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Migration and social change in Thessaloniki: immigrants’ integration and the new multicultural reality in the city
No full textMigration and social change in Thessaloniki: immigrants’ integration and the new multicultural reality in the city
No full textNew Technology, Innovation and Space
Get PDFThe new geography of the R&D activities As a rule, new technologies in today’s world are the result of a long R&D process. This includes basic theoretical and applied research, as well as repeated testing which ensures that the new techniques coming out of the previous processes are ready to be applied in production and/or to enrich the output-mix with new products. In a broader sense, R&D generates also new ideas and techniques that contribute to the introduction of more efficient methods in the organization of production. In that part in which the non-marketable results are significant, the R&D activity is primarily state funded or financed by international organizations. It manifests a wide spatial distribution, spreading practically to all countries, and includes mainly research aiming to improve public health and security conditions, and to raise agricultural efficiency. It aims also to increase environmental protection and to create positive external economies that promote the public interest. In many big countries a considerable amount of state funded research serves military purposes and the exploration of space, with some of it having spillover effects for peaceful purposes. In the remaining part of the R&D that is conducted in the private sector of the economy, the Multinational Enterprises (MNEs) are the dominant players. In the era of globalization they have emerged as principal economic actors and are even more important in the application of new technologies. They dispose of large material resources and can recruit scientific and engineering talent from all over the world. It matters therefore where they locate their R&D. Given that the developed countries spend on R&D 2-3% of their GDP, amounting to the largest part of the world research expenditure, the traditional view has been that those countries account also for nearly all research activity. According to the UN World Investment Report 2005, however, the view of more complex production activities being undertaken in the North and simpler ones in the South is less and less a true reflection of reality. In some developing countries like China, India, Pakistan and North Korea, the state budget allocations for R&D expenses, including those for military research, has been high. The actual research output per unit of expense may be even higher, in comparison to that of the developed countries, because their wage levels and the cost of the basic infrastructure (building and various kinds of materials) are lower. Many of their researchers, however, are not less efficient and inventive than their homologues in the more developed countries. Further, MNEs now view parts of the developing world not only as key sources of cheap labour, but also of growth, skills and even new technologies. They have accelerated the pace of their direct investment in overseas R&D and the delocation of R&D activities in other countries, acquiring or establishing new laboratories abroad and integrating them into global R&D networks. They have many reasons to implement those policies: Their purpose is to source foreign technology, gain access to the local science base, hire foreign skilled engineers and benefit from local expertise and scientific excellence. They also want first, to utilize their subsidiaries in adapting the local market products to those developed in the research laboratories of the mother multinational company; and second, to adjust their own products to the local market and manufacturing processes. R&D activities of acquired subsidiaries are more concerned with applied research and scanning of local technologies, while new established subsidiaries generally focus on the suitable for the local market development of products based on technologies applied in the mother company. All told, small and less developed countries contribute now substantially to the world research output in three main ways: By running their own public and private research centers; as partners and employees of the subsidiaries of the MNEs established in them; and through their nationals doing research work in foreign universities and research centers. Despite its alleged detrimental effects, globalization, whatever its definition, appears to be reducing at a quick pace the spatial inequalities in research activities. The ways and means of those developments and their actual effects will be analyzed in the proposed paper. Policy implications Exploring the spatial allocation of the R&D activity may lead to useful conclusions for rational policy decisions. The establishment of MNEs in any country has overall positive labour market affects. It may, however, cause unemployment to the less qualified workers, in the usual cases that labour intensive processes are introduced in production lines carried out with traditional techniques. R&D activities established by the MNEs in a host country generate also positive spillovers in it, by strengthening its policies designed to attract FDI in research and innovation, as well as through an increase in the local demand for highly qualified persons. The more pronounced the presence of foreign R&D subsidiaries in a host country, the higher the demand for domestic researchers. It follows that well trained and with appropriate work attitudes graduates of tertiary education in any country can find satisfactory employment, at home or abroad. The national borders are also open for the highly skilled. Far from causing a brain drain, their emigration develops, as a rule, into a brain gain because it creates incentives for more and better training in the sending country. Eventually, it develops also into a brain exchange between sending and receiving countries, for their mutual benefit. In the last fifteen years, for example, the Chinese and Indian researchers in the universities and the technological parks of many developed countries have contributed considerably to the economic development of their respective countries. Up until very recently, in Greece as well about nine out of ten persons with responsible positions in the academia, the research centers and practically in all walks of life had some research experience abroad. The hypothesis which will also be tested in the proposed paper is that, higher degrees of R&D internalization are associated with minimal negative effects of any brain drain Main Bibliography Bein M. and Docquier Fr 2004 “Skilled Migrationâ€, Brussels Economic Review, Vol. 47-No1, Spring, Special Issue Cornelius W., EspenshadeT. J. and Salehyan I. 2001 “The International Migration of the Highly Skilled: Demand, Supply, and Development Consequences in Sending and Receiving Countries†La Jolla, Uni. of California, San Diego United Nations 2005 “World Investment Report 2005. Transnational Corporations and the Internationalization of R&Dâ€, New York and Geneva Various publications in English and Greek by Lambrianidis L., Liargovas P., Liberaki Ant., Petrakos G., Pournarakis M. and Thardanidis Ch.
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
Appropriate Similarity Measures for Author Cocitation Analysis
Get PDFWe provide a number of new insights into the methodological discussion about author cocitation analysis. We first argue that the use of the Pearson correlation for measuring the similarity between authors’ cocitation profiles is not very satisfactory. We then discuss what kind of similarity measures may be used as an alternative to the Pearson correlation. We consider three similarity measures in particular. One is the well-known cosine. The other two similarity measures have not been used before in the bibliometric literature. Finally, we show by means of an example that our findings have a high practical relevance.information science;Pearson correlation;cosine;similarity measure;author cocitation analysis
Dispelling the Myths Behind First-author Citation Counts
Get PDFWe conducted a full-scale evaluative citation analysis study of scholars in the XML research field to explore just how different from each other author rankings resulting from different citation counting methods actually are, and to demonstrate the capability of emerging data and tools on the Web in supporting more realistic citation counting methods. Our results contest some common arguments for the continued
use of first-author citation counts in the evaluation of scholars, such as high correlations between author rankings by first-author citation counts and other citation
counting methods, and high costs of using more realistic citation counting methods that are not well-supported by the ISI databases. It is argued that increasingly available digital full text research papers make it possible for citation analysis studies to go beyond what the ISI databases have directly supported and to employ more
sophisticated methods
Sources of entrepreneurial supply and embeddedness in Rural Cumbria
No full textThis chapter provides a discussion of the key methodological issues followed by a review of the relevant national literature. It also provides an outline of the locality. The chapter explores the incidence and characteristics of rural entrepreneurship and enterprises, as well the issue of entrepreneurial embeddedness. In the case of indigenous entrepreneurs other important sources of information include other businesses in the same industry and trade journals, whilst in-migrants rely heavily on market research and trade fairs. The identification of a specific demographic group that demonstrates lower than average incidence of entrepreneurship lends support to the thesis that supply-side rather than demand-side considerations may provide a large part of the explanation. The chapter argues that differential access between the Eastern and Western parts of rural Cumbria constitutes one aspect of a profound divide between the Eastern and Western parts of the study area
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