Alfred P. Sloan Foundation

Abstract Reclassification risk is a major concern in health insurance where contracts are typically 1 year in length but health shocks often persist for much longer. While most health systems with private insurers pair short-run contracts with substantial pricing regulations to reduce reclassification risk, long-term contracts with one-sided insurer commitment have significant potential to reduce reclassification risk without the negative side effects of price regulation, such as adverse selection. We theoretically characterize optimal long-term insurance contracts with one-sided commitment, extending the literature in directions necessary for studying health insurance markets. We leverage this characterization to provide a simple algorithm for computing optimal contracts from primitives. We estimate key market fundamentals using data on all under-65 privately insured consumers in Utah. We find that dynamic contracts are very effective at reducing reclassification risk for consumers who arrive at the market in good health, but they are ineffective for consumers who come to the market in bad health, demonstrating that there is a role for the government insurance of pre-market health risks. Individuals with steeply rising income profiles find front-loading costly, and thus relatively prefer ACA-type exchanges. Switching costs enhance, while myopia moderately compromises, the performance of dynamic contracts.

When organizations first harnessed information technology to solve business problems, automate processes and provide information, it could take many months, even years, to deploy an application. This situation changed two decades ago when Software-as-a-Service products, hosted in the cloud, became available. Today, technology has matured sufficiently, and it is possible to install an IT platform to support a global business process in a matter of weeks and to stitch multiple applications together into a reliable and agile architectural foundation. While legacy technology still poses a major problem, technology for new investments is no longer the bottleneck that it once was.This is likely one of the reasons why it is widely acknowledged that achieving digital transformation ambitions is less about technology deployment and more about the ability of the organization to adopt it and adapt to it, and to ultimately create real business value. But here is the conundrum: while the time to implement technology has been significantly compressed, achieving the organizational changes needed to reap benefits still require months and even years to achieve.A weakness in mainstream project management literature, especially when applied to technology-enabled business investments, is the assumption that the project is complete once the software is released, stabilized, and "accepted" by the project's sponsor. Sometimes, a window of time is allocated to "finish" the project; an after-action or lessons learned report is produced, the project team disbands, and victory is declared. When considering the success or failure of projects, discussions usually revolve around the budget, schedule, the software and its acceptance, but generally not about the changes that the organization has experienced as a result of improved processes or enhanced capabilities or whether the expected benefits were delivered. Despite recognizing that benefits come from organizational changes, project management is still premised around scope, resources and time. This can be because benefits have not yet happened; the nature of most IT projects is that benefits only emerge many weeks and months after "go-live." Victory is often declared prematurely.To promote the achievement of benefits from IT investments, the concept of Benefits Management was introduced in the 1990's. Its aim was to focus on what business benefits were expected to be delivered from the investment and to accelerate the realization of these benefits from harnessing the capabilities of technology. This was achieved by identifying the organizational changes necessary to release these benefits, as well as tracking the benefits realized throughout the entire initiation-to-realization cycle. It also advocated that expected benefits should be aligned to key strategic drivers.Since the original work on Benefits Management was undertaken, the context for IT investments has changed dramatically. The initial research was focused on improving the performance outcomes from large enterprise system investments; these systems had an internal organizational focus and took considerable time to implement. Back then, how systems were built was also different, due primarily to the constraints imposed by technology, development frameworks and dominant practices. Technologies like AI and analytics pose particular challenges for managing benefits in that it is difficult to specify them prior to technology deployment. Moreover, today, technology is a competitive necessity; it is shaping business models and customers expect to engage with an organization in a digital way; and systems can extend outside the organizational boundary to ecosystem partners. Speed, innovation, and agility are critical determinants of success in a digital-first world, fundamentally changing how an organization competes. All of these changes impact the nature of projects and how they are set up and run.Although benefits management is an established concept in the project management and technology literatures, it is not well-known as an organizational practice. In this paper, we revisit the benefits management concept, discuss some of the adoption barriers, and suggest a number of ways to adapt benefits management to digital transformation programs.

