The state of science in Catalonia

The Catalan Foundation for Research and Innovation (FCRI), a private organisation set up in 1986, that disseminates research and innovation among society to promote scientific culture, careers in science and Technology and public-private relationships and entrepreneurship publishes its first report about the state of the science in Catalonia

The report starts from the analysis of the key elements that have allowed Catalonia to become a pole of knowledge and talent in Europe over the last two decades, both in the scientific research carried out in the universities and in the research centers, large scientific infrastructures and scientific parks.

The report highlights the main strengths of the Catalan research system, in terms of scientific publication and the management of research projects and the training of research staff. It also values ​​the capacity of the Catalan system for attracting Spanish and European competitive funds, and the fact that the research policies entrusted to 25 years have allowed Catalonia to be recognized internationally as a center for knowledge and talent.

The document also highlights five conditions in favor to the research ecosystem such as 

• the approval of the National Pact for the Knowledge Society, 
• the recovery in Catalonia de Department of Research and Universities, 
• the European strategy of the European Green Deal, 
• the Next Generation projects 
• the future Catalan Science Law. 

The report puts the attention to the measures that should be introduced into the knowledge system to guarantee the continuity of scientific quality indicators and the ability to attract competitive research funds: 

• the increase public and private investment in R+D+I, 
• support for the professional career of researchers 
• improve in the field of transfer and innovation. 

In the areas for improvement, the work points to the aging of the teaching and research staff, the difficulty for young people to start and consolidate a scientific career and the more than difficult reconciliation of family and work, which mainly affects female talent. The report is in favor of more internationalizing the workforce and encouraging the recruitment and retention of international talent. 

In terms of funding, the report emphasizes the need to substantially increase public and private investment in R+D+I, currently below the European average indicators. The report also recommends the necessity to connect the research and innovation ecosystem (the universities, research centers, sicentific parks...) with industrial and technological companies.  

Web access: https://estatciencia.fundaciorecerca.cat/

Report and indicators

photo Jordi Soldevila. Homenatge a Toni Catany. Plat Pobre

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Back to basics: Michael Grossman

The Health Economics journal publishes the Michael Grossman editorial related to the 50th anniversary of the publication of the demand for health model in “On the Concept of Health Capital and the Demand for Health,” Journal of Political Economy 80(2): 223–255, and in The Demand for Health: A Theoretical and Empirical Investigation, NBER Occasional Paper 119 New York: Columbia University Press for the NBER.

The editorial focuses on the history of the model and its impacts on the field of health economics.

Editorial:  The demand for health turns 50: Reflections Michael Grossman

Michael Grossman and the Demand for Health Model

The Demand for Health introduced a new theoretical model for determining the health status of the population. His work uniquely synthesized economic and public health knowledge and has catalyzed a vastly influential body of health economics literature.

The demand for health is somewhat more complicated than the demand for a typical product. Here, the individual demands health and not health care. The demand for health care is, therefore, a derived demand.

The central idea behind Grossman’s model of demand for health is how age, education, health status, income etc. affect the production of health through the demand for health capital. Michael Grossman defined health both as a consumption good as well as a production good. He provided two reasons behind this; one health is consumed directly i.e. people are happier when they are healthier. Second, health is an investment i.e. good health permits people to do other things. Thus, the individual is both the consumer and the producer of health.

This model introduces the idea of investing in human capital (health and education) to improve outcomes in both the market (work) and non-market (household) sectors. The goal is to improve the earnings. Health is characterized as a capital good because it can be seen as lasting over time periods and depreciating at a non-constant rate.

Grossman bases his approach on Gary S. Becker's household production function model and his theory of investment in human capital. Consumers demand health, which can include illness-free days in a given year or life expectancy, and then produce it through the input of medical care services, diet, other market goods and services, and time.

Grossman also treats health and knowledge as equal parts of the durable stock of human capital. Consumers therefore have an incentive to invest in health to increase their earnings in the future. 

Grossman examines complementarities between health capital and other forms of human capital, the most important of which is knowledge capital earned through schooling and its effect on the efficiency of production.

