But the motivations and expected benefits are quite different. Cooperation may be impelled primarily out of narrow self-interest and may yield mutual benefit but not joint benefit. It can be construed as an exchange relationship. For instance, scientists cooperate With their peers by making their data available to them in publicly accessible databases. But they may do so primarily because they are required by third parties to make data public before they can publish or receive additional funding.
Collaboration can be construed as a communal relationship that implies social trust and synergy among participants, with mutual benefit as the result.
Scientific organizations, like individual scientists, also engage in competition and collaboration. The competition for resources funds and the best scientists among scientific organizations is well known and intense.
Yet, at the same time, cooperative agreements of different forms among organizations are also quite common today: academic and industry consortia, precompetitive industry projects, National Science Foundation science and technology centers, accelerator projects, and so on. While scientific organizations are motivated to advance scientific knowledge through these collaborations, they are also motivated to ensure their own well-being.
Thus, issues of priority claims and credit can be as important to organizations as they are to individual scientists. Some of the most complex provisions governing interorganizational agreements have to do with ownership of products resulting from the cooperation.
A goal of the collaboratory concept is to render irrelevant the actual location of equipment and instrumentation and to make possible the creation of virtual laboratories using networked facilities. One can imagine the possibility of coordinating the capture of data by equipment on an orbiting satellite with the collection of data by ground-based instrumentation using computer networking tools to link all the facilities together.
This collaboratory function may prove to be at least as important as providing for the sharing of information and support for collaborative interaction among colleagues.
Where unique instru-. The antecedents of the collaboratory date to the development of the Arpanet in One of the first examples of computer-network-supported collaboration, started in , was a collaboration among Stanford University, University College in London, and Bolt Beranek, and Newman in Boston. Currently about 1, people—scattered across countries that cross all 24 time zones—are involved in some 80 working groups that constitute the Internet Engineering Task Force.
Electronic mail, shared document databases, distribution lists, anonymous file transfer archives, and a cornucopia of new applications for distributed data recovery and management make this global collaboration feasible. These tools also enable a six-person staff to function as a secretariat for this rapidly paced technical standardization work.
Industry participation in the work has led to the rapid development and deployment, sometimes within days, of products resulting from standards agreements. Consisting of over 10, networks that link more than 1,, computers, the Internet itself represents another kind of collaboration infrastructure.
There is no central operating authority, and the system is funded by an international melange of private, public, for-profit, and non-profit resources. The system is doubling in size annually; it has spawned a multi-billion-dollar international equipment and service market in computer communications, and it is used worldwide for sharing scientific results and coordinating scientific research.
On-line publications are beginning to emerge from the Internet environment. The Internet Society News, for example, is published quarterly and incorporates the contributions of over reporters worldwide who submit stories to the editor and to a page-layout editor over the network.
Many software development projects sponsored by D ARPA rely heavily on the Internet for project management and for collaboration. Common Lisp, a popular computer language for artificial intelligence, was developed by more than 60 people from universities, government, and industry who collaborated for 3 years but attended face-to-face meetings for only 2 days. According to a lead participant in the design effort, "The development of Common LISP would probably not have been possible without the electronic message system provided by the Arpanet.
Over the course of 30 months, approximately 3, messages were sent an average of 3 per day , ranging in length from one line to 20 pages It would have been substantially more difficult to have conducted this discussion by any other means and Would have required much more time" Steele, It accepts very large scale integrated VLSI circuit designs in digital form over the Internet, combines multiple circuits where there is room on chips, produces a tape that describes the fabrication mask, arranges for fabrication of the wafers at a foundry, has the chips packaged and tested, and returns the circuits to the original designers within a few weeks at a cost ranging from a few hundred to a few thousand dollars per chip.
This collaboration between circuit designers principally, graduate students at U. In the information-rich world of scientific research today, discovery of relevant data and results is a major challenge. The information cataloging and indexing capability of digital libraries, which are part of the collaboratory concept, as well as the idea of having available the full content of reports and even the raw data and analysis programs used to process them, contributes to the appeal of collaboratories.
With the proper information technology infrastructure, collaboratories could be formed quickly and flexibly to address particular problems or research opportunities. Although variations may evolve over time and in response to the needs of different disciplines, a collaboratory may be envisioned as including up to perhaps 2, principal investigators, postdoctoral associates and doctoral students, scientific support personnel, and technical support personnel located at from 5 to 20 home institutions.
