Felix Stoehr, María Díaz Trigo, Evanthia Hatziminaoglou
et al.
The success of an astronomical facility is measured by its scientific impact. A principal metric for this impact is the ensemble of peer-reviewed publications based on the observational data obtained by the facility. We present a comprehensive study of the statistics of the 4,190 refereed publications of the Atacama Large Millimeter/Submillimeter Array (ALMA) in the period from 2012 to 2024. The publications have received 169,985 citations and are based on 2,670 ALMA projects totalling 19,265 hours of 12-m-array-equivalent observing time. Our study analyses publication statistics related to various aspects, e.g. science categories, geographical distribution, archival research, time to publication, publication fraction, and citations. We also look into the community and compare ALMA with other facilities. We find that ALMA is a high-impact observatory with an average of 41 citations per publication, ~70% of observed projects published, ~40% of publications making use of archival data in 2024, more than 9,400 unique authors, and a publication evolution following that of HST and VLT. Currently, the impact factor for ALMA publications is larger than that of all other major astronomical facilities. ALMA also plays a pivotal role in very long baseline interferometry (VLBI), substantially contributing to landmark achievements such as capturing the first image of a black hole shadow.
This study investigates the effects of crises on human resource management in the public sector, with a particular focus on recruitment and retention processes during the COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis centers on the response of
Romania’s National Agency of Civil Servants (NACS) to unprecedented challenges in workforce planning, candidate selection, and employee well-being.
Using a quantitative methodology, data were collected via a structured online questionnaire distributed to 107 permanent NACS employees, of which 85 (79%) completed it. The findings reveal significant disruptions in recruitment
activity, with 76% of respondents perceiving a decline in position occupancy and 85% indicating that digital recruitment methods limited candidate accessibility. Major constraints included reduced financial resources, postponed
competitions, platform instability, and poor internet connectivity. Psychological stress was reported by the majority of employees, especially during prolonged remote work or early lockdown periods, while ineffective internal communication was also associated with increased tension and uncertainty.
Despite these challenges, the study also highlights perceived advantages of digitalization, including improved administrative efficiency, faster communication, and better access to evaluation materials. The research emphasizes the need for adaptive, inclusive, and resilient HR strategies in the public sector, drawing key lessons from the crisis for future institutional preparedness and policy development.
Public relations. Industrial publicity, Political institutions and public administration (General)
Philosopher of technology, Darryl Cressman, is an assistant professor at Maastricht University. Cressman’s work engages with a wide variety of disciplines and approaches, including Science and Technology Studies (STS), media theory, the history and philosophy of science, innovation studies, and critical theory. He is the editor of The Necessity of Critique: Andrew Feenberg & the Philosophy of Technology (2022), a collection which brings together diverse perspectives from various authors to focus on Feenberg’s critique of technology. In this interview, Cressman provides insights into his philosophical roots, approach, and methodology.
Eduard V. Patrakov, Rafael de Brito Dias, Rodrigo F. Frogeri
et al.
This theoretical article is devoted to the human and social factors of innovations. This is due to the fact that innovation is an increasing and inevitable trend of our time, with deep impacts on society, on nature and on individuals. At the same time, innovations are related to the area of large economic risks and have quite pronounced contradictions, including in the psychological context. The article reveals the basics of studying the psychological context of innovation and the main risks associated with such a context, drawing attention to the need of developing conceptual approaches to better understand this phenomenon, as well as proper policy frameworks that address innovation under these emerging views. As a result, the author’s model for the analysis of risks and innovation resources is presented. The model includes three levels of analysis: the macro level (socio-cultural and institutional factors), the meso level (company level), and the micro level (a person as a subject, creator and/or consumer of innovations). This approach allows us not to make too sharp distinctions between the social, psychological and economic factors of innovation.
AKOMOLAFE O. Charles, SUN Licheng, BORAH Prasad Siba
et al.
The persistent underperformance of road transportation projects in Lagos, Nigeria has led to reduced operational efficiency, poor project outcomes, and compromised safety. Although risk management frameworks are globally institutionalized, their implementation in Lagos remains fragmented and predominantly reactive. This study examines the relationship between risk management strategies and project performance outcome in Lagos, using a mixed-method approach. Quantitative data were collected from 197 key stakeholders, including contractors, consultants, engineers and community representatives. The findings highlight the lack of standardized risk management frameworks and scope deficiencies, limited stakeholder engagement, and low adoption of advanced technologies. To address these challenges, the study recommends the institutionalization of an enforceable risk governance framework and implementation of mandatory risk assessments for all road projects exceeding one billion naira. These measures will enhance transparency, accountability, and infrastructure performance in Lagos.
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Carolina Bagattolli, Tiago Brandão, RayssaVieira Kruger Moreno
et al.
