US National Science Research Articles

Science, politics and ideologies: Global political developments towards isolationism, ideology or disregard of facts have scientists concerned about the free exchange of ideas and people.

Since his inauguration as President of the USA in January 2017, Donald Trump has ushered in various measures that are widely perceived as anti‐science, such as the infamous travel ban on people arriving from seven Muslim countries. At the same time Brexit, the UK's impending departure from the EU, has begun to worry scientists across the continent and beyond over the potential impact on research. Other events, such as turmoil in the Middle East and the continuing threat of terrorism, have also contributed to a negative mood. There have been some positive developments too, such as the election of Emmanuel Macron as president of France with his pro‐science rhetoric and his promise to act as a counterweight to the USA with the “Make Our Planet Great Again” competition. It could also be argued that one country's loss is another's gain: Canada, for example, has been attracting more graduate‐student applicants at the expense of the USA since Trump's election (https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2017/03/20/canadianuniversities-post-large-gains-international-applications). ### The impact of international mobility However, such gains may be illusory in a global context, as science as a whole suffers whenever there is any friction over travel, collaboration and exchange of information, especially when it affects the USA as the world's leading power in research. So far, firm evidence on how collaboration and mobility affects science has been lacking, but Brexit and Trump's election in particular have galvanized new efforts to gain more solid data. The US National Science Foundation (NSF), in collaboration with the Spanish Ministry for Economy and Competitiveness, analysed the impact of mobility on a more clearly defined basis [1]. Not surprisingly, their study showed strong correlations between mobility, collaboration and scientific impact. The study was careful to avoid equating impact factor with quality of research and took account of other factors, such as influence, by mapping mobility to …

Reduction of Tortuosity in Porous Electrodes through Macropore Patterning

The demand for potable water from an increasing population has led to the investigation of methods for improving performance of electrodes in purifying water, such as in capacitive deionization technology, which removes salt ions from water by storing the ions in capacitive electrodes. Applications of porous electrodes also extends into fields such as batteries and supercapacitors, all of which are searching for means of improving performance. Within the structure of a porous electrode, one factor limiting the rate at which ions transport to electric double layers is known the “tortuosity.” Tortuosity quantifies the irregular path length the ions must take through the pores and around solid particles, increasing the effective distance they must travel regardless of the dimensions of the electrode cross-section. By introducing straight macroscopic pores, oriented normal to the separator between the electrodes, the apparent tortuosity can be decreased, allowing a greater utilization of the electrode’s material by giving ions a more direct path to active particles. [1] Current micromachining technology makes the manufacture of such patterns physically feasible by milling straight channels into the surface of cast electrodes, studied here in the case of activated carbon electrodes. As a result of this patterning method, electrodes have been fabricated which are capable of achieving higher specific and areal capacitance at increasing sweep rates over their unpatterned counterparts. The performance improves with increasing sweep rate and thickness, in the best cases reaching over double the performance of unpatterned electrodes during experiments. Cyclic voltammetry experiments were performed on YP-50 activated carbon electrodes, composed of 85% active material, 5% carbon black and 10% PVDF binder, of thicknesses between 50 and 250 μm to study the effect of patterning. [2] The results of these experiments showed that the patterned, or “bi-tortuous” electrodes of 25% macro-pore coverage, showed a slower decline with respect to sweep rate than unpatterned ones. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy was used to characterize the electronic and ionic resistance by applying a transmission line model. These findings confirmed a ~40% decrease in tortuosity and roughly twice the effective ionic conductivity compared with unpatterned electrodes of similar dimensions. [3][4] Further experiments varying the concentration of the aqueous NaCl electrolyte between 10 and 100 mM shows that the measured tortuosities for both patterned and unpatterned electrodes remained constant within 12%. From these results we conclude that reduced tortuosity results in a higher effective ionic conductivity in the direction of the current, increasing the rate of charging in the electric double-layer. Despite the patterning process removal of some of the electrode’s mass, and thereby decreasing theoretical areal capacitance, increased effective ionic conductivity compensates for the reduced mass at increasing sweep rates due to more efficient utilization of electric double-layers. The resulting bi-tortuous electrodes, while possessing the same composition and microporous structure as their unpatterned counterparts, demonstrate as high as a 100% increase in overall capacitance at high sweep rates due to their macroscopic features. Application of similar macroscopic pores could reduce ionic resistance in systems using porous electrodes, and improve performance of technologies in fields such as energy storage and desalination. Figure 1: A) A comparison of the cross-sections of unpatterned electrode and a patterned electrode cast onto a graphite foil current collector with a 100 μm wide macropore milled into it, including expected paths for the current to flow. B) and C) show the areal capacitance values found from cyclic voltammetry curves for the unpatterned and patterned electrodes, respectively. Data is from experiments on 214 μm-thick unpatterned and patterned electrodes, tested at sweep rates ranging from 1-30 mV/s. This work was funded by the US National Science Foundation Award No. 1605290.

