Scientific foundation, organization structure, and performance of biotechnology and pharmaceutical firms

Technologists seek to advance practical applications of science while scientists seek to advance knowledge which may or may not have a practical application. Firms with a stronger basic science focus, e.g. biology and chemistry, seek to advance their scientific knowledge foundation in addition to developing and selling innovative products. Firms with a more highly applied science foundation (medicine, engineering, etc.) prioritize the development and sale of innovative products. Combining an Absorptive Capacity (AC) approach with Transaction Cost Economics (TCE) this study explores and explains how firms gain knowledge and perform given their scientific focus.Findings indicate that firms with a stronger basic science orientation are less profitable than firms with a stronger applied science orientation. Applied science firms had more acquisitions and cooperative organizations but both types of firms were more likely to acquire other firms in their quest to build knowledge stores rather than partner. Partnerships with universities were more prevalent among basic science firms than with applied science firms.     

Development of an industrial engineering project

This paper presents a teaching strategy of the scheduling and developmental phase of an Industrial Engineering computer project. It is based on a real project which has been carried out by our department in collaboration with a local company. The classroom setting provides an environment where students can experience firsthand all phases of the development of an electronic product: design, development and implementation of a prototype board to the final commercial product.     

Involvement with child protective services: Is this a useful question in population-based surveys?

Direct questions on child maltreatment in population-based surveys are often limited by ethical and methodological issues. This restricts the ability of researchers to examine an important aspect of early adversity and its relationship to health and behavior. An alternative to excluding issues of maltreatment entirely in population-based surveys is to include questions on child and family involvement with child protective services (CPS). A school-based adolescent survey that included a question on child and family involvement with CPS yielded results that were generally consistent with other studies relating child maltreatment to health and behavioral outcomes such as psychological distress symptoms, delinquency, aspects of bullying, and health service utilization. Such findings suggest that questions on involvement with CPS may be a reasonable proxy for child maltreatment. Despite the lack of information on the reason for involvement or specific categories of maltreatment, CPS involvement questions highlight the shared familial experience that surrounds CPS involvement and serves as a general reflection of an adverse experience that can be utilized by researchers interested in early experiences.     

Relative Effectiveness of Expository and Field Trip Methods of Teaching on Students' Achievement in Ecology

The study was a pre‐test treatment post‐test control design. Three educational districts from the Niger Delta region of Nigeria were treated as clusters. Twenty boys and 20 girls were randomly selected, making up a total of 40 students, in each of Group A, Group B, and Group C. Students in Group A were taught ecology by taking them to the school farm, pond, and nearby stream, while students in Group B were taught ecology strictly in the classroom. Students in Group C were not taught but have knowledge of ecology. Findings of the study revealed a highest performance of Group A relative to Group B and Group C. Students in Group A (field trip) were thus able to perform highest because of their opportunity of having first‐hand experience of organisms in their natural habitat.     

Finding creativity and flow in a high-stakes assessment context

Remarks by the Minister for Education and Skills underscore the accountability that public institutions and the teaching profession carry for assuring the success of the nation's education enterprise. This article challenges assumptions about the nature of education that are critical to the accountability and testing regimens currently in favor internationally. While supportive of the goals of accountability systems, it argues that higher order pedagogies that reconcile competing historical trends between ‘progressive’ and ‘back to basics’ themes are very promising in an era of important new tools. These approaches include designing classroom ecosystems in ways that routinely elicit high performance and flow-like experiences in learning. Such designs, when successful, alter the terms of accountability and testing dialogues.     

Theory through history: Exploring scholarly conceptions of U.S. alternative media

This essay analyzes the relationships between major works on alternative media and historical contexts in order to discover various conceptions’ limitations and possibilities for practice. It begins by tracing the emergence and development of a dominant interpretive theory based in vanguardism, essentialism, and technological determinism, and concludes by discussing recent efforts that are grounded in materialist theories of culture and society. Such a change signals an ongoing project of generating understandings of alternative media that suggest the reciprocal relationships between modes of production, media forms, and oppositional, participatory practice.     

The World of Music

Musical Instruments of the World: An Illustrated Encyclopedia (New York: Bantam Books, 1978—$9.95, paper)

Warren Craig's Sweet and Lowdown: America's Popular Song Writers (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press, 1978—$25.00)

Norm N. Nite's Rock On: The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Rock 'n Roll– The Modern Years, 1964-Present (New York: Crowell, 1978—$14.95)

Jerry Osborne and Bruce Hamilton's Popular and Rock Records 1948-1978 (Phoenix, Arix.: O'Sullivan Woodside & Co., 1978—$7.95, paper)

Kenny Rogers and Len Epand's Making it with Music: Kenny Rogers' Guide to the Music Business (New York: Harper & Row, 1978—$12.95)

Anthony Fawcett's California Rock/California Sound: The Music of Los Angeles and Southern California (Los Angeles: Reed Books, 1978—$19.95/9.95)

Rock Critics' Choice: The Top 200 Albums (New York: Quick Fox, 1978—$4.95, paper)

Alan Kinzler's Bob Dylan: The Illustrated Record (New York: Harmony Books/Crown, 1978—$15.00/8.95)

John Blair's The Illustrated Discography of Surf Music 1959-1965 (J. Bee Productions, P.O. Box 1584, Riverside, Calif. 92502—$4.00, paper)

Alan Lomax's Folk Song Style and Culture (New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Books (Rutgers), 1978—$6.95, paper)

Nat Hentoff's The Jazz Life (New York: DaCapo, 1978—$5.95, paper)

George Hoefer, Music on My Mind: The Memoirs of an American Pianist (New York: DaCapo, 1978—$6.95, paper)

Valerie Wilmer's As Serious as Your Life: The Story of the New Jazz (London: Allison & Busby, 1977—E6.50 or about $13.00)     

Comparing Chinese undergraduate students’ level of intercultural communication competence: does studying in the USA make a difference?

This article presents the results of a study conducted in order to determine whether Chinese students who study in the USA for a portion of their internationalised undergraduate degree programme report differences in intercultural communication competence (ICC) compared to their classmates who remain in China. The results showed no significant differences in reported intercultural communication competence between students studying in Beijing and those studying in Denver. Frequency of multicultural group work was not associated with higher intercultural communication competence for students in Beijing, but it was positively associated with higher intercultural communication competence for students in Denver. The strongest relationship observed in the data was between intercultural communication competence and reciprocity, that is, the equal exchange of information and ideas among students. These results have implications for alternatives to study abroad, as well as classroom interventions designed to improve students’ intercultural communication competence.     

Primary and secondary school choice among public and religious alternatives

In this paper we develop a conceptual framework for analyzing school choice decisions, evaluate past empirical research, and estimate an individual level model of choice using a unique data set. Previous empirical work modeling households' decisions to send their children to public or private schools frequently employed incomplete or aggregate data that precluded firm policy conclusions. The data employed here merges 1980 individual level census data with information about schools in New York. The results suggest that parents are sensitive to the relative quality of school offerings, the tuition of religious schools, characteristics of other students in each alternative, and socioeconomic characteristics of the family. The empirical findings contribute to our understanding of the existing school choice structure and provide insights concerning new school choice proposals.