Handful Of Topics Research Articles

Chapter 5. Assessing the Need for High Impact Technology Research, Development & Deployment for Mitigating Climate Change

Technology is a centrally important component of all strategies to mitigate climate change. As such, it encompasses a multi-dimensional space that is far too large to be fully addressed in this brief chapter. Consequently, we have elected to focus on a subset of topics that we believe have the potential for substantial impact. As researchers, we have also narrowed our focus to address applied research, development and deployment issues and omit basic research topics that have a longer-term impact. This handful of topics also omits technologies that we deem to be relatively mature, such as solar photovoltaics and wind turbines, even though we acknowledge that additional research could further reduce costs and enhance performance. These and other mature technologies such as transportation are discussed in Chapter 6. This report and the related Summit Conference are an outgrowth of the University of California President’s Carbon Neutrality Initiative, and consequently we are strongly motivated by the special demands of this ambitious goal, as we are also motivated by the corresponding goals for the State of California, the nation and the world. The unique feature of the UC Carbon Neutrality Initiative is the quest to achieve zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2025 at all ten 10 campuses. It should be emphasized that a zero emission target is enormously demanding and requires careful strategic planning to arrive at a mix of technologies, policies, and behavioral measures, as well as highly effective communication – all of which are far more challenging than reducing emissions by some 40% or even 80%. Each campus has a unique set of requirements based on its current energy and emissions. Factors such as a local climate, dependence on cogeneration, access to wholesale electricity markets, and whether a medical school is included shape the specific challenges of the campuses, each of which is a “living laboratory” setting a model for others to learn and adopt. An additional aspect of a zero GHG emission target is the need to pay close attention to system integration – i.e., how the various elements of a plan to achieve carbon neutrality fit together in the most cost effective and efficient way. This optimization imposes an additional constraint, but also provides an important opportunity to capture the synergies that can arise from those choices. For example, one of the themes that has been proposed is the complete electrification of energy supplies, residential & commercial building operation, and transportation. The deployment of storage technologies such as batteries and/or hydrogen for both transportation and for load balancing of grid and distributed generation may provide some synergistic opportunities for integrating these systems that will accelerate the deployment of each. A specific example is the use of on-board batteries in electric vehicles for load balancing the electric grid. On-site residential storage as is now being developed by Tesla Motors, has the potential to accelerate the deployment of residential solar installations. In the case of hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, the necessary infrastructure to provide a network of hydrogen filling stations might also accelerate the use of hydrogen for storage on the electric grid by using excess solar capacity to produce hydrogen by electrolysis.

SCAN heads to kindergarten

It is hard to believe, but SCAN turns five in 2011 and things are going well. We received our first impact factor of 4.203, which places us #9 on the list of psychology journals and in the top 25% of all neuroscience journals. We have also become the official journal of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society that hosts the SAN meeting each year. And we are growing. We have been running four issues a year with 11–12 articles per issue. In 2011 we are expanding to five issues at 15 articles per issue and in 2012 we will go to six issues. This growth in pages should help us deal with the growth in submissions. In the past 2 years, the number of submissions to SCAN has doubled. We had a wonderful special issue on Cultural Neuroscience in 2010 (thanks to Joan Chiao for editing this). In the next 2 years, we will have special issues on Aging (edited by Lisbeth Nielsen and Mara Mather), Adolescence (edited by Sarah-Jayne Blakemore and Jennifer Pfeifer) and Mindfulness (edited by Yi-Yuan Tang and Michael Posner). We have comings and goings as well. After 5 years of service to SCAN, Ralph Adolphs will be stepping down as an Associate Editor. As many of you know, Ralph has become the Deputy Editor at Psychological Science, which is a huge obligation, but great for social and affective neuroscience. Ralph has played an enormous role in making SCAN a success since even before the first issue went to press and I am extremely grateful for all he has done. Luckily, we have two new Associate Editors joining SCAN and I could not be more pleased. Paul Whalen (Dartmouth University) and Shihui Han (Peking University) are new Associate Editors and fantastic additions to our team. Welcome to you both. Finally, a substantive change at SCAN. Apart from the ‘In this Issue’ and ‘Tools of the Trade’ specialty pieces, all articles published at SCAN have been empirical papers that use neuroscience methods. This will continue to be our bread and butter. However, the accumulation of quality studies in various areas of social and affective neuroscience suggests that it is time to start publishing review articles as well. We are particularly interested in meta-analyses, but will also consider non-empirical TICS-type reviews (the 5000 word limit still applies to reviews). We will likely only publish one review piece per issue and we will be highly selective. Reviews, even more than empirical submissions, must be viewed as a making a significant contribution to the literature. This is a very exciting change for SCAN. When SCAN was being formulated as a journal in 2005, we discussed whether to accept review papers. At the time, our assessment was that there were only a handful of topics that had been studied enough in the areas that SCAN covers to warrant reviews (and those had already been reviewed). Today, there are literally dozens of areas that have developed to the point where serious reviews are necessary and appropriate. We look forward to publishing the best of them here in the pages of SCAN.

