Truth for Its Own Sake: Academic Culture and Technology Transfer at Johns Hopkins University

American research universities have long been a source of technical advance for industry, yet few have written on the history of university-industry relationships. This essay examines the evolution of practices and policies at Johns Hopkins University, which was established in 1876 as the first research university in the United States. Although an academic vision shaped its founding culture, the interests of technology transfer increasingly shape that culture. This essay considers the tensions between academic research and commercial orientation and the process of changing university orientation and culture.     

Higher education and early life outcomes

A multidimensional view of the impact of higher education is presented. The influence of earnings on three other life outcomes is considered. Data from a follow-up of students in the United States who had earlier participated in the Freshmen Norms Survey of the Cooperative Institutional Research Program (CIRP) indicate the distinctiveness of selected outcomes. A different developmental process is suggested for each. Controlling for other inputs, we found possible impacts of higher education on earnings attainment and liberalism-conservatism, but not on later job and life satisfaction.     

Cross-Language Evaluation Forum: Objectives, Results, Achievements

The Cross-Language Evaluation Forum (CLEF) is now in its fourth year of activity. We summarize the main lessons learned during this period, outline the state-of-the-art of the research reported in the CLEF experiments and discuss the contribution that this initiative has made to research and development in the multilingual information access domain. We also make proposals for future directions in system evaluation aimed at meeting emerging needs.     

Stage, Transfer, and Academic Achievement in Dialect-speaking Hawaiian Adolescents

The study reported here is concerned with certain dialect-speaking groups in the United States who do poorly in high school while giving their teachers an impression that they have great intellectual ability and doing well on formal operational tasks. We examined the relation between stage of cognitive development, transfer ability, production ability in Standard English, and school achievement among a sample of high school students in rural Hawaii, speakers of Hawaiian Creole English. A path analysis suggests that transfer ability is the missing ingredient in school performance, and that a habit of active encoding in the classroom, in turn, facilitates transfer.