He concludes that the rate of return on investing in health by increasing education may exceed the rate of return on investing in health through greater medical care. Higher income may not lead to better health outcomes, as wealth enables the consumption of goods and services with adverse health effects.

photo Jordi Soldevila. Homenatge a Toni Catany. Ampolles silencioses  

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clinical practice guidelines and the voice of patients

Clinical practice guidelines (CPG) are the user manuals of modern medicine. If the human body can suffer it, chances are there's a guideline for treating it, from burns and breaks to cancers and strokes. At their best, they provide gold-standard guidance to doctors: how to diagnose and treat a condition, what symptoms to watch for, what tests to order. But that's not always the reality. Clinicians are experts, but the patients with the disease are also experts. They're the ones living with it on a daily basis.

Guideline development could be unsatisfactory and unreliable. Because it so often fails to engage any patients or caregivers. Usually guidelines are developed without any input from the people who would actually experience them. Also, there is no consensus on what exactly patients and their representatives should be asked to do during CPG development. For example, should they be active members of guideline groups, or should patient input and preferences be shared only with clinicians in guideline groups. Moreover, there is little clarity about how guidelines should reflect patient-based evidence, or information generated by patients about different aspects of care, patient preferences, and care experience.

Rand (2019) in an interdisciplinary team of researchers, patient representatives from the Parent Project Muscular Dystrophy (PPMD) and clinicians developed the RAND/PPMD Patient-Centeredness Method (RPM) - a version of a Delphi method- with a online approach to engaging patients and their representatives in Clinicial Practice Guildelines.

The authors said that Duchenne was a good test case, because the disease is so rare, so complex, and the balance between treatment and quality of life is so precarious. but this method should be formally validated and tested in the context of other clinical conditions and compared to other ways of engaging patients in CPG development.

Open access article

photo: Moda ald carrer 1971. Joana Biarnés (1935-2018)
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10 years of The Catalan Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies (Ivàlua)

The Catalan Institute for the Evaluation of Public Policies (Ivàlua) was created 10 years ago. It's a public institution depending of the Government of Catalonia. The board of trustees is made up of the founding Academic Institutions (UPF), public institutions (Ministry of the Vice-presidency and of the Economy and Finance, DIBA, CTESC, CIC)

Ivalua promotes the evaluation of public policies among the Catalan public administrations, non-profit entities that pursue objectives that are of public interest and among citizens in general,

The evaluation is a tool for improving government performance and democratic accountability. To accomplish its mission, Ivàlua is guided by the following strategic lines:

• Evaluation of public policies and advisory activities
• Training and generation of training resources
• Promotion and dissemination of evaluation

Ivàlua has traditionally and naturally specialised in social policies, employment policies and educational policies (in this field jointly with Fundació Jaume Bofill they are promoting the #WhatWorks in Education movement)

All the activities done during these 10 years have been done with Independence, Technical Rigor to generate evidence and with maximum Transparency at all times. In their website you can download all the Evaluations carried.

Congratulations!!!

photo: Ivalua Team; Marc Balaguer, Mireia Climent, Núria Comas, Marçal Farré, Laura Kirchner, Jordi Miras. Erika Pérez, Ramon Sabes-Figuera, Jordi Sanz, Anna Segura, Federico Todeschini, Frederic Udina.
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Back to basics: the 7 enemies of evidence-based policy

Evidence-based policy is focused on research-based evidence to inform policymakers about “what works” and thereby produce better policy outcomes.

Graham Leicester in his 20th century article - 1999- brings us a number of factors that he suggests inhibits the adoption of the evidence based policy



What we could do against them?

