Education, Training, and Skills Formation

2019 ◽  
pp. 83-105
Author(s):  
Susana Borrás ◽  
Charles Edquist

The main question that guides this chapter is how governments are focusing (and must focus) on competence-building (education, training, and skills formation) when designing and implementing innovation policies. After a brief literature review, this chapter suggests a typology of internal/external and individual/organizational sources of competences that are related to innovation activities. This serves to examine briefly the most common initiatives that governments are taking in this regard. The chapter identifies three common overall obstacles and barriers in innovation systems in terms of education, training, and skills formation: the insufficient levels of skills and competences in a system, the time lag between firms’ short-term needs for specific competences and the long time required to develop them, and the imbalances between internal and external sources of competences in firms. From these, the chapter elaborates a set of overall criteria for the (re)design and choice of policy instruments that address those obstacles and barriers.

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Berna Uygur ◽  
Josh Duberman ◽  
Steven M Ferguson

One of the ongoing challenges for academic, biotech and pharma organizations involved in oncology-related research and development is how to help scientists be more effective in transforming new scientific ideas into products that improve patients’ lives. Decreasing the time required between bench work and translational study would allow potential benefits of innovation to reach patients more quickly. In this study, the time required to translate cancer-related biomedical research into clinical practice is examined for the most common cancer cases including breast, lung and prostate cancer. The calculated “time lag” typically of 10 years for new oncology treatments in these areas can create fatal delays in a patient’s life. Reasons for the long “time lag” in cancer drug development were examined in detail, and key opinion leaders were interviewed, to formulate suggestions for helping new drugs reach from bench to bed side more quickly.


Author(s):  
Kenji Ikeda ◽  
Yusuke Kawamura ◽  
Masahiro Kobayashi ◽  
Taito Fukushima ◽  
Yushi Sorin ◽  
...  

Background: Although DC Bead has been useful in treatment of multiple and large hepatocellular carcinoma, loading time of doxorubicin into the DC Bead takes a long time of 30-120 minutes. Epirubicin is also used as an antitumor agent together with DC Bead, but its loading efficiency was not sufficiently elucidated. Methods: To shorten loading time of epirubicin into DC Bead (100-300µm, 300-500µm, 500-700µm), we examined the following three methods after mixing the drug: (a) let stand in room temperature, (b) agitated for 30 seconds with Vortex mixer, and (c) sonicated for 30 seconds with ultrasonic cleaner. After loading of epirubicin by each method, supernatant concentration for epirubicin was assayed at 5, 10, 30, 60, and 120 minutes. Results: Epirubicin loading rates for small bead (100-300µm) at 5 minutes were 82.9 % in group a, 93.8% in group b, and 79.9 % in group c. Similarly, medium bead (300-500µm), 40.1% in group a, 65.7% in group b and 45.5% in group c, respectively. In large-sized bead (500-700µm), loaded rates of epirubicin were 38.8% in group a, 59.0% in group b and 48.0% in group c. Agitation of mixture of epirubicin and DC Bead with Vortex mixer significantly shortened the loading time, but sonication did not affect the time required. Microscopic examination did not lead to any morphological change of microspheres in all the methods. Conclusions: Short time of agitation with Vortex mixer reduced the necessary time for loading of epirubicin in every standard of DC Bead.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Mazzuca ◽  
Matteo Santarelli

The concept of gender has been the battleground of scientific and political speculations for a long time. On the one hand, some accounts contended that gender is a biological feature, while on the other hand some scholars maintained that gender is a socio-cultural construct (e.g., Butler, 1990; Risman, 2004). Some of the questions that animated the debate on gender over history are: how many genders are there? Is gender rooted in our biological asset? Are gender and sex the same thing? All of these questions entwine one more crucial, and often overlooked interrogative. How is it possible for a concept to be the purview of so many disagreements and conceptual redefinitions? The question that this paper addresses is therefore not which specific account of gender is preferable. Rather, the main question we will address is how and why is even possible to disagree on how gender should be considered. To provide partial answers to these questions, we suggest that gender/sex (van Anders, 2015; Fausto-Sterling, 2019) is an illustrative example of politicized concepts. We show that no concepts are political in themselves; instead, some concepts are subjected to a process involving a progressive detachment from their supposed concrete referent (i.e., abstractness), a tension to generalizability (i.e., abstraction), a partial indeterminacy (i.e., vagueness), and the possibility of being contested (i.e., contestability). All of these features differentially contribute to what we call the politicization of a concept. In short, we will claim that in order to politicize a concept, a possible strategy is to evidence its more abstract facets, without denying its more embodied and perceptual components (Borghi et al., 2019). So, we will first outline how gender has been treated in psychological and philosophical discussions, to evidence its essentially contestable character thereby showing how it became a politicized concept. Then we will review some of the most influential accounts of political concepts, arguing that currently they need to be integrated with more sophisticated distinctions (e.g., Koselleck, 2004). The notions gained from the analyses of some of the most important accounts of political concepts in social sciences and philosophy will allow us to implement a more dynamic approach to political concepts. Specifically, when translated into the cognitive science framework, these reflections will help us clarifying some crucial aspects of the nature of politicized concepts. Bridging together social and cognitive sciences, we will show how politicized concepts are abstract concepts, or better abstract conceptualizations.


