) reactor was used to perform “continuous” Hf doping experiments while the surface of a single-crystal Ni alloy was being aluminized to form an aluminide (β-NiAl) coating matrix for 45 minutes at 1150 °C. The continuous doping procedure, in which HfCl₄ and AlCl₃ were simultaneously introduced with H₂, required a high HfCl₄/AlCl₃ ratio (>∼0.6) to cause the precipitation of Hf-rich particles (∼0.1 μm) at grain boundaries of the coating layer, with the overall Hf concentration of ∼0.05 to 0.25 wt pct measured in the coating layer by glow-discharge mass spectroscopy (GDMS). Below this ratio, Hf did not incorporate as a dopant into the growing coating layer from the gas phase, as the coating matrix appeared to be “saturated” with other refractory elements partitioned from the alloy substrate. In comparison, the Hf concentration in the aluminide coating layer formed on pure Ni was in the range of ∼0.1 wt pct, which was close to the solubility of Hf estimated for bulk NiAl. Interestingly, the segregation of Hf and the formation of a thin γ′-Ni₃Al layer (∼0.5 μm) at the coating surface were consistently observed for both the alloy and pure-Ni substrates. The formation of the thin γ′-Ni₃Al layer was attributed to an increase in the elastic strain of the β-NiAl phase, associated with the segregation of Hf as well as other refractory alloying elements at the coating surface. This phenomenon also implied that the coating layer was actually growing at the interface between the γ′-Ni₃Al layer and the β-NiAl coating matrix, not at the gas/coating interface, during the early stage of the coating growth.     

A novel processor architecture with exact tag-free pointers

Along with the success of Java, garbage collection advances to embedded and real-time systems. In this paper a novel RISC processor architecture that lays the foundation for efficient real-time garbage collection in hardware and guarantees pointer integrity at the machine-code level is proposed. This article summarizes the most commonly used garbage collection methods and points out problems of contemporary software-based solutions to motivate architectural support for garbage collection.     

Correlation of damage, dry band arcing energy, and temperature in inclined plane testing of silicone rubber for outdoor insulation

Silicone rubber samples, filled with 30% alumina trihydrate, subjected to the ASTM inclined plane test, show good correlation between the measured harmonic power components of dry band arcing and the surface temperature recorded with a thermovision camera. The simultaneous study of the low frequency fast Fourier transform and variations in temperature shows that when the temperature rises above 100/spl deg/C there is a well defined increase in the low frequency harmonic components of the measured power; however, this trend is not verified by the fundamental component. The eroded mass of the samples is measured independently by a laser approach and a model to rank the tested samples using the inclined plane test is developed. The model is validated by applying it to both the recorded harmonic power components and temperature, resulting in the correct ranking of damage on the samples tested in the inclined plane test.