1. Recognise that these enemies are everywhere not only in the governing machine. In the universities, research centres, ... 
2. We live in a risk society and the whole society is a laboratory. All the things that happen are real life experiences with risky technologies, not experiments conducted in laboratory controlled conditions. That means that when they go wrong—and it is axiomatic in the scientific model that they must go wrong if progress is to be made—they do so for real. There needs to be a much closer relationship therefore between government and research evidence. 
3. The political management of the evidence in our ‘risk society’ is even more important than the evidence itself. Researches have an obligation not only to be as rigorous as possible, but also to recognise that their research has a political dimension. What they choose to investigate, how and when they present the findings are part of the risk management process. They are all agents of change.
4. Technological advance is giving a new opportunities to get to grips with complexity. The increase in processing capacity makes all sorts of things possible in the management of complex systems. There is now a capacity for instant information gathering and analysis which makes all policy into a continuous real-time experiment. The researcher’s role will be to monitor, evaluate and adjust continuously. 
5. We must work harder to develop better data, and true indicators of what really matters to us as a society. We need data that answers the question ‘why’ as well as ‘how much’ or ‘how many’? We need indicators which can stand proxy for the general health of society, measures of the vital signs.

It is important for researchers not only to gather the evidence to describe what is happening and how society is changing, but to provide explanations about why these changes are occurring, and then ideally to suggest things that might be done to adjust the system accordingly.

As a Citizens we want evidence-based policy NOT "policy-based evidence": where evidence is typically used as a weapon — mangled and used selectively in order to claim that it supports a politician’s predetermined position

Acces to the article (restricted): The seven enemies (1999)

photo: Game of Thrones. Jon Snow: You know nothing and Book
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Ideas are becoming more expensive to find.

In Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find? (NBER Working Paper No. 23782), Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen, and Michael Webb argue that, to maintain a given rate of economic growth, resources devoted to research must increase over time.

In many growth models, economic growth arises from people creating ideas, and the long-run growth rate is the product of two terms: the effective number of researchers and their research productivity.

The authors present a wide range of evidence from various industries, products, and firms showing that research effort is rising substantially while research productivity is declining sharply. They cite both aggregate evidence and measures of R&D productivity in specific industries, in particular computers, agriculture, and medicine.

A good example is Moore’s Law. The number of researchers required today to achieve the famous doubling every two years of the density of computer chips is more than 18 times larger than the number required in the early 1970s. Across a broad range of case studies at various levels of (dis)aggregation, they find that ideas — and in particular the exponential growth they imply — are getting harder and harder to find. Exponential growth results from the large increases in research effort that offset its declining productivity.

They argue that a single-minded focus on the quantity of undiscovered ideas is unhelpful. It is not just how many ideas for productivity growth are left, but what it would cost to get them out of the ground – and, crucially, how much we’re prepared to spend to do it. For a long time, geologists have been forecasting ‘peak oil’, only to be surprised by new deep-sea discoveries and shale oil. We, likewise, see a continuing stream of innovations. But, just as newer oil sources are increasingly costly to extract, coming up with new ideas is getting more expensive. There have been technological improvements, but these require the devotion of ever-growing amounts of resources to the research process to maintain steady rates of improvement

These days, pushing the frontier of knowledge out requires mastering an ever-larger body of knowledge, meaning that students have to stay longer in university, and researchers increasingly work in larger teams whose members are more specialised. This all pushes up costs. Returning to the oil metaphor, we are digging deeper into a trickier part of the rock.

Access to the article (pdf): Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?
Commentary from the authors: Ideas aren’t running out, but they are getting more expensive to find


photo: Until our two activists and our members of the Catalonia Cabinet could come back to Catalonia and will be released from jail I'll publish a dark photo.
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open data in health care organizations

Open data definition: Data that is easily accessible, machine-readable, accessible for free or at negligible cost, and with minimal limitations on its use, transformation, and distribution.
See the video: #opendatafilm 12m

Why Open Data in health care organization?

Transparency. 
In a well-functioning, democratic society citizens need to know what their health organizations are doing. To do that, they must be able freely to access data and information and to share that information with other citizens.

• Transparency isn't just about looking for what the managers or the personnel are earning (an old fashioned idea). It is also about people empowering themselves to be better able to make decisions about their lifes: choosing the hospital with better treatment outcomes after analyse and compare different data procedures.
• Transparency isn’t just about access, it is also about sharing and reuse — often, to understand material it needs to be analyzed and visualized and this requires that the material be open so that it can be freely used and reused. Open data helps organizations to create data more efficient.

