谈谈恐龙是热血动物的证据

恐龙是兴起于三叠纪晚期，全盛于侏罗纪，灭亡于白垩纪末期的一类古代巨大爬行动物。自从恐龙化石被真正发现，它们是冷血动物的观点便开始长期占据着人们的思想。但随着近几十年来科学家对恐龙化石特征、数量及其分布研究的不断深入，各方面的证据都从不同角度否定了这一传统观点。大量事实说明恐龙实际上的是一类热血动物。虽然现在对这一观点仍有部分争论，但这一观点的提出却对古生物学的发展产生了重大影响，是古生物学的一场革命。本文通过对这些证据的收集、整理、综合，具体阐述恐龙是热血动物论证过程，并就这此证据谈谈笔者对恐龙灭亡原因的一些设想。     

X-rays as evidence in German orthopedic surgery, 1895-1900

Historians have found it difficult to give a general account of the early medical use of X-rays in medicine. While the rays were hailed by some as a miracle technology, their early medical application was patchy, often remaining subsidiary to traditional methods of diagnosis and treatment, and was of disputed value. In this essay, I argue that the selective appropriation of the new technology needs to be understood within the wider medical practice of the period. The argument is developed around the case of orthopedic surgery in Germany, probably the first example in which doctors quickly made X-rays indispensable as a medical tool. I show that value of X-rays in this case was contingent upon an ongoing dispute, the theory and practice of surgical intervention, and the sociology of new surgical knowledge.     

Investigating the document structure as a source of evidence for multimedia fragment retrieval

Multimedia objects can be retrieved using their context that can be for instance the text surrounding them in documents. This text may be either near or far from the searched objects. Our goal in this paper is to study the impact, in term of effectiveness, of text position relatively to searched objects. The multimedia objects we consider are described in structured documents such as XML ones. The document structure is therefore exploited to provide this text position in documents. Although structural information has been shown to be an effective source of evidence in textual information retrieval, only a few works investigated its interest in multimedia retrieval. More precisely, the task we are interested in this paper is to retrieve multimedia fragments (i.e. XML elements having at least one multimedia object). Our general approach is built on two steps: we first retrieve XML elements containing multimedia objects, and we then explore the surrounding information to retrieve relevant multimedia fragments. In both cases, we study the impact of the surrounding information using the documents structure.     

Resource constraints as triggers of radical innovation: Longitudinal evidence from the manufacturing sector

Despite the significant role of radical innovation as a driver of firm growth and performance, the consequences of resource constraints for radical innovation outcomes remain unknown. Our paper addresses this gap. We combine arguments from entrepreneurship theory and the theory of recombinative innovation to construct an overarching theoretical framework that argues why resource constraints can promote, rather than impede, radical innovation. We then build hypotheses on two specific resource constraints, knowledge and financial, and test these by a lagged-variable random-effects Tobit model with longitudinal data from an exceptionally large and detailed innovation survey. Controlling for absorptive capacity, firm age, and firm growth, we find full support for the hypothesis that knowledge constraints spur radical innovation and partial support for the hypothesis that financial constraints spur radical innovation. We discuss the theoretical significance of these findings and point to managerial implications and paths for future research.     

Innovation persistence: Survey and case-study evidence

Evidence on the persistence of innovation sheds light on the nature of the innovation process and can guide appropriate policy development. This paper examines innovation persistence in Ireland and Northern Ireland using complementary quantitative and case-study approaches. Panel data derived from innovation surveys is used, and suggests very different results to previous analyses of innovation persistence primarily based on patents data. Product and process innovation are found to exhibit strong general persistence but we find no evidence that persistence is stronger among highly active innovators. Our quantitative evidence is most strongly consistent with a process of cumulative accumulation at plant level. Our case-studies highlight a number of factors which can either interrupt or stimulate this process including market volatility, plants’ organisational context and regulatory changes. Notably, however, the balance of influences on product and process innovation persistence differs, with product innovation persistence linked more strongly to strategic factors and process changes more often driven by market pressures.     