SUSTAINING HYPERLOCAL MEDIA

As traditional media operations struggle to find their footing in a world of rapidly evolving interactive technology and economic turmoil, media innovators are exploring new ways to identify, collect, and disseminate information. One innovation that is attracting attention is the development of hyperlocal media. Hyperlocal media are characterized by their narrow focus on a handful of topics or geographic areas, but they vary widely in the type and reliability of funding that supports their operations; the training, expertise, and size of their staffs; and their ability to attract an audience. They also follow in a long line of media reform efforts that have tried to fill the gap in public affairs coverage left by the shrinking traditional media, including civic journalism, C-SPAN (Cable–Satellite Public Affairs Network), and statewide public affairs television networks. And like these earlier reform efforts, hyperlocal media operations face the same dilemma—how to create a sustainable funding model that will allow them to provide the information members of the public need. This paper examines the various funding models used by hyperlocal media operations and assesses whether they are sustainable for the long term.

NIFTY AT FIFTY

THEODORE H. MAIMAN couldn’t possibly have guessed how the ruby laser that he and his coworkers first demonstrated 50 years ago at Hughes Research Laboratories would influence the world of chemistry research. But the effect was colossal. “Modern physical chemistry simply wouldn’t exist as we know it without lasers,” insists Daniel M. Neumark, professor of chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley. These coherent light generators have been used so broadly to uncover the fundamentals of chemistry, as well as chemical aspects of biology, physics, and materials science, that a few pages in C&EN are hardly sufficient to illustrate their impact. The handful of topics and research projects discussed in this special feature—from atmospheric probes to femtochemistry to cellular imaging—are merely illustrative examples. They were selected to suggest the depth of the laser’s impact on our growing understanding of the chemical sciences over the past five decades. The advances in laser technology during that ...

PULSAR ASTROPHYSICS: THE GLITCH PHENOMENON

We briefly discuss a handful of topics in pulsar astrophysics, first some general well-known features, then an overview of the glitch phenomenon and the sort of information gathered about the internal structure and dynamics, and finally the quandary posed by the precession of PSR B1828-11 a very important clue pointing towards a novel paradigm for structure of the core regions. We point out that "exotic" solutions for the precession puzzle would force a consideration of exotic glitch mechanisms as well.

The nonprofit marketing landscape: guest editors' introduction to a special section

Welcome to this special section of the Journal of Business Research devoted to nonprofit, arts and social marketing. The five articles appearing in this section have been selected and developed from papers originally presented at the first two annual colloquiums on nonprofit, social and arts marketing organised in the United Kingdom by Henley Management College and London Metropolitan University. This annual event is fast becoming a leading European outlet for cutting edge research in these important fields. The topics embraced by nonprofit, social and arts marketing are as diverse as they are complex. This introduction to the special section aims to illustrate the extent of the diversity, to identify critical problems, and to suggest possible areas for future research. It is impossible to mention in this introduction all the subjects covered by nonprofit, arts and social marketing, or even to cite all the major contributions to any one of its many spheres. Thus, we concentrate on relatively recent literature that, in itself, contains extensive references to prior and collateral research and which usefully reviews the work of others in the subject area concerned. A handful of topics have been especially salient in the literature concerning the marketing activities of nonprofit organisations during the last two decades. Essentially, these focus on the development and consequences of marketing orientation among organisation members, the theory and practice of fundraising, the stimulation of changes in social behaviour, and corporate involvement in nonprofit affairs. The employment of marketing techniques and principles to attract volunteers to work in nonprofit, social and arts organisations has also received much attention.

Environment Ministers Commit To Projects

Last week, top North American environmental officials announced three crossborder pilot projects and a handful of topics they intend to work on together. Among broad areas identified by the environ...