Participation.
Citizens are not able to engage with their health organizations.
By opening up data, citizens are enabled to be much more directly informed. This is more than transparency: it’s about making a full “read/write” society, not just about knowing what is happening in the process of governing or managing a health care organization but being able to contribute to it. Patients, their families and citizens in general push the organization to be more responsive.

[Want to know how a Catalan Health Care organization are tackling open data?: SAGESSA Open Data]

Other useful information: 
Health Open Data Catalan Health Service
The Open Data Era in Health and Social Care NHS England (2014)

photo: galaxy IDCS 1426 (NASA)
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Evaluation of industrial policy: methodological issues and policy lessons

Industrial policy, covers a multitude of policy instruments and approaches. While there has been a recent revival of interest in industrial policy around the world, systematic evidence of efficacy is relatively scarce.

This new OECD report (Evaluation of industrial policy (2014)) brings together the work of an OECD expert group that has considered recent evidence from the evaluation of industrial policy.

The report focuses on three specific policy areas, namely:

• support for R&D;
• capital market interventions (with a focus on risk capital);
• public procurement for innovation.

It also examines three areas where packages of industrial policy measures are generally applied:

• sector approaches including public-private partnerships PPP);
• policies towards clusters and business networks;
• national industrial strategies.

In many areas of industrial policy, evaluation faces particular methodological challenges. These challenges are outlined in the report, which concludes by drawing together the main policy lessons from the available evaluation evidence.

In particular the recomendations to the policy makers are:

• Make an explicit commitment to the evaluation of industrial policy
• Insist on the development of data and evaluation strategies before programmes can begin.
• Choose evaluation techniques appropriate to the programmes concerned.
• Evaluate industrial strategy using mixed methods.
• Insist on full disclosure in evaluation reports.
• Create robust governance mechanisms to ensure evaluation is objective and free of political influence.
• Develop effective mechanisms for policy learning

RELATED POST

photo: (*) Photosolde
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Data: the most valuable commodity

Data is becoming a "commodity". The important point today is HOW we USE the data NOT the data itself. The data itself is like a barrel of oil: It's basically the same product regardless of the producer.

If we believe in this idea we could understand also that the current definition of "personal data" is evolving. The report published by World Economic Forum in collaboration with The Boston Consulting Group in 2013 Unlocking the value of personal data: from collection to usage (2013) explains how the world and the use of personal data are changing:

"What is considered personal data is increasingly contextual; it changes with personal preferences, new applications, context of uses, and changes in cultural and social norms. Traditionally, organizations have used a variety of techniques to de-identify data and create value for society while protecting an individual’s privacy. Such data was not subject to the same rules as the Personal Identificable Information (PII) as an individual could not be identified from it.

Today technological advances and the ability to associate data across multiple sources is shifting boundaries of what is or is not PII, including potential re-identification of previously anonymized data.

This issue is the subject of significant debate with some arguing that this means that all data is effectively personally identifiable and should be treated as such. Others urge caution, arguing that this would curtail many of the beneficialuses of anonymous data with minimal gains in privacy. A shift in approach to thinking less about the data and more about the usage could offer a way forward.

If the usage impacts an individual directly it would require different levels of governance than data which is used in an aggregated and anonymized manner.

• Related post: data is now touching everyone lifes

photo: (*) Photosolde
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What motivates people to display philanthropic behaviour?

The main drivers of philanthropic donation behaviour are defined by Eight Mechanisms:

1. Awareness of need
2. Solicitation
3. Costs and benefits
4. Altruism
5. Reputation
6. Psychological benefits; impure altruims or warm glow
7. Values
8. Efficacy

I would like to focuse in the concepts of altruism, warm glow and efficacy.

• Altruism: Acts of philanthropy can be inspired by a ‘true’ or ‘pure’ concern for the well-being of recipients or the creation of a public good or service. People simple demand more for the public good.
• Impure altruism or warm glow: Some people get some private benefits (positive reputation, a sense of duty or satisfaction... ) from their gift per se, like a "warm glow". Its a selfish motive but with no bad connotations.
• Efficacy: People are more likely to engage in philanthropic behaviour when they perceive their contribution to be more effective.

