Latest Reports & Publications

Science, Technology Education Gets Boost
Washington Post- 1/17/08 Arlington County public schools will receive a grant that will establish one of Virginia´s first Governor´s Career and Technical Academies. This initiative intends to align instruction in science, technology, engineering and math with changing needs of the modern workplace.

Reform Teaching and Equity in Math Education
NewsReleaseWire.com (press release) – 1/9/08 A new study of results from the Brazilian national assessment supports the notion that reform teaching improves all students´ mathematics performance regardless of socioeconomic status. The study examined the extent to which reform teaching narrowed the achievement gap between students in schools with low average socioeconomic status (SES) and students in schools with high average SES. The study also reported on whether reform teaching reduced the equity gap that divides students within the same school but who are of different socioeconomic status. This article highlights the increasing military support for research and development, especially in the area of nanotechnology, where the US Department of Defense contributes 30% of the funding for the US Nanotechnology Initiative.


FNIH Public Access Policy to become mandatory NIH´s Public Access Policy is set to become mandatory following President Bush´s approval on Dec 26th 2007. This much-heralded change, once implemented, will require NIH-funded investigators to submit an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts to PubMed Central, as soon as they have been accepted for publication.

HHMI Open Access mandate takes effect On Jan 1st 2008 the Howard Hughes Medical Institute´s open access mandate came into effect. The HHMI policy requires that, for all manuscripts now submitted that have an HHMI scientist as a major author.

FDA Declares Cloned Foods to Be Safe for Humans The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) released a draft risk assessment saying meat and milk from most cloned animals or their offspring is safe for consumers to eat. The agency is expected to approve the sale of products from cloned livestock in 2008.

Invent a Drug, Win $1 Million Should the government start handing out prizes for science breakthroughs? Slate- 1/23/08


Innovation Nations Ride the Next Wave of Invention IT World, 1/23/08
Dan Blacharski discusses the shift of high tech innovation from Silicon Valley to India, China and Southeast Asia.

Singapore´s SMART Centre to be intellectual hub for global researchers 1/22/08
MIT Provost Rafael Reif and Dr. Tony Tan, Chairman of Singapore´s National Research Foundation (NRF), announced Jan. 23 the official launch of the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Centre, or SMART Centre. The SMART Centre is the first entity in CREATE, which stands for Campus for Research Excellence and Technological Enterprise, a complex of research centres from Singapore, world-class research universities and corporate labs.

SMART is the Massachusetts Institute of Technology´s (MIT) largest international research endeavor and the first research center of its kind located outside Cambridge, Mass. It will offer laboratories and computational facilities for research in several areas, including biomedical science, water resources and the environment, and possible additional research thrusts that encompass such topics as interactive digital media, energy, and scientific and engineering computation.

Disincentives to scientists engaging with society must be removed, says John Denham, UK Secretary of State for Innovation 1/21/08
UK Secretary of State for Innovation, Universities and Skills John Denham has a vision of his country that is ´excited about sciences, values its importance to our economic and social well-being, feels confident in its use and supports a representative, well-qualified scientific workforce´.

Making this vision a reality involves more engagement between science and society, and more influence for scientific evidence in policy-making, he said.

´If policy-makers do not have access to world class scientific evidence and advice, we will not be able to make the best decisions about the tough challenges facing the country. If the public do not have the capacity to understand scientific evidence and risk, they face being unable to make the best decisions for themselves and their families or, in a democracy, put the most appropriate pressure on politicians,´ Mr Denham told members of the Royal Society for Encouragement of the Arts, Commerce and Manufacturers (RSA).


$10 Million Competition to Expand Science, Technology, Engineering and Math Careers Government Technology, CA – 1/15/08
The U.S. Department of Labor´s Employment and Training Administration today announced a new, two-phase competition to build the workforce investment system´s capacity to support careers in science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fields.

"Since approximately half of America´s economic growth in the past several decades has been attributed to industries related to science, technology, engineering and mathematics, this $10 million grant competition will boost the ability of the workforce investment system to support the pursuit of careers in these high-growth industries that provide excellent job opportunities," said U.S. Secretary of Labor Elaine L. Chao.

High-Tech Hiring: Youth Matters (1/15/08)
In IT engineering, young hires tend to be more energetic and up to date. Older workers need to keep skills fresh, or aim for management posts, according to Vivek Wadhwa of Business Week.

Yes, The Tech Skills Shortage Is Real, Information Week- (1/12/08)
The demand for IT skills has become ubiquitous across every industry globally. The market for IT professionals is strong and is still the fastest-growing sector in the U.S. economy, with more than a million new jobs projected to be added between 2004 and 2014. Five of the 30 occupations projected by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics to grow the fastest by 2016 are IT-related, led by network and data communications analysts, software engineers, and systems analysts. According to Jerry Luftman, The IT skills famine plaguing the United States is only going to get worse.