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143 Results Found for

• Summer 1998

  No Productivity Boom for Workers

  Stephen S. Roach

  America’s love affair with the new technologies of the Information Age has never been more intense, but nagging questions remain about whether this passion is delivering on its promise to accelerate growth… Read More

• Summer 1997

  University Rankings Revisited

  Robert M. Rosenzweig

  To the list of life’s very few certainties, Americans at least may confidently add a new category: ratings. We are an extremely competitive people, a fact reflected in our political and economic… Read More

• Spring 1997

  Roundtable: The Future of Computing and Telecommunications

  As part of its 10th anniversary symposium on May 16, 1996, the National Research Council’s Computer Science and Telecommunications Board convened a panel of experts to speculate about what the future holds.… Read More

• November 14, 2025

  Yellow

  If there were an app that estimated the risk of every decision, would you use it? B. Pladek’s short story “Yellow” explores how data changes the way we think about risk—and what happens when that data is manipulated.

• July 9, 2024

  A Road Map for a New Era in Biology and Medicine

  Lydia Contreras, Monya Baker

  Most people are familiar with DNA, but its cousin, RNA, has become widely known only recently. In 2020, of course, RNA was in the news all the time: the COVID-19 virus is… Read More

• February 21, 2023

  Episode 26: You’ve Been Misinformed About Sharks

  David Shiffman, Lisa Margonelli

  Recent conversations about scientific misinformation have concentrated on what is new: social media and algorithms that spread all kinds of information—reliable and unreliable—surprisingly fast. But misinformation has long been an issue for… Read More

• June 2, 2022

  Creating a New Moral Imagination for Engineering

  Darshan Karwat

  Engineers are responsible for some of the awesome achievements of our era, such as the electrical grid, vitamin A-enriched “Golden Rice,” getting astronauts to the Moon and back, and innumerable others. They… Read More

• Fall 2022

  A Vision for Democratizing Government Data

  Julia Lane

  During the earliest weeks of the COVID-19 pandemic, there was a desperate need for data to respond to the worst labor market crisis in almost a century. State-administered unemployment claims skyrocketed. Jobseekers,… Read More

• Winter 2018

  Scaling Up Policy Innovations in the Federal Government: Lessons from the Trenches

  Jenn Gustetic

  Large bureaucracies such as those of the federal government are notoriously slow to innovate. But in recent years, new technology-enabled approaches to helping government meet its public obligations have begun to find… Read More

• Winter 2018

  What Drives Innovation?

  Richard R. Nelson, Irwin Feller, Sallie Keller, Stephanie Shipp

  In “What Does Innovation Today Tell Us about the US Economy Tomorrow?” (Issues, Fall 2017), Jeffrey Funk starts with an assertion that puzzles me, but after that he develops and… Read More

• Summer 2014

  How Hurricane Sandy Tamed the Bureaucracy

  Adam Parris

  Remember Hurricane Irene? It pushed across New England in August 2011, leaving a trail of at least 45 deaths and $7 million in damages. But just over a year later, even before… Read More

• Spring 2010

  Every Little bit Counts

  Kathleen Courrier

  The world’s top search engine, a $175 billion corporation second only to Coca Cola in name recognition worldwide, and a new active verb, Google knows what it’s about. But others aren’t so… Read More

• Winter 2010

  Changing Climate, More Damaging Weather

  Robert Repetto, Robert Easton

  The weather varies, but climate change affects the frequencies with which particular weather occurs, including the frequencies of extreme weather, such as heavy storms, heat waves, and droughts. More frequent weather extremes… Read More

• Spring 2007

  From the Hill – Spring 2007

  Bush 2008 budget: More bad news for R&D On February 5, President Bush released his budget for fiscal year (FY) 2008, just as the new Democratic majority in Congress was racing to… Read More

• Spring 2006

  For What the Tolls Pay: Fair and Efficient Highway Charges

  Rudolph G. Penner

  Hydrogen cars, expensive oil, fuel efficiency standards, and inflation frighten those interested in maintaining and improving U.S. highways. All of these forces could erode the real value of fuel taxes that now… Read More

• Fall 2004

  Meeting the New Challenge to U.S. Economic Competitiveness

  William B. Bonvillian

  The U.S. economy, seemingly a world-dominant Goliath in the mid- and late-1990s, now faces major structural challenges from a new cast of Davids. The nation confronts a host of new economic challengers… Read More

• Fall 2003

  New Economy Lite

  Kenneth Flamm

  Roger Alcaly’s title overpromises. Despite this, the book contains a useful introduction for a lay reader to a set of topics that academic economists interested in the interaction between high technology and… Read More

• Fall 2003

  The Limits of the Polygraph

  David L. Faigman, Stephen E. Fienberg, Paul C. Stern

  Polygraphs, also known as lie detectors, are not as accurate as television suggests. Their use is problematic and courts should be skeptical.

• Fall 2001

  The Info/Biotech Connection

  Kevin Finneran

  Although wide agreement exists that information technology (IT) and biotechnology will be the primary sources of innovation for the foreseeable future, this insight seems not to have penetrated fully into federal research… Read More

• Summer 2000

  Preserving Privacy

  Priscilla Regan

  Telling “good stories” has been and will continue to be meaningful in making the impact of technology on privacy issues less abstract and more real. Simson Garfinkel’s Database Nation is the most… Read More

• Fall 1999

  Pork Barrel Science

  Norman Metzger

  In 1972, three architects—Robert Venturi, Denise Scott Brown, and Steven Izenour—published a book entitled Learning from Las Vegas. Its premise was simple if controversial: That however garish, ugly, and bizarre an… Read More

• Spring 1999

  The Price of Biodiversity

  R. David Simpson

  Dismayed that their pleas to save the world’s biological diversity seem to be falling on deaf ears, conservation advocates have turned to economic arguments to convince people in the poor nations that… Read More

• Summer 1998

  Toward a Global Science

  Bruce M. Alberts

  In the early 1990s, the Carnegie Commission on Science, Technology, and Government published a series of reports emphasizing the need for a greatly increased role for science and scientists in international affairs.… Read More