3D visualization of vertebrate soft tissues using spiceCT (Selectively Perfusable Iodine‐based Contrast‐Enhanced CT) as a rapid alternative to diceCT

The treatment of vertebrate specimens with radio‐opaque substances to enhance soft‐tissue contrast in CT scans has revolutionized morphological analysis. DiceCT has produced spectacular results and involves immersing specimens in Lugol's iodine. A shortcoming of diceCT is that diffusion (the “d” in “diceCT”) can take days, weeks, or months in large, intact, unskinned specimens. Moreover, long diffusion times can cause marked shrinkage. Alternatively, our team has developed spiceCT, which involves perfusing specimens with Lugol's iodine, yielding excellent results—literally within hours. The vascular system of thawed, unfixed, unskinned specimens (mostly birds and reptiles thus far) is cannulated, and then hypertonic (2.5 or 5%) aqueous Lugol's iodine is injected with a syringe. The solution perfuses well, easily filling capillary beds. Perfusion can be visually monitored in key areas, as well as tactilely via syringe pressure. Staining is rapid, and specimens can be scanned immediately, yielding same‐day results. There is no time for shrinkage, which is a well‐known problem for diceCT specimens immersed in iodine for long periods. The absence of prior fixation shortens processing time and also opens new avenues for final storage in that the specimen can be fixed, refrozen, or even skeletonized. Perfusion rather than diffusion also allows targeting of tissues—selective perfusion (the “sp” of “spiceCT”)—by injecting their vascular supply. One shortcoming of spiceCT is that iodine is too large to cross the blood‐brain barrier (BBB), even in cadaveric specimens. Our team is currently exploring ways to overcome this problem, experimenting with adding EDTA to the Lugol's injection medium to disrupt the cadherins forming the tight junctions of the endothelial cells of the cerebral vasculature. Initial results are promising. SpiceCT is intended to supplement, not replace, diceCT in the toolkit of morphologists.Support or Funding InformationUS National Science Foundation (IOB‐0517257, IOS‐1050154, IOS‐1456503)This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.

Beyond the Central Dogma: The tRNA epitranscriptome and an alternative genetic code tune translation during stress in eukaryotes, prokaryotes and viral infections

The Central Dogma defines the “what” of biology: genes are transcribed into messenger RNAs that are translated into proteins. But it says nothing about the “when” or “how much” of gene expression. Application of new convergent and data‐driven technologies to the already‐known >150 chemical modifications of DNA, RNA and histone proteins is revealing information‐rich systems for scheduling gene expression ‐‐ the epigenome, the epitranscriptome and the epiproteome. Here we explore one of the newest of these ‐‐ a universal “system of systems” in which the transfer RNA epitranscriptome interacts with an alternative genetic code to fast‐track production of survival proteins during stress in eukaryotes, prokaryotes and viruses. The tRNA molecules themselves are further repurposed as small regulatory RNAs in a system that is only now emerging with the development of new analytical and data mining tools. We will explore examples of the epitranscriptome and small regulatory RNAs in model bacterial and viral pathogens, and in human cells. The components of these systems are now being recognized as drivers of many human diseases and are emerging as new tools for academic and industrial research and development.Support or Funding InformationThis work has been funded by the US National Institutes of Health, the US National Science Foundation, the National Research Foundation of Singapore through the Singapore‐MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, the United States‐Israel Binational Science Foundation, Agilent Technologies and NTUitive.This abstract is from the Experimental Biology 2018 Meeting. There is no full text article associated with this abstract published in The FASEB Journal.