Participants engaged in joint scientific research would be linked in a system providing computerized information technology for the collection, analysis, and distribution of data and results. All data or data products, and means of accessing instrumentation as well as all analysis and modeling capabilities and results, would be immediately available at every scientist's workstation.
To achieve a collaboratory capability, a considerable amount of research, development, and experimentation is needed. Although some features of a collaboratory e. Developing useful collaboratories thus requires research and development partnerships among scientists and information technologists to define, refine, and stabilize disciplinary or interdisciplinary collaboratory tools. To further explore the concept of a collaboratory as it was first articulated and discussed in Towards a National Collaboratory, , the Computer Science and Telecommunications Board of the National Research Council convened a committee in December to study the need for and benefits of collaboration in scientific research, factors determining the effectiveness of collaboration, and the ability of information technology—specifically of electronically integrated collaboratories—to support and enhance interactive scientific research.
In addressing these issues, the committee focused on three discrete areas of scientific investigation—oceanography, in which the difficulty and expense of gathering data and the interdependence of modelers and experimentalists provide motivation for greater collaboration Chapter 2 ; space physics, which has of necessity used extensive computational technology in the analysis of data collected by cooperatively fielded space- and ground-based instruments Chapter 3 ; and gene mapping and sequencing, research that has led to construction of and reliance on massive databases Chapter 4.
The committee's investigations suggested technical requirements and social and practical issues Chapter 5 that must be considered and dealt with as part of the process of initiating a national collaboratory program Chapter 6 in support of scientific research.
Identify specific information technology needs in three particular fields of science, using this information to synthesize and refine the collaboratory concept;.
Increase awareness of the utility of information technology for the conduct of scientific research, particularly in the form of collaboratories; and. Identify goals, objectives, and costs of developing collaboratories that would achieve concrete payoff in the form of enhanced scientific output. Space physicists, for example, use ''smart" data collection instruments that incorporate microprocessors and the ability to discriminate among the data collected and thus to exclude unwanted "background" events.
The confer impact of technology on science is of equal importance as a source of unavailable instrumentation and techniques needed to address difficult scientific questions more efficiently. Currently i am persuing b.
I am interested in writing technical blogs. Akshay G Paraskar. Gaargi Tomar. Abinaya Suresh. Maharshi Ghosh. Sai Prabhas Mallidi.
Tech Connection between science and technology. Most modern technological systems, from transistor radios to airliners, have been engineered and produced to be remarkably reliable. Failure is rare enough to be surprising. A system or device may fail for different reasons: because some part fails, because some part is not well matched to some other, or because the design of the system is not adequate for all the conditions under which it is used.
If failure of a system would have very costly consequences, the system may be designed so that its most likely way of failing would do the least harm. Examples of such "fail-safe" designs are bombs that cannot explode when the fuse malfunctions; automobile windows that shatter into blunt, connected chunks rather than into sharp, flying fragments; and a legal system in which uncertainty leads to acquittal rather than conviction.
Other means of reducing the likelihood of failure include improving the design by collecting more data, accommodating more variables, building more realistic working models, running computer simulations of the design longer, imposing tighter quality control, and building in controls to sense and correct problems as they develop. All of the means of preventing or minimizing failure are likely to increase cost.
But no matter what precautions are taken or resources invested, risk of technological failure can never be reduced to zero. The expected importance of each risk is then estimated by combining its probability and its measure of harm.
The relative risk of different designs can then be compared in terms of the combined probable harm resulting from each. The earth's population has already doubled three times during the past century. Even at that, the human presence, which is evident almost everywhere on the earth, has had a greater impact than sheer numbers alone would indicate.
Use of that capacity has both advantages and disadvantages. On the one hand, developments in technology have brought enormous benefits to almost all people. On the other hand, the very behavior that made it possible for the human species to prosper so rapidly has put us and the earth's other living organisms at new kinds of risk.
The growth of agricultural technology has made possible a very large population but has put enormous strain on the soil and water systems that are needed to continue sufficient production. Our antibiotics cure bacterial infection, but may continue to work only if we invent new ones faster than resistant bacterial strains emerge. Our access to and use of vast stores of fossil fuels have made us dependent on a nonrenewable resource.
In our present numbers, we will not be able to sustain our way of living on the energy that current technology provides, and alternative technologies may be inadequate or may present unacceptable hazards.
Our vast mining and manufacturing efforts produce our goods, but they also dangerously pollute our rivers and oceans, soil, and atmosphere.
