Views From the Inside

As the new Republican majority in the North Carolina state government began to develop environmental policy initiatives for issues including coastal management, domestic energy, and broad regulatory reform, the agenda for holding environmental science hostage to hyper-partisan rancor was fully developed. And then, a miracle happened.

The new administration has outlined ambitious initiatives for public action on the pandemic, climate change, and the stagnating connection between innovation and economic outcomes in communities around the country, issues that will require new levels of informed public guidance of policy.

What are city codes for? A poet finds the human in the vocabulary of urban planning.

Consigning the impact of our innovations to a postscript has given rise to many current dilemmas now facing society, such as climate disruption and bias in algorithms. Not acknowledging how profoundly science affects society is naive at best and dangerous at worst.

Problems around expert advice and the public are best considered one societal issue at a time and should be viewed in terms of how scientific advances intersect with such variables as individuals’ values, economic and other interests, or politics.

“How can NSF be much more proactive—and take a leadership role—around resilience to pandemics, resilience to natural hazards, resilience to economic disruptions, resilience to disruptions in education? How might we then configure ourselves around this resilience framework?”

Our analysis showed that underserved states consistently outperformed higher-award states in commercializing the outcomes of their DOD SBIR projects. Underserved states generally did better in total sales, sales to the private sector, sales to the military, and sales of research and development services for specialized applications.

Virtual and augmented reality technologies will facilitate a move away from the computer keyboard and mouse to a more immersive form of computing in which we interact with computers with gestures, physical behaviors, and voices, while the “world” becomes our screen.

It is too early, and the changes are coming too fast and too broadly, to be able to predict how humans will interact over time with the distributed techno-human cognitive structures that are growing increasingly complex and powerful around us.

Neither more communication nor technological innovations are likely to change the underlying driver of opposition to nuclear energy for progressives: a view that the technology is inherently antidemocratic and doesn’t fit with the small-scale, decentralized clean energy future they envision.

Three decades after Congress selected Yucca Mountain as the only candidate for a geological disposal site, and a decade after it was taken off the table, no options for long-term management are in play.

Time became a balm for the uncertainty bred of ignorance, or at least for some of it. It provided an opportunity to make sense of one’s clinical observations and experiential learning and transform a disorganized set of novel findings into more coherent insights that would improve patient outcomes.

We are attempting to imagine a path toward a nuclear engineering discipline that better prepares its intellectual progeny to sense and reason with the inevitable moral dissonances that the management—creation as well as dismantlement—of nuclear technologies poses for society.

The most politically practicable industrial policies aren’t necessarily the most efficient. And the more efficient alternatives are often difficult to adopt or maintain. Policymakers are left to choose between politically viable initiatives that are economically risky and economically viable initiatives that are politically risky. They must find a compromise path between these two unpalatable options.

A handful of companies have launched trial services, and there is a widespread expectation that drone deliveries will eventually become routine. This early point in the emergence of a new technology presents an opportunity to examine the complexity of public attitudes toward innovation.