Live Migration for Multiple Correlated Virtual Machines in Cloud-Based Data Centers

With the development of cloud computing, virtual machine migration is emerging as a promising technique to save energy, enhance resource utilizations, and guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) in cloud datacenters. Most of existing studies on the virtual machine migration, however are based on a single virtual machine migration. Although there are some researches on multiple virtual machines migration, the author usually does not consider the correlation among these virtual machines. In practice, in order to save energy and maintain system performance, cloud providers usually need to migrate multiple correlated virtual machines or migrate the entire virtual datacenter (VDC) request. In this paper, we focus on the efficient online live migration of multiple correlated VMs in VDC requests, for optimizing the migration performance. To solve this problem, we propose an efficient VDC migration algorithm (VDC-M). We use the US-wide US National Science Foundation (NSF) network as substrate network to conduct extensive simulation experiments. Simulation results show that the performance of the proposed algorithm is promising in terms of the total VDC remapping cost, the blocking ratio, the average migration time and the average downtime.

CIRCE: The Canarias InfraRed Camera Experiment for the Gran Telescopio Canarias

The Canarias InfraRed Camera Experiment (CIRCE) is a near-infrared (1–2.5[Formula: see text][Formula: see text]m) imager, polarimeter and low-resolution spectrograph operating as a visitor instrument for the Gran Telescopio Canarias (GTC) 10.4-m telescope. It was designed and built largely by graduate students and postdocs, with help from the University of Florida (UF) astronomy engineering group, and is funded by the UF and the US National Science Foundation. CIRCE is intended to help fill the gap in near-infrared capabilities prior to the arrival of Especrografo Multiobjecto Infra-Rojo (EMIR) to the GTC and will also provide the following scientific capabilities to compliment EMIR after its arrival: high-resolution imaging, narrowband imaging, high-time-resolution photometry, imaging polarimetry, and low resolution spectroscopy. In this paper, we review the design, fabrication, integration, lab testing, and on-sky performance results for CIRCE. These include a novel approach to the opto-mechanical design, fabrication, and alignment.

Building Tools to Support Active Curation: Lessons Learned from SEAD

SEAD – a project funded by the US National Science Foundation’s DataNet program – has spent the last five years designing, building, and deploying an integrated set of services to better connect scientists’ research workflows to data publication and preservation activities. Throughout the project, SEAD has promoted the concept and practice of “active curation,” which consists of capturing data and metadata early and refining it throughout the data life cycle. In promoting active curation, our team saw an opportunity to develop tools that would help scientists better manage data for their own use, improve team coordination around data, implement practices that would serve the data better over time, and seamlessly connect with data repositories to ease the burden of sharing and publishing.
 SEAD has worked with 30 projects, dozens of researchers, and hundreds of thousands of files, providing us with ample opportunities to learn about data and metadata, integrating with researchers’ workflows, and building tools and services for data. In this paper, we discuss the lessons we have learned and suggest how this might guide future data infrastructure development efforts.

