Research shows that continuing competitive pressure applied during development and production leads to better industry performance, often at reduced cost. However, the entrenched practice of one-time competition for an entire program life-cycle often endows the winner with a very strong monopolistic power that lasts for decades. This paper describes continuous competition as leverage to acquire...

Presents the President’s message for this issue of publication.

Since its emergence as a respectable scientific discipline nearly a half century ago, the electromagnetic Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI) has been dominated by three classes of practitioners: government agencies, academic institutions, and nonprofit organizations surviving on a combination of private contributions and research grants. Recent technological advances have brought ...

Since its introduction in 1992, there has been a revolution in the ability to image brain function with functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), going from early experiments demonstrating relatively course images of activity in the visual cortex to mapping cortical columns and to “brain reading” that constructs mental experiences of an individual, all using the fact that we were endowed with a com...

Commitment to Self-Rewards Self-administered rewards are ubiquitous. They serve as incentives for personal accomplishments and are widely recommended as tools for overcoming self-control problems. However, it seems puzzling why self-rewards can work: the prospect of a reward has a motivating force only if the threat of self-denial of the reward after low performance is credible. We explain how ...

Sabbaticals were initially intended to take place one year of every seven and to provide an opportunity for study or travel. Psychiatrists rarely take sabbaticals, but they can be of tremendous value in widening professional and personal horizons. It is not merely the psychiatrist taking the sabbatical who reaps the benefits, but also the home institution and patients. Sabbatical-takers have an...