These concepts are not contradictories, but probably the mechanisms of donation could differ if your are a small donor, a big philantropist or your are company. Probably you will put emphasis or priorizes these three concepts in a different way.

Acces to related articles (in pdf):

• Testing Mechanisms for Philanthropic Behaviour (2011)
• Eight Mechanisms that Drive Charitable Giving (2011)
• Impure altruism-warm glow (1990)

pd: Discussion cycle in Barcelona organized by Ivàlua and Obra social "la Caixa" New Forms of Philanthropy and Social Transformation

photo: (*) Photosolde
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Catalan Results Centre Reports in Health: a transparency and benchmark step

The Catalana Results Centre is a tool that measures, evaluates and disseminates the results achieved in the field of health care for members of the various agents Integrated Public Use Healthcare System of Catalonia. The Results Centre also measure, evaluates and disseminates biomedical research centers and institutes of health research.

It's a potent tool for transparency and benchmarking and to facilitate joint decision making for the quality of the health care delivered to the population of Catalonia.

• Here you will find the latest reports of these topics here: Latest reports
• If you want to download the data you can go to the tab "Open Data" or the section "Results of your center. You could download in excel or csv format all data: Open Data

Now you can dowload the results about biomedical research 2012 data. Basic and applied research realized by our hospitals and research centers. Data about inputs, outputs and less outcomes.

This effort to put all the results together is the first step to compare and think:

• Are we doing "too much" research? 
• Are we doing "relevant research". 

The answer is: Less Research, Better Research, Relevant Research: Related post

"That's one small step for a man, one gian leap for mankind".

Photo: Ralph Morse—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images. Portraits of Smokers in 1964, When Cigarettes Were First Called Killers. Not published in LIFE. "Among graduates of college, the death rate was 1,439 [per 100,000] for smokers, 676 for those who did not smoke."

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Think tanks ranking

 

A think tank (or policy institute, research institute, etc.) is an organization that performs research and advocacy concerning topics such as social policy, political strategy, economics, defense, science and technology, and culture. Most policy institutes are non-profit organizations. Other think tanks are funded by governments, advocacy groups, or businesses, or derive revenue from consulting or research work related to their projects

The University of Pennsylvania has published its 7th annual 2013 The Global Go To Think Tank Index (GGTTI). A ranking of more thant 6,500 thinks tanks all over the world. The Index has become the gold standard for think tanks and is widely cited by governments, donors, journals and policymakers as the foremost profile and performance of think tanks in every region of the world.

2013 GGTTI REPORT

Top Think Tank worldwide: Brookings Institution (United States)
Top Heath Policy: Cambridge Centre for Health Services Research (United Kingdom)
Top Science and Technology: Max Planck Institute (German)

In Spain:
Top think tanks worldwide:
#60 FAES
#64 CIDOB
Science and Technology: #28. Fundación de la Innovación Bankinter

photo: Robert W. Kelley—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images
Ken Isaacs (front) and a colleague work on the outside of Isaccs' "knowledge box," Chicago, 1962
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the relevance gap between researcher's interests and society: A proposals open to criticism

Paul Nightingale and Alister Scott from the University of Sussex at the Science Policy Research Unit  published in 2007 the article Peer review and the relevance gap: ten suggestions for policy-makers

The paper explores how academic research becomes divorced from wider society and the consequences of this for both society and academia.

They suggest 10 suggestions for policy-makers:

1. Do not fund research again that comes to the conclusion that ‘more research is needed’.
2. Funders should recognise the distinction between relevance and academic impact.
3. Within peer review, encourage and protect research that aims to be relevant and interdisciplinary, and ensure that protection is effective.
4. Stop using interdisciplinarity as a proxy for relevance and focus on relevance itself.
5. Funders should end the ‘closed shop’ whereby academics have a monopoly on research funding.
6. Funding bodies should insert explicit relevance criteria within the peer-review process, and provide guidance to reviewers on what those criteria are and how they should be treated.
7. Only fund research that shows a clear and rigorous understanding of the diverse actors involved in the field of enquiry, and their questions and needs.
8. Funding agencies should recognise that relevant research is intensive and requires long-term commitment.
9. Funding agencies should recognise the inherent limitations of ‘knowledge transfer’.
10. Policy-makers should recognise vested interests within the existing research community, and how they might invoke the three Sirens of: academic objectivity; academic autonomy; and academic quality, to avoid having to deal with relevance criteria.