Reviews of Recent Publications by Grier and Hemmendinger

Reviews of Recent Publications by Grier and Hemmendinger David Hemmendinger (bio) Thomas J. Misa and Jeffrey R. Yost, FastLane: Managing Science in the Internet World, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. 224 pp. ISBN: 9781421418681. The US National Science Foundation (NSF) FastLane system handles all its research grant proposals, reviews, budgets and project reports. Its development began in 1994, its use became mandatory in 2000, and its current user-help document reports its use by 400,000 people annually. Tom Misa and Jeff Yost, both of the Charles Babbage Institute, studied the development and use of FastLane in a project that ran from 2007 to 2011, supported by NSF research grants. They interviewed over 800 participants, mostly researchers; about 10 percent were NSF staff members. Half of the interviews were done in person, and half online. About 80 percent of the interviews are publicly accessible at the Babbage Institute—the authors suggest that their dataset may be the largest available on the development and use of a complex computing system. The authors study FastLane from several perspectives: as a government information technology project, as e-commerce that developed in parallel with the World Wide Web and the Mosaic graphical web browser, and as a software engineering project. They look at how it changed both researchers and the NSF. The book describes the early stages of automation at the NSF. Connie McLindon came to the NSF in 1980 from the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and, in the early 1980s, upgraded NSF servers and introduced network email, which only the computer science program officers previously had. Erich Bloch, who became director in 1984, promoted automation, and McLindon had an important role in developing EXPRES, a system for email submission of multimedia research proposals. This system did not impose a document standard, but had translation programs to convert a variety of formats to a single intermediate format. It was ambitious, and also premature at a time when there were multiple email and networking standards. Nonetheless, it helped prepare for FastLane. The experimental FastLane project that began in 1994 coincided with the emergence of the World Wide Web and, in particular, with the Mosaic graphical browser developed at the Illinois National Center for Superconducting Application, with heavy NSF support. It shared important capabilities with e-commerce programs such as those used by Amazon: encryption for security, a database, and dynamic webpages that loaded information from the database. It used the Perl scripting language with PostScript forms and file uploads, something initially possible only with [End Page 82] the Netscape browser that succeeded Mosaic. It also required researchers to upload their proposals as Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) files, starting in 1996, when PDF document production was not widely or cheaply available. It required Adobe products or free alternatives that might not produce PDFs acceptable to FastLane. Despite these difficulties, FastLane enabled researchers to avoid last-minute pressure to package two dozen copies of proposals and rush them via priority mail or even hand-carry them to the NSF. Users did find that FastLane got swamped by last-minute submissions, as some practices never change. Despite frustrations due to PDF difficulties and an overloaded system, PIs (principal investigators) generally liked FastLane, though crashes of an overloaded system led some to think that requiring its use in 2000 was premature. The overall satisfaction with FastLane may have been a result of what the book calls “value-laden design,” in which key NSF values were designed into the system. These included open access by small colleges as well as research universities, security, reliability, and protection of merit reviews. The designers also got frequent user feedback, both from formal committees and from a network of researchers and university administrators. They sought to make FastLane accessible to both occasional users and university grants officers who dealt with it daily—one goal was not to change the interface frequently, so that the former group would not have to learn a new system on each use. Nonetheless, the authors point out that PIs at small institutions, such as HBCUs (Historically Black Colleges and Universities), and underfunded institutions in the EPSCoR project (Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research) were likely...

MtnSEON and social–ecological systems science in complex mountain landscapes

The Mountain Social Ecological Observatory Network (MtnSEON) is a US National Science Foundation‐funded Research Coordination Network that focuses on social–ecological systems (SES) science approaches to understanding the vulnerability, resilience, and sustainability of complex mountain landscapes. Papers from members of several MtnSEON working groups are presented in this Special Issue, with topics ranging from applying an SES conceptual approach to social–ecological observatories to dealing with the human aspects of predator–livestock interactions in the American West. All of these articles portray varying degrees of integration of social and ecological sciences and methodologies in order to better address both complex and “wicked” problems inherent to many coupled natural and human systems. The diversity of approaches presented here reflect the different project histories, disciplines being integrated, fields of expertise, and nature of the environmental problems and issues being addressed.

Regional scholar, policy-maker, academic leader: the work of Brazilian economist Clelio Campolina Diniz

The author hosted Clelio Campolina Diniz during the writing of his second dissertation, required of professors in Brazil, at Rutgers University’s Project on Regional and Industrial Economics in the 1990s and subsequently headed up a US National Science Foundation-funded international project on new industrial districts with Campolina and colleagues in Japan and South Korea. She co-wrote a subsequently published paper with Campolina for the Inter-American Development Bank and served for two months in 2008 at the Federal University of Minas Gerais’s (UFMG) Center for Transdisciplinary Studies. Campolina and the author are currently researching how development theory might be expanded to incorporate culture and environment, using a new contemporary art museum and botanical gardens, Inhotim, in Minas Gerais as a test case. During a month-long work session on the latter in 2017, the author interviewed Campolina extensively for this paper.

