If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It

If You Can't Measure It, You Can't Manage It

Start of the lab: 2006 Size of the lab: Currently ten—size has fluctuated between five and 20 Research field: Systems and synthetic biology In 2005, I was working in the bioinformatics group of Pioneer Hi-Bred International, a subsidiary of DuPont. The company was downsizing its research and development effort. At the same time, synthetic biology was emerging as a new discipline, and I wanted t...

"If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it".

How to Measure Legislative District Compactness If You Only Know it When You See it

The US Supreme Court, many state constitutions, and numerous judicial opinions require that legislative districts be “compact,” a concept assumed so simple that no definition is offered other than “you know it when you see it.” Academics, in contrast, have concluded that the concept is so complex that it has multiple theoretical dimensions requiring large numbers of conflicting empirical measur...

If You Own It, It Exists; If You Love It, That Says Something about You, Not It: Semantically Conditioned Case in Finnish

In Finnish, the object of a transitive verb is case marked in one of two ways: with the ACCUSATIVE or PARTITIVE case. Generally speaking, all Finnish transitive verbs are compatible with both accusative and partitive marked objects. Basically, which case is assigned can affect the interpretation assigned to a verb or its object. This suggests an instance of free variation in Finnish; that there...

If You Build It, They Will Come

When Annie Stunden came to the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1999 as CIO, she had a vision of providing all students, faculty, and staff their own Web sites where they could store and share documents and files, a place where they could easily and intuitively collaborate with each other. Before joining UW–Madison, Stunden had been CIO at Cornell University, where her team implemented a syst...