Transferring technology into and within the third world

This article is based on Jordan J. Baruch's talk at the banquet at this year's Technology Transfer Society's annual meeting on the occasion of his being named winner of the society's Thomas Jefferson Award. As recipient of the award, he was cited for outstanding achievements in technology transfer in three categories:1. Exemplary success in managing actual transfer (Baruch invented and managed transfer of many civilian and military technologies in acoustics.).2. Leadership in technology-transfer public policy (He has been a frequent expert in Congressional testimony on such issues as consortia in technology development and commercialization. He also led efforts to develop formal organizations to promote technology transfer between the US and other nations such as Israel, Jordan, India, China, and several African countries.).3. Significant contributions to professional knowledge in technology transfer (Baruch has promoted the use of computer conferencing and was the conceptual and political driving force for the formation of the Center for Utilization of Federal Technology.). Jordan J. Baruch, who has a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), is a consultant (Jordan Baruch Associates). He served as assistant secretary for science and technology at the US Department of Commerce in 1977–81. A professor at Dartmouth, The Harvard Business School, and MIT, he also was a founding partner of the engineering firm Bolt Beranek & Newman. Baruch is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.     

Genetic profile of a multi-ethnic population from Guiné-Bissau (west African coast) using the new PowerPlex 16 System kit

Allele and haplotype frequencies of 15 chromosome STR loci included in the kit PowerPlex16 System from Promega, were determined in a sample of unrelated males from Guiné-Bissau, a country from the west African coast. All individuals were subjected to an interview in order to make sure that their ancestors belonged to the same ethnic group. This way we intended to look for possible inter-ethnic differences. PowerPlex 16 includes STRs not studied before in any multi-ethnic population. The kit includes two new allele markers (Penta D and Penta E), which are very useful either in forensics or population genetic studies. The Guinean population presents significant differences when compared with other African populations.     

Resilience in Inner City Youth: Childhood Predictors of Occupational Status Across the Lifespan

The present prospective study has followed a cohort of inner city men from adolescence (14±2) until age 65. While previous studies of shorter duration have identified numerous childhood factors that powerfully influence outcomes in young adulthood, this study examined the effect of these well-documented prognostic factors on occupational status across the lifespan. Consistent with previous studies, childhood environmental protector factors and parental social class predicted occupational status at age 25 significantly, but showed progressively weaker prediction at ages 32, 47 and 65. Timely early childhood development proved over time to be a far more important predictor than childhood social environment in adulthood. Ana C. DiRago is a Psychology Ph.D. student in the Clinical Science and Psychopathology Research area. She is involved with the Minnesota Twin Family Study. Her research interests include resilience and behavioral genetics in mood and anxiety disorders. George E. Vaillant is a Professor at Harvard Medical School. He has spent the last 30 years as Director of the Study of Adult Development charting adult development and the recovery process of schizophrenia, heroin addiction, and alcoholism. George considers Dan Offer a friend and long distance teacher.     

A different lens: administrative perspectives on portability in Illinois' Housing Choice Voucher Program

Over the last decade, the Housing Choice Voucher Program has grown to become the USA's primary strategy for providing safe, decent, and affordable housing. Annually serving more than 2 million low-income households, the program is designed to help low-income households afford private market rental housing. The program also allows for the “portability” of vouchers nationally between housing authority jurisdictions. Both features aim to mitigate the effects of concentrated poverty. Research on the Moving to Opportunity Program and the Gautreaux consent decree have produced data confirming that residential mobility can at times lead to positive opportunities for assisted households. This past research has been conducted on specific programs occurring outside of the general Housing Choice Voucher Program framework and has focused on household-level outcomes, paying little attention to the ways in which program administration may affect outcomes for voucher households. This article aims to understand voucher portability from the perspective of housing authority executive directors and program administrators, in order to better understand how program administration impacts the types of household outcomes observed in prior research. The results reveal that housing authority administrative practices and inter-housing authority relationships play a significant role in shaping the types of outcomes realized by porting voucher households. These findings suggest several changes to program administrative design and policy that may improve support for voucher households as they make portability moves.     

Are Changes Effective in Performance Management? An Analysis of Japanese Agencies

Agencies are key organizations for implementing and studying performance measurement and management (PMM). This article explores the implementation and effect of PMM in Japanese agencies. In Japan, design of the agency system included New Public Management elements, such as independence and delegation of powers, but also traditional ones, with a strong system of controls. The discourse about the soundness and ambitions of the PMM system permeated the agencies but not so much their effort toward PMM. The performance improvement attained by agencies depends on their agency characteristics, organizational culture, and organizational factors, with a remarkable influence of the organizational culture.     

MONUMENTALIZING THE EVERYDAY: The Edo-Tokyo Museum

The Edo-Tokyo Museum is both the crowning achievement of the populist historiography of Edo-Tokyo studies and the monumental embodiment of an era of cultural nationalism in Japan. It embodies the perennial tension between the city as home to a unique local culture and the city as a site of state power. The historians who oversaw the design of the exhibits envisioned a celebration of local everyday life, and focused their efforts on narrating the history of a mythic urban folk. A critical walk through the museum reveals three fundamental modes of mythic projection that underwrote this folk narrative: the city of the past as a “world we have lost,” commonplace tools as icons of an essential native culture resisting modernization, and the modern century as a march of progress in everyday life, indexed by ever-improving commodities. Throughout this narrative, the protagonists are the “ordinary people” (shomin) of Edo-Tokyo. In contrast, the building's architect saw the city solely in terms of its national significance and sought to project an image of grandeur suited to the position of Japan as triumphant superpower. No conflict was recognized between the two seemingly contradictory impulses, however, since myths of the everyday, exploited by government as well as academics in these years, promoted the easy fusion of local and national narratives.     

The Social Impact of Social Funds in Jamaica: A ‘Participatory Econometric’ Analysis of Targeting,Collective Action,and Participation in Community-Driven Development

Qualitative data from a case study of the Jamaica social investment fund reveal that the social fund process is elite-driven and decision-making tends to be dominated by a small group of motivated individuals. However, there is broad-based satisfaction with the outcome. Quantitative data from 500 households mirror these findings by showing that, ex-ante, the social fund does not address the expressed needs of the majority of individuals in the majority of communities. By the completion of the project, however, 80 per cent of the community expresses satisfaction with the outcome. An analysis of the determinants of participation reveals that better educated and better networked individuals dominate the process. Propensity-score analysis demonstrates that JSIF has had a causal impact on improvements in trust and the capacity for collective action, but these gains are greater for elites.     

Measuring Quality of Life in Spanish Municipalities

Abstract

Measuring quality of life in municipalities entails two empirical challenges. First, collecting a set of relevant indicators that can be compared across the municipalities in the sample. Secondly, using an appropriate aggregating tool in order to construct a synthetic index. This paper measures quality of life for the largest 237 Spanish municipalities using Value Efficiency Analysis (VEA) to derive comparative scores by combining the information contained in 19 partial indicators. VEA is a refinement of DEA (Data Envelopment Analysis) that imposes some consistency in the weights of the indicators used to construct the aggregate index. The indicators cover aspects related to consumption, social services, housing, transport, environment, labour market, health, culture and leisure, education and security. The results show that the Northern and Central regions in Spain attain the highest levels of quality of life, while the Southern regions report low living conditions. Education is the variable that requires the largest improvement in low performing municipalities, followed by health and culture facilities, pollution and crime. Population density, growth and ageing seem to relate positively to quality of life.