The State of Research on Pacific Northwest Women

The State of Research on Pacific Northwest Women Karen J. Blair (bio) I began my investigation of the scholarly literature on Pacific Northwest women's history when I moved to Seattle to teach local women's history in 1979 and immediately engaged in a search to locate secondary sources to bolster my students' and my own research. I was discouraged to learn that, compared to the American South, New England, or the Southwest, the studies in this region have been skimpy on all but a handful of topics. I decided to initiate a thorough search to review scholarly books and articles published throughout history that explored women's history in the Pacific Northwest for the years 1787–1970. I chose 1970 as an ending point because that is the year Washington State passed the Equal Rights Amendment. In the space of fifteen years, I perused over two thousand scholarly works, including textbooks, reference works, journals, edited memoirs, and university press monographs on Washington and Oregon history to scavenge material on Northwest women. Finally, I isolated seven hundred sources, including books and articles but oftentimes mere chapters or sections of chapters in larger studies of the Northwest's past. The result was published in 1997 as Northwest Women: An Annotated Bibliography of Sources on the History of Oregon and Washington Women, 1787–1970 (Pullman: Washington State University Press), which won the American Library Association prize for best bibliography in history that year. I expected my efforts to yield a treasure trove of neglected sources that documented a huge spectrum of women's lives and activities. Surely, the women alongside the well-documented male loggers, sailors, miners, homesteaders, ranchers, laborers, union activists, entrepreneurs, Indian chiefs, generals, and government officials had been studied by scholars. Surely, the accomplishments of busy wives, nurses, teachers, social workers, homemakers, club members, missionaries, cooks, prostitutes, seamstresses, piano teachers, farmers, actresses, entertainers, and cannery workers had already been documented. To my surprise and distress, my findings showed that historians [End Page 48] of the Pacific Northwest left us much to do. The bulk of attention had gone only to a few topics while enormous arenas had been left unexamined by historians. Which Pacific Northwest women in history have enjoyed the most attention from researchers? I discovered that four topics have absorbed the lion's share of attention—the Protestant missionaries, especially Narcissa Prentiss Whitman; pioneer homesteaders, with special affection for their overland trail experiences; Native Americans, but particularly Sacajawea, who accompanied Lewis and Clark on the exploratory expedition of the region of 1803–1806; and women's club activities. In all four categories, the bulk of the publications were descriptive more than analytical. If any perspective was offered, it was generally laudatory. Most often, the focus was on individual women and the strong character they demonstrated in the face of hardship. No one has enjoyed more and better press from researchers than Narcissa Whitman, the wife of Dr. Marcus Whitman. Together, they established a Protestant mission in the 1830s in the area now known as Walla Walla, Washington. Almost universally she is presented by researchers as selfless and well-meaning, devoted to the conversion of Northwest Indians to Christianity and a martyr in the Cayuse massacre of 1838. Similarly, the missionary efforts of Anna Pittman Lee, Mary Walker, Myra Eells, and French Canadian Roman Catholic nun Mother Joseph (Esther Pariseau) have also been widely noted and praised for fortitude in civilizing the heathen. Only one modern historian, Julie Roy Jeffrey, has rigorously dissected Narcissa Whitman's story in the context of imperialism, women's rights, and social control, which leads to a less than laudatory assessment of the missionary's role.1 The anonymous pioneer homesteading family, rooted by the ambitious, hardworking farmer and his tenacious wife, has been a tenet of Northwest mythology. The story of the young sturdy couple traversing the Great Plains by covered wagon to carve productive farms out of the wilderness is realized in numerous specific histories of nineteenth-century families. The biographies of ordinary farm women generously provide the domestic details of the endless cooking, sewing, cleaning, child-raising, nursing, teaching, offering of hospitality, creating of rituals for birthdays, weddings, and funerals...

The Endless Agenda: matters arising

This volume of the Oxford Review of Education is devoted to public education policyor rather to a handful of topics which seem to be pressing themselves on public attention, where policy needs to be developed for the I98os and after. These include the future of higher education, the unresolved questions that surround the comprehensive schools and their curricula, the needs of the I6-I9 age group and the way these should be met by work, training and education, and the relationships between the Department of Education and Science and the network of public and private agencies, among whom powers of initiative and obstruction in the formation and execution of education policy are shared. It is an issue about Issues. It makes one basic assumption: that the present expenditure cuts do not presage an indefinite period of inaction. The issues will not go away even if the will to tackle them is weak.