We examine variation in the concentration of inventive activity across 72 of North America’s most highly innovative locations. In 12 of these areas, innovation is particularly concentrated in a single, large firm; we refer to such locations as “company towns.” We find that inventors employed by large firms in these locations tend to draw disproportionately from their firm’s own prior inventions...

The reader must understand that this is not a total outline of the development of physics but what I deem is the line of discoveries that leads directly to the development of atomic energy. As an example I offer thermodynamics. For this, I could develop a separate trail with some similar names such as Maxwell who besides work on electrodynamics did fundamental work on the kinetic energy of gass...

Reusing programs and other artifacts has been shown to be an effective strategy for significant reduction of development costs. This article reports on a survey of 128 developers to explore their experiences and perceptions about using other people’s code: to what extent does the “not invented here” attitude exist? The survey was structured around a novel and simple “4A” model, which is introdu...

A new indicator, a real valued s-index, is suggested to characterize a quality and impact of the scientific research output. It is expected to be at least as useful as the notorious h-index, at the same time avoiding some its obvious drawbacks. Sound, sound your trumpets and beat your drums! Here it is, an impossible thing performed: a single integer number characterizes both productivity and q...

Booming dunes” are large desert sand dunes that make a loud droning or humming noise during an avalanching of sand. The phenomenon has been observed for censturies, yet it remains largely unexplained. This note demonstrates that the booming frequency does not scale with the size of the particle or with the shearing speed of the avalanching sand. Instead, the dune may act as a waveguide with a f...

An infinite-dimensional version of Calogero-Moser operator of BC-type and the corresponding Jacobi symmetric functions are introduced and studied, including the analogues of Pieri formula and Okounkov’s binomial formula. We use this to describe all the ideals linearly generated by the Jacobi symmetric functions and show that the deformed BC(m, n) Calogero-Moser operators, introduced in our earl...

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Introduction This chapter discusses using phenomenography to study information experience. Emphasizing the experiential nature of learning, Marton, Runesson, and Tsui (2004, p. 5) made the statement, " Powerful ways of acting spring from powerful ways of seeing. " This deceptively simple statement argues for the need for research that reveals the experiences (ways of seeing) of learners. It sug...

The European Pollen Database (EPD) is a community effort to archive and make available pollen sequences from across the European continent. Pollen sequences provide records that may be used to infer past vegetation and vegetation change. We present here maps based on 828 sites from the EPD giving an overview of changes in postglacial pollen assemblages in Europe over the past 15,000 years. The ...

DEDICATION To my family ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As I come to the completion of one chapter of my life and prepare to begin the next, I reflect upon a quote I have carried with me throughout my graduate studies from the African-American educator and author Booker T. Washington-" Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles by which s(he) has ...