Last sentence of the article: "Put a closer focus on society’s real research needs, rather than those agendas currently being defined and appropriated by a small coterie of professionals." 

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Ed Clark—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images. View across the Pont Alexandre III bridge toward the Grand Palace, Paris, 1946.

We don't know what we 're doing in medicine.... or yes we know!

This sentence was expressed by Dr. Eddy on February, 4 1990 in Detroit Free Press. He recognized the importance of the gaps in medical decision making and the effect in the efficent use of healtch care resourses.

The empirical work of Dr. John Wennberg  and various colleagues tried to find some arguments to explain that. They focused on the study of "Small Area Variations (SAV)" the phenomenom that refers to the wide variations in the per-capita utilization rates for many medical and surgical procedures that are commonly found in comparing small, contiguus hospital service markets.

They have argued that much of the observed variation is closely related to the degree of physician uncertainty with respect to diagnosis and treatment and the differences in local opinions. He's the founder editor of  The Dartmouth Atlas of Health Care 

Is there any small area variations (SAV) evidence in Spain?: Take a look at ATLAS VPM a brilliant initiative coordinated by Enrique Bernal Delgado PhD in Medicine. Senior Researcher of the Research Unit in Health Services and Policies of Aragon Institute of Health Science.

They have published 8 Atlas:

8 Potentially Preventable Hospitalizations related to exacerbation of chronic diseases
7 Variability in Hospitalizations of older people in the NHS
6 Variability in Hospitalizations due to oncological surgery in the NHS
5 Variability in Hospitalizations due to mental health problems in acute care hospitals.
4 Variability in Hospitalization due to cardiovascular problems and procedures in the NHS
3 Variability in Pediatric Hospitalizations due to surgical and diagnostic procedures selected
2 Variability in General Surgery Interventions in the NHS
1 Variability in Orthopaedic Surgery and Traumatology. Hip fracture, knee replacement and hip replacement

photo: (*) Photosolde
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The Technology sector in Catalonia. Baròmetre del Sector Tecnològic a Catalunya 2013

The Technology Sector in Catalonia 2013 is the fifth edition of this report. It provides comprehensive analysis of the country’s Information and Communication Technology (ICT) field. The nation’s ICT is well-consolidated and now has the potential to become one of Catalonia’s strategic sectors and growth drivers.

Some conclusions:

• While the crisis has affected the sector, the ICT field has fared much better than other industries.
• Internationalisation is a necessity, not an alternative. The firms that are internationalising, their markets have shrunk less and they are less dependent on public administration contracts. Furthermore, 43.6% of internationalising firms have seen a significant rise in their workforces whereas for non-international firms, this figure is 32.3%. The former have also experienced marked growth in both the number of their clients and turnover.
• The crisis has directly affected R&D but the outlook for 2013 appears to be brighter, especially for the internationalising firms, which envisage spending more on it this year. There is also a slight drop in the number of companies not carrying out R&D. Even so, universities have been particularly hard-hit by cuts in research. There seem to be more university-company technology transfers and collaboration, although there is still much to be done, especially with regards to Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) and micro-firms.
• The areas identified by the sector in 2013 as the technologies of the future were mobile computing, cloud computing and smart cities.
• Two major sectorial weaknesses are that many firms cater to the domestic market and that this has shrunk. Hurdles to internationalisation and the sectors lack of lobbying power are further weaknesses.
• Two major strengths are the Barcelona Brand and Catalan research capabilities. The competitiveness of firms, talents and staff are also plus points.
• Major threats are: lack of funding to drive the growth of new but well-established firms; the ‘brain drain’ caused by the crisis; a falling share in strategic sectors such as Health.
• With regard to opportunities, the sector stresses the hopes pinned on Mobile World Capital, and on the fact that Catalonia is a leader in areas such as Health, Smart Cities, Online Banking; Cultural Content.

