United States Technology Research Articles

The Extraterritorial Reach of US Export Control Law

In recent years, the United States (US) has dramatically expanded a set of extraterritorial rules, known as the ‘foreign direct product rules’. The rules subject certain items to the jurisdiction of the Export Administration Regulations that are produced outside the US with the use of specific types of US technology, software, or equipment, but contain no US-origin content and are traded between parties outside the US without ever touching US territory. As such extraterritorial rules may breach other States’ sovereign rights, they are only permissible under international law when there is a genuine nexus between the regulating State and the object of regulation. This article argues that, in principle, the foreign direct product rules do not breach international law as US national security concerns, in principle, can justify the rules under the protective principle. The US should, however, better substantiate its decisions to exert its extraterritorial legislative powers to increase acceptance of the rules among affected states.

Human Enhancement and the Anthropology of the “Entire Human Being”

About one and a half decades ago, two prominent reports were published in the United States (US) which strongly influenced subsequent international discussions on the topic of human enhancement: a 2002 report on “converging technologies for improving human performance”, based on a workshop which was organised by the US National Science Foundation (NSF) and the US Department of Commerce in December 2001, and the first report of US President George W. Bush’s Council on Bioethics (PCBE), published in October 2003 with the title Beyond Therapy: Biotechnology and the Pursuit of Happiness. The 2002 report included a wide variety of contributions from academics in various fields of research, from representatives of US institutions, and from companies. Due primarily to the influence of the two NSF staff editing the report, it can be regarded as the first major instance of the influence of transhumanism, a techno-futurist ideology and movement, on the US technology and innovation discourse. The PCBE report, on the other hand, is a prime example of a conservative critique of the transhumanist notion of human enhancement. In this invited contribution, these two crucial publications are analysed mainly in order to point out the relevance of philosophical anthropology as developed since the 1920s by Helmuth Plessner and others. This remarkable school of thought is experiencing a revival in countries such as Germany and the Netherlands, and, to some extent, in the English-speaking world. In this article, it is argued that philosophical anthropology provides us with an important alternative to both anthropological essentialism and scientism, two approaches that are still highly relevant in current discourse on human enhancement.

Examining correlations between preparation experiences of US technology and engineering educators and their teaching of science content and practices

The purpose of this research was to investigate the extent of the relationship between select technology and science preparation experiences of United States (US) technology and engineering (T&E) teachers and their teaching of science content and practices. Utilizing a fully integrated mixed methods design (Teddlie and Tashakkori in Res Schools 13(1):12–28, 2006), this study was conducted to inform the pre- and in-service preparation needs for US T&E educators. A random sample of 55 Foundations of Technology (FoT) teachers across 12 US county school systems within an International Technology and Engineering Educators Association consortium state participated in an online survey, leading to eight teachers being purposefully selected for classroom observations. Data collected from the surveys and classroom observations were analyzed through Spearman’s rho tests to examine the strength of the relationships between certain formal/informal preparation factors and the teaching of science content and practices. These data were corroborated with FoT curriculum content analyses, classroom observation audio recordings and notes, and interview responses to help validate the results. Analyses of the data revealed significant correlations between specific formal and informal preparation experiences and the observed teaching of science content and practices. The findings and conclusions drawn from the data analyses provided implications for T&E educators, science educators, educational researchers, pre-service programs, and in-service professional development efforts.

Detecting the temporal gaps of technology fronts: A case study of smart grid field

This study aims to propose a methodology that describes the technology fronts evolution and compares the temporal gaps between two specialties. Using the patent documents of a local country, the United States (US), as well as the global context in the smart grid technology as the example, highly cited patents were collected from 2001 to 2010 and divided into a series of overlapping snapshots in which patent citation networks were constructed through bibliographic coupling (BC) analysis. A rolling clustering and features extraction procedure were applied for segmenting networks into clusters and then mapping these clusters into the technology trajectory maps. Next we describe the state of global and the US smart grid development, and then place the US trajectories in the global context to explore the temporal relationship between them. Technology fronts in this study can be categorized into four types – frontrunner, follower, uniquer, and behinder – according to the matching criteria and the temporal gap index. The results show that a high percentage of US technology fronts can be classified as frontrunners or uniquers; the nation occupies a leading position worldwide in developing each sub-domain of smart grid technology.

Progress toward establishing a US national laboratory on the International Space Station

The International Space Station (ISS) is rapidly approaching the long-awaited completion of assembly. All United States (US) core elements have been integrated and tested on-orbit and the principle elements of the European and Japanese laboratories were successfully deployed in 2008. The fully envisioned configuration is on schedule to be completed as planned by the end of US government fiscal year 2010. Section 507 of the NASA Authorization Act of 2005 designated the US segment of the ISS as a “ national laboratory”, thereby opening up its use to other US government agencies, US private firms and US non-profit institutions. This paper reports on progress toward identifying and entering into agreements with entities outside of NASA that plan to use the ISS in the post-assembly timeframe. The original 1984 vision of a robust, multi-mission space station serving as a platform for the advancement of US science, technology and industry will soon be achieved.