Already, by-products of industrialization in the atmosphere may be depleting the ozone layer, which screens the planet's surface from harmful ultraviolet rays, and may be creating a buildup of carbon dioxide, which traps heat and could raise the planet's average temperatures significantly. The environmental consequences of a nuclear war, among its other disasters, could alter crucial aspects of all life on earth. From the standpoint of other species, the human presence has reduced the amount of the earth's surface available to them by clearing large areas of vegetation; has interfered with their food sources; has changed their habitats by changing the temperature and chemical composition of large parts of the world environment; has destabilized their ecosystems by introducing foreign species, deliberately or accidentally; has reduced the number of living species; and in some instances has actually altered the characteristics of certain plants and animals by selective breeding and more recently by genetic engineering.
What the future holds for life on earth, barring some immense natural catastrophe, will be determined largely by the human species. Individual inventiveness is essential to technological innovation. Nonetheless, social and economic forces strongly influence what technologies will be undertaken, paid attention to, invested in, and used. Such decisions occur directly as a matter of government policy and indirectly as a consequence of the circumstances and values of a society at any particular time.
In the United States, decisions about which technological options will prevail are influenced by many factors, such as consumer acceptance, patent laws, the availability of risk capital, the federal budget process, local and national regulations, media attention, economic competition, tax incentives, and scientific discoveries. The balance of such incentives and regulations usually bears differently on different technological systems, encouraging some and discouraging others.
Technology has strongly influenced the course of history and the nature of human society, and it continues to do so.
The great revolutions in agricultural technology, for example, have probably had more influence on how people live than political revolutions; changes in sanitation and preventive medicine have contributed to the population explosion and to its control ; bows and arrows, gunpowder, and nuclear explosives have in their turn changed how war is waged; and the microprocessor is changing how people write, compute, bank, operate businesses, conduct research, and communicate with one another.
Technology is largely responsible for such large-scale changes as the increased urbanization of society and the dramatically growing economic interdependence of communities worldwide. Historically, some social theorists have believed that technological change such as industrialization and mass production causes social change, whereas others have believed that social change such as political or religious changes leads to technological change.
However, it is clear that because of the web of connections between technological and other social systems, many influences act in both directions. For the most part, the professional values of engineering are very similar to those of science, including the advantages seen in the open sharing of knowledge. Because of the economic value of technology, however, there are often constraints on the openness of science and engineering that are relevant to technological innovation.
A large investment of time and money and considerable commercial risk are often required to develop a new technology and bring it to market. That investment might well be jeopardized if competitors had access to the new technology without making a similar investment, and hence companies are often reluctant to share technological knowledge. But no scientific or technological knowledge is likely to remain secret for very long.
Patent laws encourage openness by giving individuals and companies control over the use of any new technology they develop; however, to promote technological competition, such control is only for a limited period of time. Commercial advantage is not the only motivation for secrecy and control. Much technological development occurs in settings, such as government agencies, in which commercial concerns are minimal but national security concerns may lead to secrecy.
Because the connections between science and technology are so close in some fields, secrecy inevitably begins to restrict some of the free flow of information in science as well.
Some scientists and engineers are very uncomfortable with what they perceive as a compromise of the scientific ideal, and some refuse to work on projects that impose secrecy. Others, however, view the restrictions as appropriate. Occasionally, however, the use of some technology becomes an issue subject to public debate and possibly formal regulation. In such instances, the proposed solution may be to ban the burial of toxic wastes in community dumps, or to prohibit the use of leaded gasoline and asbestos insulation.
Rarely are technology-related issues simple and one-sided. Relevant technical facts alone, even when known and available which often they are not , usually do not settle matters entirely in favor of one side or the other.
The chances of reaching good personal or collective decisions about technology depend on having information that neither enthusiasts nor skeptics are always ready to volunteer.
The long-term interests of society are best served, therefore, by having processes for ensuring that key questions concerning proposals to curtail or introduce technology are raised and that as much relevant knowledge as possible is brought to bear on them. Considering these questions does not ensure that the best decision will always be made, but the failure to raise key questions will almost certainly result in poor decisions.
The key questions concerning any proposed new technology should include the following: What are alternative ways to accomplish the same ends? What advantages and disadvantages are there to the alternatives? What trade-offs would be necessary between positive and negative side effects of each? Who are the main beneficiaries? Who will receive few or no benefits? Who will suffer as a result of the proposed new technology?
How long will the benefits last?
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