Accés al document  Català, Castellà, English Report /Informe 2013
photo: (*) Photosolde
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if you'd like to understand what health economics is, don't miss Kenneth J. Arrow

In the introduction of the book "The Economics of Health and Health Care" from Sherman Folland, Allen C. Goodman and Miron Stano, the authors define: Health Economics is the study how resources are allocated to and within the health economy. The study of the production of health care and its distribution across population fall within this definition.

If you would like to understand a little bit more about what Health Economics is about, I recommed you to read one of the most influential articles in the health economics discipline:

UNCERTAINTY AND THE WELFARE ECONOMICS OF MEDICAL CARE by Kenneth Arrow published by the American Economic Review in 1963!.

Kenneth J. Arrow is an American economist and joint winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics with John Hicks in 1972.

The article finishes with this Postcript:

"I wish to repeat here what has been suggested above in several places: that the failure of the market to insure against uncertainties has created many social institutions in which the usual assumptions of the market are to some extent contradicted. The medical profession is only one example, though in many respects an extreme one. All professions share some of the same properties. The economic importance of personal and especially family relationships, though declining, is by no means trivial in the most advanced economies; it is based on non-market relations that create guarantees of behavior which would otherwise be afflicted with excessive uncertainty. Many other examples can be given. The logic and limitations of ideal competitive behavior under uncertainty force us to recognize the incomplete description of reality supplied by the impersonal price system."

Acces: Uncertainty J.K. Arrow (1963)

Francis Miller—Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images.
Not originally published in LIFE, but printed elsewhere in the years since. Martin Luther King Jr. addresses the crowd during the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, August 28, 1963.

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Si la universitat genera coneixements però no els transfereix, la societat no se’n beneficia

Aquesta afirmació pertany a l'autora  Inés Macho-Standler, professora del Departament d'Economia i Història Econòmica de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona i investigadora del MOVE (Markets, Organizations and Votes in Economics), un Centre de Recerca CERCA.

A l'any 2010 l'autora va publicar un document anomenat Transferència de les Innovacions Universitàries als Opuscles del CREI, documents de difusió per al públic en general de la recerca que es fa en El Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional (CREI), un altre centre CERCA.

Un article interessant de llegir i molt actual, on algunes de les seves conclusions són:

• El suport públic a les universitats i a altres centres d’investigació es justifica per la preferència que el sector privat té cap a la investigació més aplicada i amb el rendiment a curt termini, que comportaria una subinversió persistent en investigació fonamental o bàsica que resulta de més difícil apropiació i escàs valor comercial immediat.
• Les dues activitats primàries de la universitat són la docència, que transfereix coneixements directament i contribueix a la formació de les noves generacions de tècnics i d’investigadors, i la investigació, que transfereix nous descobriments a través de les publicacions científiques i les patents.
• Fixar-se només en una activitat pot donar una idea errònia de la tasca de difusió d’una universitat i del seu impacte en l’economia i en la societat.

Accés a l'article en pdf:

• CATALÀ
• ANGLÈS
• CASTELLÀ

photo: (*) Photosolde ________________________________________________________________________________

Science foresight: The future of Science

 

The Institute For the Future (IFTF) is an independent, non-profit research organization in Palo Alto (US) who produces documents, maps, forecasts and scenarios to understand the future in three main areas: 1) Global landscape; 2) People + Technology and 3) Health + Self.

Here we present the super-visual report, called "The Future of Science: 2021" Research Map

The map focuses on six big stories of science that they think will play out over the next decade:

• Decrypting the Brain
• Hacking Space
• Massively Multiplayer Data
• Sea the Future
• Strange Matter
• Engineered Evolution

I recommend to visit the IFTF website  Future of Science 2021 to go in more detail and to watch the video: Platforms for the Future: Magic and Neuroscience by Luigi Anzivino

photo: (*) Photosolde
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