Effective sentence retrieval based on query-independent evidence

In this paper we propose an effective sentence retrieval method that consists of incorporating query-independent features into standard sentence retrieval models. To meet this aim, we apply a formal methodology and consider different query-independent features. In particular, we show that opinion-based features are promising. Opinion mining is an increasingly important research topic but little is known about how to improve retrieval algorithms with opinion-based components. In this respect, we consider here different kinds of opinion-based features to act as query-independent evidence and study whether this incorporation improves retrieval performance. On the other hand, information needs are usually related to people, locations or organizations. We hypothesize here that using these named entities as query-independent features may also improve the sentence relevance estimation. Finally, the length of the retrieval unit has been shown to be an important component in different retrieval scenarios. We therefore include length-based features in our study.     

International licensing of technology: empirical evidence

This paper summarizes recent empirical evidence on international licensing of technology and its determinants. Two empirical questions are treated. First, does evidence support a view that international licensing is more prevalent than domestic licensing? Second, what does the evidence imply about the causes of international versus domestic differences?Aggregate licensing data support the view of greater international than domestic licensing. This evidence is not conclusive, however, because the size of a country in relation to the rest of the world has an important influence on the data.Some evidence supports an ‘expansion constraint’ view that financial and organizational constraints are greater for overseas than domestic expansion and therefore licensing tends to be more popular internationally. More extensive evidence supports an additional view of the causes of international versus domestic licensing differences. This explanation, the ‘oligopoly’ view, is that firms seek to maintain segmented geographic markets by not licensing their technology to domestic competitors. Support for the ‘oligopoly’ view comes from our previous study of US licensing, from Japanese data, and from an independent British study. An interpretation of empirical results for Japan is that in other countries, notably the US, rival firms are unwilling to license their know-how and production secrets to each other for fear of losing their market position. There is, however, a valuable pool of technology which they could license, and in fact are willing to license to firms that aren't expected to be direct competitors. These licensees tend to be in foreign countries because the rivals' possibilities for expansion there are limited.     

University-based technology initiatives: Quantitative and qualitative evidence

This article discusses salient trends in university-based technology initiatives in the United States and Europe, and it summarizes the papers contained in this special issue.     

Motives to patent: Empirical evidence from Germany

Against the background of the patent upsurge, we first analyse the role of patenting and alternative instruments to protect intellectual property, based on a sample of German companies active in patenting. In a second step, we investigate the motives to patent, considering sector and company size effects. We find that company size matters, both for the importance of instruments and the motives to patent. Especially important are the new strategic motives to patent, like using patents to improve a company's own position in negotiations with partners, licensees and the financial sector, or to use patents as incentives for R&D personnel or performance indicators—these correlate positively with company size. We derive some possible challenges for future patent policies from these insights.     

关于审计证据质量控制的思考

审计证据是审计工作的核心,是形成审计结论的基础和保证。当今审计证据面临着一系列的问题,严重影响了其在经济监督职能方面的发挥。文章分析了审计证据中普遍存在的问题,提出了审计证据质量控制的思路方法,以达到提高审计证据质量的目的。     

Birthplace diversity and economic complexity: Cross-country evidence

We empirically investigate the relationship between a country’s economic complexity and the diversity in the birthplaces of its immigrants. Our cross-country analysis suggests that countries with higher birthplace diversity by one standard deviation are more economically complex by 0.1 to 0.18 standard deviations above the mean. This holds particularly for diversity among highly educated migrants and for countries at intermediate levels of economic complexity. We address endogeneity concerns by instrumenting diversity through predicted stocks from a pseudo-gravity model as well as from a standard shift-share approach. Finally, we provide evidence suggesting that birthplace diversity boosts economic complexity by increasing the diversification of the host country’s export basket.     

The innovation–economic growth nexus: Global evidence

This paper extends the line of research attempting to link innovation to economic growth by addressing some unexplored questions. Using global patent data, this paper empirically investigates the importance of both the quantity and quality of innovation on economic growth, controlling for past measures of inventive inputs. Moreover, our research examines how innovation inputs can be translated into per capita growth under the various economic structures and stages of economic development. Based on a sample of 58 countries for the period 1980–2003, our empirical results indicate that countries hosting firms with higher quality patents also have higher economic growth. Furthermore, we have some evidence that those countries that increase the level of patenting also witness a concomitant increase in economic growth.