University-industry research relationships in biotechnology: implications for the university

The growth of university-industry research relationships in biotechnology has raised questions concerning their effects, both positive and negative, on universities. A survey of over 1200 faculty members at 40 major universities in the United States reveals that biotechnology researchers with industrial support publish at higher rates, patent more frequently, participate in more administrative and professional activities and earn more than colleagues without such support. At the same time, faculty with industry funds are much more likely than other biotechnology faculty to report that their research has resulted in trade secrets and that commercial considerations have influenced their choice of research projects. Although the data do not establish a causal connection between industrial support and these faculty behaviors, our findings strongly suggest that university-industry research relationships have both benefits and risks for academic institutions. The challenge for universities is to find ways to manage these relationships that will preserve the benefits while minimizing the risks.     

The triple burden: the impact of time poverty on women’s participation in coffee producer organizational governance in Mexico

In the mid-1990s, fairtrade-organic registration data showed that only 9 % of Oaxaca, Mexico’s organic coffee ‘farm operators’ were women; by 2013 the female farmer rate had increased to 42 %. Our research investigates the impact of this significant increase in women’s coffee association participation among 210 members of two coffee producer associations in Oaxaca, Mexico. We find that female coffee organization members report high levels of household decision-making power and they are more likely than their male counterparts to report control over their coffee income. These significant advances in women’s agency within the household are offset by the fact that the women experience significant time poverty as they engage in coffee production while bearing a disproportionate share of domestic labor obligations. The women coffee producers view organizational labor as a third burden on their time, after their reproductive and productive labor. The time poverty they experience limits their ability to fully participate in coffee organizational governance and consequently there are few women leaders at all levels of the coffee producer businesses. This is problematic because it limits women’s ability to fully benefit from organizational membership: when women fully participate in governance they gain valuable business and leadership skills and producer associations with active female members may also be more likely to develop and maintain programs and policies that enhance gender equity. Our findings indicate that targeted agricultural development programs to improve gender equity among agricultural smallholders should involve creative ways to ease women’s labor burdens and reduce their time poverty in order to facilitate full organizational participation. The research findings fill a gap in existing studies of agricultural global value chains (GVCs) by demonstrating how the certified coffee GVC depends on women’s under and un-paid labor not only within the household but also within producer organizations.     

Empirical analysis of an evolving social network

Social networks evolve over time, driven by the shared activities and affiliations of their members, by similarity of individuals' attributes, and by the closure of short network cycles. We analyzed a dynamic social network comprising 43,553 students, faculty, and staff at a large university, in which interactions between individuals are inferred from time-stamped e-mail headers recorded over one academic year and are matched with affiliations and attributes. We found that network evolution is dominated by a combination of effects arising from network topology itself and the organizational structure in which the network is embedded. In the absence of global perturbations, average network properties appear to approach an equilibrium state, whereas individual properties are unstable.     

农业院校青年教师基本技能提高的研究与实践

农业院校青年教师基本技能是指其完成教学活动任务必须包含的专业知识与能力,是其教育和教学综合能力的体现。重视青年教师的基本技能是高校发展的保障,在实践中提高青年教师基本技能是高校培养教师的重要途径。     

Female leadership raises aspirations and educational attainment for girls: a policy experiment in India

Exploiting a randomized natural experiment in India, we show that female leadership influences adolescent girls' career aspirations and educational attainment. A 1993 law reserved leadership positions for women in randomly selected village councils. Using 8453 surveys of adolescents aged 11 to 15 and their parents in 495 villages, we found that, relative to villages in which such positions were never reserved, the gender gap in aspirations closed by 20% in parents and 32% in adolescents in villages assigned a female leader for two election cycles. The gender gap in adolescent educational attainment was erased, and girls spent less time on household chores. We found no evidence of changes in young women's labor market opportunities, which suggests that the impact of women leaders primarily reflects a role model effect.     

农业院校教职工法律援助机制研究

分析了农业院校教职工在行政方面、民事方面、仲裁方面的法律援助的需求,将农业院校教职工法律援助机制存在的问题总结为农业院校职工法律援助的法律制度规定缺失、法律援助民间模式应用不足、法律援助机制缺少管理制度。探讨了农业院校职工法律援助制度运行机制的建立问题,强调完善农业院校教职工法律援助的相关法律规定,鼓励发展农业院校教职工法律援助的民间模式,建立规范教职工法律援助的管理规章制度。     

人类生命现象新论

人类有着奇异性的生理、心理结构效应模式．这种效应模式由３个层次９个子系统构成，是生命与文化内在的嵌套，构成了人类的生命现象，成为人的存在基础．据此认为自然科学家在研究人类生命现象时，要从“辩析毫厘”中看到文化的作用，社会科学家在研究人性时，要从“纵横六合”中注意到生命现象的奇异性．     