Designing a network of critical zone observatories to explore the living skin of the terrestrial Earth

Abstract. The critical zone (CZ), the dynamic living skin of the Earth, extends from the top of the vegetative canopy through the soil and down to fresh bedrock and the bottom of the groundwater. All humans live in and depend on the CZ. This zone has three co-evolving surfaces: the top of the vegetative canopy, the ground surface, and a deep subsurface below which Earth's materials are unweathered. The network of nine CZ observatories supported by the US National Science Foundation has made advances in three broad areas of CZ research relating to the co-evolving surfaces. First, monitoring has revealed how natural and anthropogenic inputs at the vegetation canopy and ground surface cause subsurface responses in water, regolith structure, minerals, and biotic activity to considerable depths. This response, in turn, impacts aboveground biota and climate. Second, drilling and geophysical imaging now reveal how the deep subsurface of the CZ varies across landscapes, which in turn influences aboveground ecosystems. Third, several new mechanistic models now provide quantitative predictions of the spatial structure of the subsurface of the CZ.Many countries fund critical zone observatories (CZOs) to measure the fluxes of solutes, water, energy, gases, and sediments in the CZ and some relate these observations to the histories of those fluxes recorded in landforms, biota, soils, sediments, and rocks. Each US observatory has succeeded in (i) synthesizing research across disciplines into convergent approaches; (ii) providing long-term measurements to compare across sites; (iii) testing and developing models; (iv) collecting and measuring baseline data for comparison to catastrophic events; (v) stimulating new process-based hypotheses; (vi) catalyzing development of new techniques and instrumentation; (vii) informing the public about the CZ; (viii) mentoring students and teaching about emerging multidisciplinary CZ science; and (ix) discovering new insights about the CZ. Many of these activities can only be accomplished with observatories. Here we review the CZO enterprise in the United States and identify how such observatories could operate in the future as a network designed to generate critical scientific insights. Specifically, we recognize the need for the network to study network-level questions, expand the environments under investigation, accommodate both hypothesis testing and monitoring, and involve more stakeholders. We propose a driving question for future CZ science and a hubs-and-campaigns model to address that question and target the CZ as one unit. Only with such integrative efforts will we learn to steward the life-sustaining critical zone now and into the future.

Research and Development Intensity in Business: Russia and EU

JEL Classification Codes: F60, F63, 035, 044 Introduction The strategy of European development till the year of 2020 determines research and development as the key objective of country's development, with the key indicator of efficiency set to ensure the strategic goal of 3% of GDP. In order to ensure the growth of the intensity of research and development, EU is planning the formation of a common scientific space, in which the free interaction on the model > will take place. In the given context, there appear a number of questions: what is the state of things on the specified direction in Russia and how to relate the strategic priorities in this field across countries (Akopova and Przhedetskaya, 2016; Dasanayaka and Sardana, 2015; Ryzhkova and Prosvirkin, 2015). Based on the said above, the purpose of the study is defined by the authors as the study of trends and strategic priorities for the financing of research and development in the cross-country perspective. Consideration of the issues of research and development intensity is a hard task, since the area of the objective study is the following: --firstly, in understanding the definition of > itself; --secondly, research and development intensity index is the key indicator of the effectiveness of strategic development for many countries and plays a significant role in the assessment of cross-country competitiveness, which determines its complexity and diversity, requires the application of interdisciplinary approaches for the research and actualizes a comparative retrospective analysis on the example of the actual index values in Russian Federation and some of EU countries. Thus, this is the context and logics of the given study. Theoretical, Informational and Empirical, and Methodological Grounds of the Research > is a complex category. In order to determine its semantics, it would be useful to consider a system of concepts > and later on, taking into account its peculiarity, to give the definition >. We are going to carry out the study of semantic influence of the definition > with the help of content analysis technology. US National Science Fund defines the intensity of research and development as the ratio of research experimental work and GDP. Efremova T. in her dictionary defines > as high voltage or force that can give the highest performance. The electronic encyclopedia > defines > as a relative indicator, expressed through the degree the extent of one phenomenon among other phenomena. Research and Development (RD Epifanove et al., 2015; Frank et al., 2016; Havlicek et al, 2013; Tcvetkov et al., 2015) . Definition Research and development (R&D) comprise creative work undertaken on a systematic basis in order to increase the stock of knowledge (including knowledge of man, culture and society) and the use of this knowledge to devise new applications. …

Defining Research Reproducibility: What Do You Mean?

