The Chinese Academy of Sciences in 2002

The year 2002 saw the suc-cessful convocation of the16th National Congress ofthe Communist Party of China, atwhich the important thought ofThree Represents was made thelong-term guiding concept for ourParty in the future. The congresscalled for building a well-off societyin an all-round way and for acceler-ating the countrys socialist modern-ization drive. Moreover, a new ses-sion of the Partys leadership wassatisfactorily elected at the congress.The same year saw the ChineseAcademy of Sc…     

The Characteristic of Hemingway’s The Old Man and The Sea

Ernest Hemingway,a famous American modern writer,who has a high position in the international literature field.The Old Man and the Sea is a great masterpiece     

The foundations of Israel’s ongoing love affair with science

During the last two decades, the history of science in Israel has attracted much scholarly attention. Historians of science, science and technology studies (STS) scholars, and Middle East/Israel studies experts have focused on specific scientific disciplines or periods, analyzing the uniqueness of science and technology in Israel. This article explores what characterized Israel’s scientific activity precisely at the time of the state’s birth, and examine how the perception of science as key to Israel’s survival was constructed and reinforced in that formative phase. The focus here is on the natural sciences, as the perception of the natural sciences’ importance and their contribution to building the state and its security differed essentially from that of other disciplines. As this article demonstrates, the challenges that the natural sciences faced during Israel’s War of Independence were far more difficult than those faced by the social sciences and the humanities. This study analyzes scientific activity that took place in one single year, beginning with the establishment of the Science Corps in March 1948, two months before Israel’s declaring independence, until the end of its War of Independence in February 1949. As this study shows, both the war effort and the civilian activities strongly influenced scientific research and implementation in the nascent state.     

Esoteric Imperialism: The Solomonic-Theurgic Mystique of John Dee’s British Empire

The life and works of the English Renaissance polymath John Dee (1527–1609) have been traditionally treated by scholarship in the context of the history of philosophy and science. Only in recent decades have two of John Dee’s most prominent and controversial endeavors - (1) his political philosophy and advocacy of a British Empire (a term he is credited with coining), and (2) his long-standing practice of angelic magic - been reconstructed in their significance to Dee’s worldview. This paper highlights how Dee’s visions of a British Empire and his angelic rituals were not only major landmarks in his corpus, but were intimately interconnected in Dee’s ideology of “Cosmopolitics.” Dee’s “esoteric imperialism” is situated in the context of his intellectual, textual, and political environment, and his angelic magic is identified as fitting within the medieval Solomonic current. It is argued that both ideological trends coalesced in Dee’s vision of an angelic-inspired British Empire.     

Academy of Opto-Electronics,CAS

The Academy of Opto-Electronics (AOE) is an institution under the direct jurisdiction of the CAS headquarters. Organizationally, it has six components: the head office, the Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics & Physics (CIOMP), the Shanghai Institute of Technical Physics (SITP), the Xi’an Institute of Optics & Precision Mechanics (XIOM), the Shanghai Institute of Optics & Fine Me- chanics (SIOM) and the Institute of Optics & Electron- ics (IOE) in Chengdu. The p…     

Minerva’s owl. A response to John Houghton and Charles Oppenheim’s ‘The economic implications of alternative publishing models’

As the twenty-first century approaches … the possibilities of a univerally opulent society being realised have appeared in the sense that [Adam] Smith envisioned it, and the information society that will emerge from the computer communications revolution will be a society that actually moves towards a universal society of plenty … this is what I mean by “Computopia” (Masuda)

Our culture … is already committed to the proposition that the only legitimate knowledge we can gain of our world is that yielded by science. All thinking, dreaming, feeling, indeed all other sources of insight have already be delegitimated. The indoctrination of our children's minds with simplistic and uninformed computer idolatory … is a pandemic phenomenon (Weizenbaum)²     

The Shanghai Institute for Advanced Studies——A New Type of Science Academy

The Shanghai Institute for Advanced Studies is committed to the outlined goals of the older science academies, but is also trying to look beyond them to find its own course.     

The intangibles’ mindset of CFOs’ and corporate performance

This paper aims to analyze the companies’ view about the financial valuation of intangibles relevance and its influence on corporate performance. Based on the theory of resources, the role of intangibles in business competitiveness is justified. The traditional factors of production have become secondary, while the success is primarily based on the development and utilization of intangible resources. One of the main problems in managing the intangibles appears to be that, there is a general lack of information about them. Therefore, financial valuation of intangibles will result in significant benefits to the organization that will help determine business strategy, process design as well providing competitive advantage. It follows the hypothesis of this work, the greater known about their intangibles and the greater sensitivity to the financial valuation of them, the better performance. To achieve this objective, a field study is done, doing telephone calls to Basque Country companies’ financial managers.     

Institutional complementarities: The origins of experimentation in China’s plug-in electric vehicle industry

A vast literature on technology transitions within industries suggests that early phases of new technologies are marked by periods of intense experimentation, but we know little about the conditions under which these periods emerge. We apply inductive, grounded theory-building techniques to examine what prompts firms to experiment across one emerging technology platform—plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs)—in China. Triangulating annual vehicle make and model sales data from 2003 to 2016 (plus monthly data from 2010 to 2016); 112 English and Mandarin archival documents from industry, academic, and news outlets; and 51 semi-structured interviews with industry, government, and academic stakeholders, we develop four in-depth case studies. We find that in contrast to the innovation trajectories of multinational and Chinese arms of joint venture (JV) firms, independent domestic Chinese firms (those with no history of international JV partnerships) are undertaking significant experimentation across multiple levels—infrastructure, core system, subsystem, and component—of the emerging PEV technology platform. We propose the concept of “institutional complementarities” to describe how interactions among institutions—here the national JV regulation and local market support and subsidies—may have turned regional markets into protected laboratories, extending the incubation periods for independent domestic firm experimentation. While this diverse experimentation may be an important antecedent of technology transition, consolidation induced by national policy standardization or competitive pressure may be required for PEV innovations to scale beyond their early, protected regional markets.