Scholars have grown concerned that the commercialization of academic science is increasing secrecy at the expense of cooperation and information sharing. Using data from comparable surveys of academic scientists in three fields (experimental biology, mathematics and physics), we test whether scientists have become more competitive and more secretive over the last 30 years. We also use the recen...

The ongoing globalisation of science has undisputedly a major impact on how and where scientific research is being conducted nowadays. Yet, the big picture remains blurred. It is largely unknown where this process is heading, and at which rate. Which countries are leading or lagging? Many of its key features are difficult if not impossible to capture in measurements and comparative statistics. ...

Today people work together across time, space, cultural and organizational boundaries. To simplify and automate the work, collaboration employs a broad range of tools, such as project management software, groupware, social networking services, or wikis. For a collaboration to be effective, the actions of collaborators need to be properly coordinated, which requires taking into account social, s...

An on-chip deformability checker is proposed to improve the velocity–deformation correlation for red blood cell (RBC) evaluation. RBC deformability has been found related to human diseases, and can be evaluated based on RBC velocity through a microfluidic constriction as in conventional approaches. The correlation between transit velocity and amount of deformation provides statistical informati...

The University of Texas and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian have had experience working together on virtual museum projects that bring indigenous people to the museum for the purpose of “digitally repatriating” important cultural items. The initial virtual museum project provided a strategy for cultural responsive teaching in American Indian schools. They also provided a ...

This paper studies anonymity in a setting where individuals who communicate with each other over an anonymous channel are also members of a social network. In this setting the social network graph is known to the attacker. We propose a Bayesian method to combine multiple available sources of information and obtain an overall measure of anonymity. We study the effects of network size and find th...

Violence is a serious problem in South Africa with many effects on health services; it presents complex research problems and requires interdisciplinary collaboration. Two key meta-questions emerge: (i) violence must be understood better to develop effective interventions; and (ii) intervention research (evaluating interventions, assessing efficacy and effectiveness, how best to scale up interv...

Rather than pursue questions related to learning in biology from separate camps, recent calls highlight the necessity of interdisciplinary research agendas. Interdisciplinary collaborations allow for a complicated and expanded approach to questions about learning within specific science domains, such as biology. Despite its benefits, interdisciplinary work inevitably involves challenges. Some s...

Development of knowledge based society carries multiple challenges to the higher education system. Some of the challenges laid before the higher education sector of countries which aspire to become knowledge based societies are: the entrepreneurial leadership of the higher education institutions, finding new sources of financing in order to minimize dependence on public resources, creating conn...