In a world increasingly captivated by the allure of technology and rapid innovation, the II NOvation Forum, held in 4-6 September 2024 at the Federal University of Paraná (UFPR), in Curitiba (Brazil), stands as a critical and inspiring milestone. Under the theme «Reimagining Innovation for the Public Good», students, practitioners, and scholars from across the globe gathered to question the prevailing narratives of innovation and to explore alternative futures grounded in social justice, sustainability, and collective well-being. Full programme of the II Forum here: https://sites.google.com/view/novationforum/home-en-us?authuser=0
The digital transformation of education is significantly reshaping human resource management (HRM) practices in both public and private educational organizations. This paper examines how digital technologies are influencing HRM in the education sector, emphasizing the need for schools to align with evolving technological trends. Driven by the growing role of digitalization in education, the research offers a comparative analysis of public and private schools, exploring how each is navigating digital change and managing HR practices. It begins by outlining the theoretical foundations of HRM in education, then assesses how educational organisations are incorporating new technologies into recruitment, staff development, performance evaluation, and internal communication. The study highlights both the opportunities and challenges that digitalization presents for HRM, providing insight into the similarities and differences between 2 pilot schools (one public and one private) in their adaptation strategies. Through its in-depth analysis, the paper enhances the understanding of how digitalization is driving structural and organizational changes in HRM in the educational system.
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In recent years, innovation policy has increasingly turned to creativity as a resource for economic revitalization, social cohesion and sustainability transitions. In urban redevelopment, creative districts blend innovation logics of a “creative class” and “transformative innovation” with experimental urban governance to address grand challenges and enable broader societal transformation. Building on critiques of the idea that innovation and creativity function as “magic bullets” in the contemporary economy (Pratt & Jeffcutt, 2009), we explore the limits of this transformative promise in this article. Our analysis is grounded in ethnographic fieldwork across four creative district projects in Munich, Germany, where normative visions of creativity and innovation are rendered legitimate and governable. Through the conceptual lens of regional innovation cultures
(Pfotenhauer et al., 2023), we examine how the creativity-innovation-nexus is locally stabilized and tamed through distinct cultivation mechanisms, summarized as curation, compliance, and consolidation, that reinscribe existing socio-political settlements and market-driven valuation logics of the common good. Paradoxically, Munich’s creative districts foster a form of conservative creative innovation that constrains the transformative potential of creative innovation by reproducing hegemonic power structures and marginalizing alternative visions of conviviality (Robra et al., 2023). We argue that creative districts—and similar initiatives—risk undermining their potential as open, experimental spaces for radical transformation when they prioritize innovation’s productive role over creativity’s more politically contested and disruptive capacities.
The application of artificial intelligence (AI) in industry is accelerating the shift from traditional automation to intelligent systems with perception and cognition. Vision language-action (VLA) models have been a key paradigm in AI to unify perception, reasoning, and control. Has the performance of the VLA models met the industrial requirements? In this paper, from the perspective of industrial deployment, we compare the performance of existing state-of-the-art VLA models in industrial scenarios and analyze the limitations of VLA models for real-world industrial deployment from the perspectives of data collection and model architecture. The results show that the VLA models retain their ability to perform simple grasping tasks even in industrial settings after fine-tuning. However, there is much room for performance improvement in complex industrial environments, diverse object categories, and high precision placing tasks. Our findings provide practical insight into the adaptability of VLA models for industrial use and highlight the need for task-specific enhancements to improve their robustness, generalization, and precision.
Differentially private (DP) machine learning often relies on the availability of public data for tasks like privacy-utility trade-off estimation, hyperparameter tuning, and pretraining. While public data assumptions may be reasonable in text and image domains, they are less likely to hold for tabular data due to tabular data heterogeneity across domains. We propose leveraging powerful priors to address this limitation; specifically, we synthesize realistic tabular data directly from schema-level specifications - such as variable names, types, and permissible ranges - without ever accessing sensitive records. To that end, this work introduces the notion of "surrogate" public data - datasets generated independently of sensitive data, which consume no privacy loss budget and are constructed solely from publicly available schema or metadata. Surrogate public data are intended to encode plausible statistical assumptions (informed by publicly available information) into a dataset with many downstream uses in private mechanisms. We automate the process of generating surrogate public data with large language models (LLMs); in particular, we propose two methods: direct record generation as CSV files, and automated structural causal model (SCM) construction for sampling records. Through extensive experiments, we demonstrate that surrogate public tabular data can effectively replace traditional public data when pretraining differentially private tabular classifiers. To a lesser extent, surrogate public data are also useful for hyperparameter tuning of DP synthetic data generators, and for estimating the privacy-utility tradeoff.