Vague definitions and an unclear understanding of “research reproducibility” have contributed to confusion in the scientific community. In a recent article published in Science Translational Medicine , Goodman et al. showed that the number of studies concerning research reproducibility has been steadily increasing since the 1970s, and that reproducibility and replicability are frequently used interchangeably (1). According to a US National Science Foundation subcommittee on replicability in science, reproducibility is the ability to duplicate results using the same raw data; replicability is the ability of a study to duplicate results with newly collected data (2). To illustrate confusion concerning these terms, a former director of the US National Institutes of Health (Francis Collins) …

Teaching Qualitative Research Online to Leadership Students: Between Firm Structure and Free Flow

The US National Science Foundation (2013, 2015) surveys of earned doctorates in education show that between 2003 and 2014, over 20,000 degrees were granted in a field broadly defined as Educational Administration. It is then important to discuss the pedagogies of teaching not only the content area courses for educational leaders, but research as well. We highlight the intertwined tensions between different discourses: the ways of thinking about research that our students bring to the online classrooms, the course goals that we aspire to achieve, and the ways we teach qualitative research online. In doing so, we see our classes as spaces of the (not always smooth) interplay between the firm structure of expected goals and free-flowing nature of qualitative research.

Ubicomp without Borders: International Experiences in Pervasive Computing

Ubicomp educators can inspire students by giving them technically challenging and socially impactful projects and by exposing them to enriching experiences that involve interacting with professionals from different backgrounds. Here, the authors argue in favor of including international experiences in this already rich education and training space, reporting on their engagements on this front through two projects funded by the US National Science Foundation under the International Research Experiences for Students program.

Impact of research collaboration cosmopolitanism on job satisfaction

The concept of collaboration cosmopolitanism has referred to the institutional and geographic distance characteristics of academic researchers' collaboration patterns. We study the effect of collaboration cosmopolitanism on doctoral level research personnel working in different sectors–government, industry, and academia. The study examines the impact of collaboration cosmopolitanism on an important aspect of career success: job satisfaction. We employ the 2006 and 2010 Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR) collected by the US National Science Foundation to evaluate the cross-sectional and longitudinal effect of collaboration cosmopolitanism on job satisfaction. We are particularly interested in doctoral level researchers’ job satisfaction related to sector of employment while controlling for demographic and work characteristics such as gender, minority status, salary, and work hours. Findings suggest that scientists working at a higher level of collaboration cosmopolitanism tend to report a higher level of job satisfaction. Furthermore, we find that academic scientists are more satisfied than those working in industry. This finding holds in the longitudinal model—industry scientists are less satisfied—but we find that over time, government scientists are more satisfied than academic scientists, and much more satisfied than industry scientists.

Assessment of critical minerals: updated application of an early-warning screening methodology

Increasing reliance on non-renewable mineral resources reinforces the need for identifying potential supply constraints before they occur. The US National Science and Technology Council recently released a report that outlines a methodology for screening potentially critical minerals based on three indicators: supply risk (R), production growth (G), and market dynamics (M). This early-warning screening was initially applied to 78 minerals across the years 1996 to 2013 and identified a subset of minerals as “potentially critical” based on the geometric average of these indicators—designated as criticality potential (C). In this study, the screening methodology has been updated to include data for 2014, as well as to incorporate revisions and modifications to the data, where applicable. Overall, C declined in 2014 for the majority of minerals examined largely due to decreases in production concentration and price volatility. However, the results vary considerably across minerals, with some minerals, such as gallium, recording increases for all three indicators. In addition to assessing magnitudinal changes, this analysis also examines the significance of the change relative to historical variation for each mineral. For example, although mined nickel’s R declined modestly in 2014 in comparison to that of other minerals, it was by far the largest annual change recorded for mined nickel across all years examined and is attributable to Indonesia’s ban on the export of unprocessed minerals. Based on the 2014 results, 20 minerals with the highest C values have been identified for further study including the rare earths, gallium, germanium, rhodium, tantalum, and tungsten.