Coordination of efforts to assess the challenges and pain points felt by industries from around the globe working to reduce COVID-19 transmission in the indoor environment as well as innovative solutions applied to meet these challenges is mandatory. Indoor infectious viral disease transmission (such as coronavirus, norovirus, influenza) is a complex problem that needs better integration of our current knowledge and intervention strategies. Critical to providing a reduction in transmission is to map the four core technical areas of environmental microbiology, transmission science, building science, and social science. To that end a three-stage science and innovation Summit was held to gather information on current standards, policies and procedures applied to reduce transmission in built spaces, as well as the technical challenges, science needs, and research priorities. The Summit elucidated steps than can be taken to reduce transmission of SARS-CoV-2 indoors and calls for significant investments in research to enhance our knowledge of viral pathogen persistence and transport in the built environment, risk assessment and mitigation strategy such as processes and procedures to reduce the risk of exposure and infection through building systems operations, biosurveillance capacity, communication form leadership, and stakeholder engagement for optimal response. These findings reflect the effective application of existing knowledge and standards, emerging science, and lessons-learned from current efforts to confront SARS-CoV-2.

The double pulsar (PSR J0737−3039A/B) provides some of the most stringent tests of general relativity (GR) and its alternatives. The success of this system in tests of GR is largely due to the high-precision, long-term timing of its recycled-pulsar member, pulsar A. On the other hand, pulsar B is a young pulsar that exhibits significant short-term and long-term timing variations due to the electromagnetic-wind interaction with its companion and geodetic precession. Improving pulsar B’s timing precision is a key step towards improving the precision in a number of GR tests with PSR J0737−3039A/B. In this paper, red noise signatures in the timing of pulsar B are investigated using roughly a four-year time span, from 2004 to 2008, beyond which time the pulsar’s radio beam precessed out of view. In particular, we discuss the profile variations seen on timescales ranging from minutes – during the so-called “bright” orbital phases – to hours – during its full 2.5 h orbit – to years, as geodetic precession displaces the pulsar’s beam with respect to our line of sight. Also, we present our efforts to model the orbit-wide, harmonic modulation that has been previously seen in the timing residuals of pulsar B, using simple geometry and the impact of a radial electromagnetic wind originating from pulsar A. Our model successfully accounts for the long-term precessional changes in the amplitude of the timing residuals but does not attempt to describe the fast profile changes observed during each of the bright phases, nor is it able to reproduce the lack of observable emission between phases. Using a nested sampling analysis, our simple analytical model allowed us to extract information about the general properties of pulsar B’s emission beam, such as its approximate shape and intensity, as well as the magnitude of the deflection of that beam, caused by pulsar A’s wind. We also determined for the first time that the most likely sense of rotation of pulsar B, consistent with our model, is prograde with respect to its orbital motion. Finally, we discuss the potential of combining our model with future timing of pulsar B, when it becomes visible again, towards improving the precision of tests of GR with the double pulsar. The timing of pulsar B presented in this paper depends on the size of the pulsar’s orbit, which was calculated from GR, in order to precisely account for orbital timing delays. Consequently, our timing cannot directly be used to test theories of gravity. However, our modelling of the beam shape and radial wind of pulsar B can indirectly aid future efforts to time this pulsar by constraining part of the additional red noise observed on top of the orbital delays. As such, we conclude that, in the idealised case of zero covariance between our model’s parameters and those of the timing model, our model can bring about a factor 2.6 improvement on the measurement precision of the mass ratio, R = mA/mB, between the two pulsars: a theory-independent parameter, which is pivotal in tests of GR.