高校人事聘用制改革与构建的新思考

本剖析了全员聘用制的优点和消极因素，并提出高校构建流动与稳定岗位相结合、聘用制与评估制相得益彰的人才选拔聘用制度的思路和途径。     

刍议利用网络媒体加强大学生思想政治教育

网络媒体对大学生的学习和思想教育具有重要影响,是新形势下高校思想政治教育的重要阵地。基于对高校专业教师、思政教师和大学生对网络媒体使用的调研,明确了大学生应用网络媒体的意愿、类别、使用目的和关注重点,分析了网络媒体对大学生专业学习和综合素质培养的影响,并进一步提出利用网络媒体加强大学生思想政治教育的方法与举措。     

Edison and the pure science ideal in 19th-century america

Between 1878 and 1882, key members of the American scientific community played an important role in Thomas A. Edison's work on electric lighting. Impressed by his abilities, these scientists came to regard Edison as a peer and led him to see himself as a scientific man. But Edison's high standing among scientists and the American public and his professed self-image as a scientist provoked America's noted experimental physicist, Henry A. Rowland, to make a "Plea for pure science" before the American Association for the Advancement of Science in 1883.     

Reputational ratings of doctoral programs

Peer ratings of the quality of doctoral program faculties were obtained in a 1975 national survey of chemistry, history, and psychology programs. The ratings were then compared to those obtained 6 and 11 years earlier by the American Council on Education. In general, the rankings obtained from the ratings proved to be highly stable over the 11-year period, particularly in chemistry and history. Some ratings were also obtained for subspecialties within the three disciplines. Though it is clear that variations in quality among subspecialty faculties do exist and are important for individual program evaluations, it is unlikely that such subspecialty ratings would be feasible or useful in national surveys of the reputations of doctoral programs. The ratings were found to be highly related to a number of research-oriented variables of departments (such as size, productivity, percentage of alumni holding academic positions at Ph.D.-granting universities), but unrelated or very weakly related to such features as the student-reported quality of teaching and degree of faculty concern for students, or faculty-reported degree of departmental effort toward the career development of junior members of the faculty.     

NASA life sciences. An improvement in vital signs

Last week a hefty Russian module with living and working quarters for astronauts docked with the pieces of the international space station already in orbit, a critical step in creating a full-time orbiting laboratory. Meanwhile, NASA bureaucrats put the finishing touches on a realignment of the agency's struggling biology effort that should bolster fundamental research and allow scientists to make better use of the facility, scheduled to be completed in 2005. The two events raise the hopes of U.S. academic space life scientists that their discipline is at last on the ascent at NASA.     

The university, industry, and cooperative research

Yale University intends to issue a statement of policy governing the nature and extent of university and faculty involvement in the commercial application of scientific research. This policy will be based on the university's principles of openness and free dissemination of ideas, and will recognize the need of profit-oriented companies to treat knowledge as private property. The university will continue to allow relationships between faculty members and commercial companies, even in arrangements involving university-based results, but a faculty member who goes beyond any reasonable definition of "consulting" may be asked to take an unpaid leave of absence or to sever his or her ties with the university. While a university should not ignore the potential availability of funds from commercial sponsors, neither should it be driven to arrangements that are not compatible with the norms and mission of the university.     

Human issues in human rights

The National Academy of Sciences' Committee on Human Rights and its 350 correspondent academy members seeks to ease the plight of individual scientists, engineers, and medical personnel suffering severe repression. It has engaged in a program of private inquiry, public remonstrance, and moral support in behalf of individuals from 11 countries. In developing this activity, members of the committee had to engage in a series of troubling issues related to the nature of human rights, the choice of cases, and the format of protest. But most troubling of all are the issues raised by the profound distortions of humanness, nationhood, and science that follow in the wake of repression.     

中国农业大学校内文献资源共享机制研究

随着高等院校招生规模的扩大和信息资源更新速度的加快，生均可利用文献的拥有量并没有显著增加，文献的供给与需求之间出现了较大的缺口．而校内文献资源不能有效的共知共享也是可用文献资源不能满足需求的原因之一。本文通过对中国农业大学院系资料室现有资源与服务现状的调查分析，阐明了校内文献资源共享的必要性，提出了建立校内文献资源共享机制的建议。     

Virology. Evolution on life's fringes

Earlier this summer, two dozen scientists gathered here to take another crack at the question of viral origins and evolution. Fresh evidence that viruses have existed for billions of years suggests that they were on hand when the first cells arose. That has scientists wondering what role these stripped-down microbes played in the evolution of life.     