Sustaining Software for Biological Collections Computing

Specify is a biological collections data management platform for the digitization, curation, and dissemination of museum specimen information. The Specify Software Project and its predecessor, the MUSE Project, have been funded by the US National Science Foundation for 30 years. Specify 6, a native desktop app is used in about 500 biological collections for specimen data processing. The latest generation, Specify 7, is a web platform for hosting collections data in the Specify Cloud service or on an institutional server. During 2017 and 2018, with encouragement from its long-time funder, the Specify Project is 'transitioning-to-sustainability', in a campaign to identify an organizational structure and sources of revenue to support the Project's software engineering, help desk and data management services. A museum consortium dedicated to maintaining and evolving Specify Software is a probable outcome. Such a non-profit consortium would formally engage institution directors, collections researchers, and biodiversity informaticists in the governance of Specify. Each group would play a significant role in determining the direction and capabilities of consortium software products and services. In this paper, we will summarize our approach with the Specify transition. The Specify Project's transition to sustainability is not unique within the research museum community. In the United States, groups that produce Symbiota, Arctos, and GeoLocate, as examples, face a similar quest. As legacy funders look to data communities to underwrite more of the ongoing expense of research cyberinfrastructure, projects seeded with grant funds that contribute to the overall suite of collections digitization and management software solutions will, sooner or later, face this existential challenge. Significant questions of research community economics present themselves. How much can collections institutions, of all sizes and budgets, afford to pay for specimen data software platforms and services? Will the significant cost of collections software development and support lead to sustained, collaborative, community-wide efforts, similar to the way that members of professional societies pool resources (including endowments) to provide journal and annual meeting 'infrastructure'? Or will the high cost of software, security and systems management, etc., drive wealthier museums to outsource software development by licensing commercial products, and relegate collections unable to afford software licenses, to bespoke, simple, or no software solutions? This session will include project case studies on the economics of collections research cyberinfrastructure and present perspectives and paths to long-term sustainability.

Socio-economic impacts and public value of government-funded research: Lessons from four US National Science Foundation initiatives

Interest in evaluating non-economic social outcomes of science and technology research has risen in policy circles in recent years. The interest in social impacts of research has not yet given rise to a great proliferation of useful, valid techniques for evaluating such impacts. This study presents detailed case studies of four US National Science Foundation (NSF) programs/initiatives to provide a framework for understanding diverse efforts at addressing social impacts, and to suggest some important gaps in our research approaches for assessing socio-economic impacts of research. The four cases studied − the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), the Innovation Corps (I-Corps), the Arizona State University Center for Nanotechnology in Society, and the NSF “Broader Impacts” criteria—were chosen for their diversity in intent and modality but operating within a single agency. The cases are compared based on criteria important for assessing socio-economic outcomes: the initiative’s modality, enabling policy vehicle, benefit guarantor, distribution and appropriability of benefits, specificity of beneficiary, social-economic range, and timing of the benefit stream. The paper concludes with a discussion of the most pressing methodological and theoretical issues that need addressing for greater progress in assessing social impacts.

The Surface Extraction from TIN based Search-space Minimization (SETSM) algorithm

Digital Elevation Models (DEMs) provide critical information for a wide range of scientific, navigational and engineering activities. Submeter resolution, stereoscopic satellite imagery with high geometric and radiometric quality, and wide spatial coverage are becoming increasingly accessible for generating stereo-photogrammetric DEMs. However, low contrast and repeatedly-textured surfaces, such as snow and glacial ice at high latitudes, and mountainous terrains challenge existing stereo-photogrammetric DEM generation techniques, particularly without a-priori information such as existing seed DEMs or the manual setting of terrain-specific parameters. To utilize these data for fully-automatic DEM extraction at a large scale, we developed the Surface Extraction from TIN-based Search-space Minimization (SETSM) algorithm. SETSM is fully automatic (i.e. no search parameter settings are needed) and uses only the sensor model Rational Polynomial Coefficients (RPCs). SETSM adopts a hierarchical, combined image- and object-space matching strategy utilizing weighted normalized cross-correlation with both original distorted and geometrically corrected images for overcoming ambiguities caused by foreshortening and occlusions. In addition, SETSM optimally minimizes search-spaces to extract optimal matches over problematic terrains by iteratively updating object surfaces within a Triangulated Irregular Network, and utilizes a geometric-constrained blunder and outlier detection in object space. We prove the ability of SETSM to mitigate typical stereo-photogrammetric matching problems over a range of challenging terrains. SETSM is the primary DEM generation software for the US National Science Foundation’s ArcticDEM project.