Filomat ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 31 (20) ◽  
pp. 6247-6267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elham Shamsara ◽  
Zahra Afsharnezhad ◽  
Reihaneh Mostolizadeh

Developing accurate mathematical models for host immune response in immunosuppressive diseases such as HIV and HTLV-1 are essential to achieve an optimal drug therapy regime. Since for HTLV-1 specific CTL response typically occurs after a time lag, we consider a discontinuous response function to better describe this lagged response during the early stage of the infectious, thus the system of HTLV-1 model will be a discontinuous system. For analyzing the dynamic of the system we use Filippov theory and find conditions in which the Filippov system undergoes a Hopf bifurcation. The Hopf bifurcation help us to find stable and unstable periodic oscillations and can be used to predict whether the CTL response can return to a steady state condition. Also, Hopf bifurcation in sliding mode is investigated. In this case the solutions will remain in the hyper-surface of discontinuity and as a consequence the disease cannot progress, at least for a long time. Finally we use numerical simulations to demonstrate the results by example.


2020 ◽  
pp. 174462952096194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Femke Scheffers ◽  
Xavier Moonen ◽  
Eveline van Vugt

Background: Persons with an intellectual disability are at increased risk of experiencing adversities. The current study aims at providing an overview of the research on how resilience in adults with intellectual disabilities, in the face of adversity, is supported by sources in their social network. Method: A literature review was conducted in the databases Psycinfo and Web of Science. To evaluate the quality of the included studies, the Mixed Method Appraisal Tool (MMAT) was used. Results: The themes: “ positive emotions,” “ network acceptance,” “ sense of coherence” and “ network support,” were identified as sources of resilience in the social network of the adults with intellectual disabilities. Conclusion: The current review showed that research addressing sources of resilience among persons with intellectual disabilities is scarce. In this first overview, four sources of resilience in the social network of people with intellectual disabilities were identified that interact and possibly strengthen each other.


2014 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 359-363 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas E. Lovejoy

One of the fundamental challenges of climate change is that we contribute to it increment by increment, and experience it increment by increment after a considerable time lag. As a consequence, it is very difficult to see what we are doing to ourselves, to future generations, and to the living planet as a whole. There are monumental ethical issues involved, but they are obscured by the incremental nature of the process and the long time frame before reaching the concentration of greenhouse gases and the ensuing accumulation of radiant heat—and consequent climate change—that ensues.


2004 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 372-392 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Bredgaard

In spite of – or maybe precisely because of – its inherent vagueness, ambiguity and multidimensionality, CSR has increasingly come into vogue with the EU institutions, national governments and numerous European companies. This article identifies four types of CSR approaches: (1) CSR between business and society (e.g. the US approach); (2) CSR in business (e.g. HRM within firms); (3) CSR between business and government (e.g. the European Commission's approach) and (4) CSR between employment policy and business (e.g. the Danish approach). Denmark, which provides the case study of the article, typifies an approach to CSR in which the government and social partners have played an active role in promoting CSR and where initiatives have focused narrowly on employers’ responsibilities for the recruitment, training, development and dismissal of labour. The Danish case thus allows for a discussion of the role of public authorities and social partners in CSR, a discussion often neglected in mainstream CSR literature. The main question addressed in the article is how links can be created between policy instruments and business interests in order to reduce workplace exclusion and promote the labour market integration of the unemployed and inactive. We propose a framework that transcends the dichotomy between voluntarism and coercion that characterises much of the CSR discussion by suggesting different, but complementary, roles of public authorities and social partners in CSR.