Bibliography: Farmer knowledge and management of crop disease

Nearly all contemporary people subsist on cultivated plants, most of which are vulnerable to diseases. Yet, there have been few studies of what traditional people know – and do not know – about crop disease. Agricultural scientists in general are becoming aware of the potential contribution of social scientists and farmers in developing integrated management of crop diseases. The International Potato Center (CIP) has focused on stimulating farmer-scientist collaboration in developing management of late blight, a major fungal disease of potatoes and other plants. Understanding farmers' knowledge of this and other plant diseases is an important element in furthering such collaboration. Although not all agricultural scientists recognize the value of social science, this literature search shows that some agricultural scientists now actively collaborate with farmers, in ways that cross the boundary into social science research. During this search, much of the work we found was written by plant pathologists and entomologists. We found over fifty publications on farmer knowledge of crop disease, and we have annotated the material that we thought most relevant to farmer- scientist collaboration for research of crop diseases, especially late blight.     

What difference does income make for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) members in California? Comparing lower-income and higher-income households

In the U.S. there has been considerable interest in connecting low-income households to alternative food networks like Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). To learn more about this possibility we conducted a statewide survey of CSA members in California. A total of 1149 members from 41 CSAs responded. Here we answer the research question: How do CSA members’ (1) socioeconomic and demographic backgrounds, (2) household conditions potentially interfering with membership, and (3) CSA membership experiences vary between lower-income households (LIHHs) and higher-income households (HIHHs)? We divided members into LIHHs (making under $50,000 annually) and HIHHs (making over $50,000 annually). We present comparisons of LIHHs’ and HIHHs’ (1) employment, race/ethnicity, household composition and education, use of food support, and enjoyment of food-related activities; (2) conditions interfering with membership and major life events; and (3) sources of information influencing decision to join, reasons for joining, ratings of importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, gaps between importance of and satisfaction with various CSA attributes, valuing of the share and willingness to pay more, and impacts of membership. We find that LIHHs are committed CSA members, often more so than HIHHs, and that CSA members in California are disproportionately white, but that racial disproportionality decreases as incomes increase. We conclude by considering: (1) the economic risks that LIHHs face in CSA membership, (2) the intersection of economic risks with race/ethnicity and cultural coding in CSA; and (3) the possibilities of increasing participation of LIHH in CSA.     

基于文献计量学的我国2006-2015年植物分子生物学研究态势分析

植物分子生物学是植物基因工程的理论基础,对作物遗传改良、新品种培育有重要的指导意义,总结我国植物分子生物学科研论文产出,客观评价我国在该研究领域的基础研究水平及影响力,了解发展现状和变化趋势,对我国种业自主创新有重要意义。以Web of Science 数据库为文献来源,检索了2006-2015年间我国研究人员在植物分子生物学领域发表的高水平研究文献,用文献计量学方法分析了我国论文产出数量和影响力的现状及发展态势,并与世界主要国家进行对比,同时对该领域内我国科学家发文期刊、高产作者、高产机构、资助来源和国际合作情况的分布特征进行描述,并揭示了我国植物分子生物学研究领域的研究热点。结果表明：过去十年间我国植物分子生物学领域发展迅速,我国科学家发表的影响因子大于4.0的论文共计3 841篇,占全球总数的16.74%,全球排名第二,且年度发表量呈现逐年递增的趋势,从2012年开始跃居全球第二,与美国的差距日益缩小。论文影响力也得到了提升,但与荷兰、英国等世界领先水平国家仍有较大差距。通过本研究进一步把握了植物分子生物学全球发展格局,挖掘出我国在该领域的一批优势机构和领军人才,理清我国国际合作关系,追溯资助来源,探测研究热点,识别我国在领域内的国际地位,找到优势和潜力,并发现问题和差距,以期为植物分子生物学学科发展提供参考。     

What happens after technology adoption? Gendered aspects of small-scale irrigation technologies in Ethiopia,Ghana, and Tanzania

Diverse agricultural technologies are promoted to increase yields and incomes, save time, improve food and nutritional security, and even empower women. Yet a gender gap in technology adoption remains for many agricultural technologies, even for those that are promoted for women. This paper complements the literature on gender and technology adoption, which largely focuses on reasons for low rates of female technology adoption, by shifting attention to what happens within a household after it adopts a technology. Understanding the expected benefits and costs of adoption, from the perspective of women users in households with adult males, can help explain observed technology adoption rates and why technology adoption is often not sustained in the longer term. Drawing on qualitative data from Ethiopia, Ghana, and Tanzania, this paper develops a framework for examining the intrahousehold distribution of benefits from technology adoption, focusing on small-scale irrigation technologies. The framework contributes to the conceptual and empirical exploration of joint control over technology by men and women in the same household. Efforts to promote technology adoption for agricultural development and women’s empowerment would benefit from an understanding of intrahousehold control over technology to avoid interpreting technology adoption as an end in and of itself.