Abstract NOTE: The first page of text has been automatically extracted and included below in lieu of an abstract Dynamics of Establishing and Sustaining a National Minority Engineering Programs Advisory Board Abstract For nearly 12 years, our Minority Engineering Programs Office has sustained a national board of industry representatives who serve on our National Minority Engineering Programs Advisory Board. These representatives are from companies who actively recruit our undergraduate and graduate students to fill internships and co-operative education. They also hire our graduates as new full-time employees. Specific companies targeted for inclusion on our MEP advisory board are those who work tirelessly to diversify their company’s engineering workforce. The board members have demonstrated a willingness to maintain an on-going relationship with us by, among other things, allowing our MEP office to help facilitate company on-campus exposure and hiring, and by regularly providing financial support programs administered by our office. This paper describes our strategy for recruiting members to our National Board, frequency and rationale for twice a year board meetings, priority MEP student-centered services provided to members of our board, and challenges associated with sustaining these relationships as corporate recruiting personnel change within these companies at a fairly regular rate. An additional attribute associated with our success is having our student chapter presidents of the National Society of Black Engineers, the American Indian Science and Engineering Society, and the Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers, maintain permanent membership on this national advisory board. A portion of the paper explains how this inclusion provides added value to industry representatives who are active board participants. This paper includes specific information on three companies who have served continuously on our board, and which have provided continuous support to our programs. Background on Our National Minority Engineering Programs Advisory Board Our Director of Minority Engineering Programs was hired in 1995 with the specific charge to increase recruiting, enrollment, graduation and overall success of under-represented minority engineering students. The director moved quickly to establish a permanent advisory board of corporate representatives who routinely recruit our engineering students, and who are demonstrating a commitment to diversity in the work place. Invitations went out to over two dozen companies, with a small fraction responding. Working with a dozen companies, the director decided to hold advisory board meetings twice annually: In the fall in conjunction with the university-wide Minority Career Fair, and in the spring in conjunction with the College of Engineering Career Fair. Rationale for these two meeting times was that the companies targeted for inclusion on the National Minority Engineering Programs Advisory Board are likely to have a recruiting presence on campus at these two career fairs, and even if the preferred company administrator could not attend, she/he could send one of the company recruiting representatives to our meeting. At the first board meeting, members in attendance confirmed the logic and frequency for our meetings. Since they have a keen interest in direct access to our minority engineering students, we agreed to add to the board student presidents of our National Society of Black Engineers (NSBE), Society of Hispanic Professional Engineers (SHPE), and American Indian Science and Engineering Society (AISES) chapters. With leaders of NSBE, SHPE and

An increasingly important and often overlooked issue in science and technology policy is recognizing the role that philanthropies play in setting the direction of research. In an era where public and private resources for science are strained, the practices that foundations adopt to advance basic and applied research needs to be better understood. This first-of-its-kind study provides a detailed assessment of the current state of science philanthropy. This examination is particularly timely, given that science philanthropies will have an increasingly important and outsized role to play in advancing responsible innovation and in shaping how research is conducted. Philanthropy and the Future of Science and Technology surveys the landscape of contemporary philanthropic involvement in science and technology by combining theoretical insights drawn from the responsible research and innovation (RRI) framework with empirical analysis investigating an array of detailed examples and case studies. Insights from interviews conducted with foundation representatives, scholars, and practitioners from a variety of sectors add real-world perspective. A wide range of philanthropic interventions are explored, focusing on support for individuals, institutions, and networks, with attention paid to the role that science philanthropies play in helping to establish and coordinate multi-sectoral funding partnerships. Novel approaches to science philanthropy are also considered, including the emergence of crowdfunding and the development of new institutional mechanisms to advance scientific research. The discussion concludes with an imaginative look into the future, outlining a series of lessons learned that can guide how new and established science philanthropies operate and envisioning alternative scenarios for the future that can inform how science philanthropy progresses over the coming decades. This book offers a major contribution to the advancement of philanthropic investment in science and technology. Thus, it will be of considerable interest to researchers and students in public policy, public administration, political science, science and technology studies, sociology of science, and related disciplines.

Over the past few decades, scholars trained in a range of disciplines have begun to frame some of their applied research as translational research. For instance, from 2010 to 2018, more than 32,000...

In the 21st Century, research is increasingly data- and computation-driven. Researchers, funders, and the larger community today emphasize the traits of openness and reproducibility. In March 2017, 13 mostly early-career research leaders who are building their careers around these traits came together with ten university leaders (presidents, vice presidents, and vice provosts), representatives from four funding agencies, and eleven organizers and other stakeholders in an NIH- and NSF-funded one-day, invitation-only workshop titled "Imagining Tomorrow's University." Workshop attendees were charged with launching a new dialog around open research – the current status, opportunities for advancement, and challenges that limit sharing. The workshop examined how the internet-enabled research world has changed, and how universities need to change to adapt commensurately, aiming to understand how universities can and should make themselves competitive and attract the best students, staff, and faculty in this new world. During the workshop, the participants re-imagined scholarship, education, and institutions for an open, networked era, to uncover new opportunities for universities to create value and serve society. They expressed the results of these deliberations as a set of 22 principles of tomorrow's university across six areas: credit and attribution, communities, outreach and engagement, education, preservation and reproducibility, and technologies. Activities that follow on from workshop results take one of three forms. First, since the workshop, a number of workshop authors have further developed and published their white papers to make their reflections and recommendations more concrete. These authors are also conducting efforts to implement these ideas, and to make changes in the university system. Second, we plan to organise a follow-up workshop that focuses on how these principles could be implemented. Third, we believe that the outcomes of this workshop support and are connected with recent theoretical work on the position and future of open knowledge institutions.