2005 ◽  
Vol 288 (6) ◽  
pp. C1390-C1401 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Bouley ◽  
Herbert Y. Lin ◽  
Malay K. Raychowdhury ◽  
Vladimir Marshansky ◽  
Dennis Brown ◽  
...  

Vasopressin (VP) increases urinary concentration by signaling through the vasopressin receptor (V2R) in collecting duct principal cells. After downregulation, V2R reappears at the cell surface via an unusually slow (several hours) “recycling” pathway. To examine this pathway, we expressed V2R-green fluorescent protein (GFP) in LLC-PK1a cells. V2R-GFP showed characteristics similar to those of wild-type V2R, including high affinity for VP and adenylyl cyclase stimulation. V2R-GFP was located mainly in the plasma membrane in unstimulated cells, but it colocalized with the lysosomal marker Lysotracker after VP-induced internalization. Western blot analysis of V2R-GFP showed a broad 57- to 68-kDa band and a doublet at 46 and 52 kDa before VP treatment. After 4-h VP exposure, the 57- to 68-kDa band lost 50% of its intensity, whereas the lower 46-kDa band increased by 200%. The lysosomal inhibitor chloroquine abolished this VP effect, whereas lactacystin, a proteasome inhibitor, had no effect. Incubating cells at 20°C to block trafficking from the trans-Golgi network reduced V2R membrane fluorescence, and a perinuclear patch developed. Cycloheximide reduced the intensity of this patch, showing that newly synthesized V2R-GFP contributed significantly to its appearance. Cycloheximide also inhibited the reappearance of cell surface V2R after downregulation. We conclude that after downregulation, V2R-GFP is delivered to lysosomes and degraded. Reappearance of V2R at the cell surface depends on new protein synthesis, partially explaining the long time lag needed to fully reestablish V2R at the cell surface after downregulation. This degradative pathway may be an adaptive response to allow receptor-ligand association in the hypertonic and acidic environment of the renal medulla.


2009 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 115-148 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bruce E. Moon

Prospects for democracy in Iraq should be assessed in light of the historical precedents of nations with comparable political experiences. Saddam Hussein's Iraq was an unusually extreme autocracy, which lasted an unusually long time. Since the end of the nineteenth century, only thirty nations have experienced an autocracy as extreme as Iraq's for a period exceeding two decades. The subsequent political experience of those nations offers a pessimistic forecast for Iraq and similar nations. Only seven of the thirty are now democratic, and only two of them have become established democracies; the democratic experiments in the other five are still in progress. Among the seven, the average time required to transit the path from extreme autocracy to coherent, albeit precarious, democracy has been fifty years, and only two have managed this transition in fewer than twenty-five years. Even this sober assessment is probably too optimistic, because Iraq lacks the structural conditions that theory and evidence indicate have been necessary for successful democratic transitions in the past. Thus, the odds of Iraq achieving democracy in the next quarter century are close to zero, at best about two in thirty, but probably far less.


1940 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 898-904 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yu S. Lazurkin

Abstract Most articles made from elastic substances are intended for service under dynamic conditions. Static methods of investigation are clearly insufficient for determining the behavior of elastic substances under dynamic conditions and therefore there has for a long time been a need for dynamic tests. In recent years several dynamic tests have been developed, and a number of investigations of elastic properties under dynamic conditions have been published. The works of Frumkin, Roelig, Kosten, Naunton and Waring and other investigators have established a series of relations in the behavior of elastic substances under dynamic conditions. However, the limited intervals of frequency and temperature in these experiments gave relations of peculiar character and even led to contradictions. Thus Naunton and Waring showed that, under dynamic conditions (at high frequencies), automobile tire casings act as solid hoops and, according to Roelig and Kosten, the relation between modulus and frequency, though still existing, is of relatively little importance. The development of a concept of the mechanism of highly elastic deformation, and in particular the disclosure of relaxation made it possible for Kornfel'd and Poznyak and Mikhai˘lov and Kirilina to demonstrate experimentally the existence of a more general law relating the phenomena. However, in their experiments, the frequency in both cases changed within narrow limits, and consequently these investigations too do not give a general picture of the behavior of elastic materials in relation to the frequency of deformation and temperature. The idea of highly elastic deformation, as well as that of relaxation, comes down to the fact that the magnitudes of the deformations observed depend on the relation between the time of action of the force and the time required for regrouping of the particles in the substance during the deformation.


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