Much of scientific progress stems from previously published findings, but searching through the vast sea of scientific publications is difficult. We often rely on metrics of scholarly authority to find the prominent authors but these authority indices do not differentiate authority based on research topics. We present Latent Topical-Authority Indexing (LTAI) for jointly modeling the topics, cit...

Questions about the relevance of religious views to public policy have been central in debates over the governance of biotechnology since the 1960s. This article offers an empirical analysis of moments of deliberative politics surrounding human embryo research, primarily within public bioethics bodies. I examine how these bodies have used the idea of public reason as developed in deliberative d...

Existing models of information diffusion assume that peer influence is the main reason for the observed propagation patterns. In this paper, we examine the role of authority pressure on the observed information cascades. We model this intuition by characterizing some nodes in the network as “authority” nodes. These are nodes that can influence large number of peers, while themselves cannot be i...

The Research Authority serves as the university’s unit responsible for the administration of securing and managing external and internal research grants. Among its functions, the Research Authority locates funding sources, develops proposals, approves proposals for submission, negotiates contracts, and ensures financial and scientific compliance of grants awarded. It is imperative that the Rese...

Following a request from the Commission to the European Food Safety Authority, the Scientific Panel on Additives and Nutrient Sources added to Food was asked to provide a scientific opinion on the safety of inositol hexanicotinate (inositol hexaniacinate) added for nutritional purposes as a source of niacin (vitamin B3) in food supplements and on the bioavailability of nicotinic acid from this ...

Dear Editor in chief Centers of Excellences (CoEs, also known as capability center or competency center) define as a team, a corporate group, or a shared facility that provides research, leadership, best practices, support and training for a specific area. A CoE conducts the organization as a unity in some particular area of focus such as skill, discipline, business, technology, or a broad are...

B.G. is currently employed with the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) in its BIOCONTAM Unit that provides scientific and administrative support to EFSA’s scientific activities in the area of Microbial Risk Assessment. The positions and opinions presented in this article are those of the authors alone and are not intended to represent the views or scientific works of EFSA. The other authors ...

This study evaluated the capacity of the medicine pricing mechanism of the National Medicines and Poisons Board (NMPB), the medicine regulatory agency of Sudan, in controlling prices of imported medicines. The study was conducted between July and September 2008 and data on the 50 most sold medicines in 2007 were obtained from the records of the regulatory authority and pharmacies in Khartoum; 1...

The Energy Policy Act (EPAct) of 2005 gave the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) regulatory authority over certain naturally occurring and acceleratorproduced radioactive material (NARM). The NRC published its final rule implementing this authority in the Federal Register on October 1, 2007 (72 FR 55863). The final rule expanded the definition of “byproduct material” in NRC regulations a...