This paper analyzes the strategic interactions between a profit-maximizing monopolist and a free, capacity-constrained public option. By restricting its own supply, the monopolist intentionally congests the public option and induces rationing, which increases consumers' willingness to pay for guaranteed access. Counterintuitively, expanding the public option's capacity may raise the monopoly price and lower consumer welfare. However, I derive conditions under which all buyer types benefit from a capacity expansion, and extend these results to a setting where an oligopoly competes with a public option. These findings have implications for mixed public-private markets, such as housing, education, and healthcare.
Personal comment on the responses to “Towards a New Ethos of Science or a Reform of the Institution of Science? Merton Revisited and the Prospects of Institutionalizing the Research Values of Openness and Mutual Responsiveness” by René von Schomberg.
Gig work is increasing across all industries and sectors all over world after pandemic. In Mumbai, the gig workers of food and beverage industry are more as compared to other municipal corporations in Mumbai Metropolitan Region. The Ambernath municipal council has more gig workers as compared to Matheran Municipal Council. Rural parts of Vasai have less gig workers but Ambernath and Kalyan rural has more gig workers. Employment generated by the wholesale and retail trade, restaurant and hotel were more during 1990 ‘s in Mumbai city. But currently, this industry is growing very slow in terms of employment as compared to other industries and employment. The ordinary least square regression shows that gig workers of food and beverage industry are positively correlated to all municipal corporations in Mumbai Metropolitan Region but negatively correlated to Thane and Panvel rural area. Sewage and water supply is positively co-related to gig workers in Vasai Virar municipal corporation. Most of units in food and beverage unis are small and do not provide employment throughout year. The social security is not provided to most of the gig workers. Hygiene, regular pay scales, normal work hours, training is not provided to gig workers. Central and State government must draft rules and regulation for this sector with strict guidelines. It will improve the current economic status of gig workers and work environment in this industry.
Public relations. Industrial publicity, Political institutions and public administration (General)
As Artificial Intelligence (AI) increasingly influences various aspects of society, there is growing public interest in its potential benefits and risks. In this paper we present results of public perception of AI from a survey conducted with 10,000 respondents spanning ten countries in four continents around the world. The results show that currently an equal percentage of respondents who believe AI will change the world as we know it, also believe AI needs to be heavily regulated. However, our findings also indicate that despite the general sentiment among the global public that AI will replace workers, if a company were to use AI to innovate to improve lives, the public would be more likely to think highly of the company, purchase from them and even be interested in a job in that company. Our results further reveal that the global public largely views AI as a tool for problem solving. These nuanced results underscore the importance of AI directed towards challenges that the public would like science and technology-based innovations to address. We draw on a multi-year 3M study of public perception of science to provide further context on what the public perceives as important problems to be solved.
We study situations where a group of voters need to take a collective decision over a number of public issues, with the goal of getting a result that reflects the voters' opinions in a proportional manner. Our focus is on interconnected public decisions, where the outcome on one or more issues has repercussions on the acceptance or rejection of other issues in the agenda. We show that the adaptation of classical justified-representation axioms to this enriched setting are always satisfiable only for restricted classes of public agendas. We adapt well-known proportional decision rules to take the structure of the public agenda into account, and we show that they match justified-representation properties in approximation on a class of expressive constraints. We also identify another path to achieving proportionality on interconnected issues via an adaptation of the notion of priceability.
The article discusses the place and importance of social control in the public service system. According to the authors, social control in the public service system depends on the transparency, publicity of the public service provided, and the high qualification of a civil servant. The article proves that indicators of information openness, social stability, and social balance determine the effectiveness of social control. The authors of the article suggested that to increase the prestige of social power in the public service system, it is necessary to work in the following areas: continuous improvement of norms and values that determine civic consciousness; use of information technologies to promote public service; strengthening public relations channels of the state and control over political processes.
Innovation heuristics offer guidance on how to navigate through the complex dynamics of innovation governance. However, further discussion is needed on the premises of such analytical tools to inquire on their implications on innovation policy and practice. This paper builds on the innovation policy dance metaphor to better grasp the ever-changing interplays (or dance) between innovation practice (I), policy (P) and theory (T). We critically assess the basic underlying assumptions of this metaphor, by examining the extent to which its heuristic pretensions are relevant in the Latin American context. To do so, we explore three illustrative cases in Colombia, shedding light on some crosscutting opportunities and gaps for the dancing metaphor across different innovation I-P-T situations. Some derived lessons suggest that dancing occurs within and/or between different governance levels, where variables such as politics shape the innovation I-P-T interplay and time defines first and second order learning pathways.
Nurgül Özbek, Linus Johansson Krafve, Hans Kjellberg
et al.
This article critically analyzes public procurement of innovation (PPI) as an instance of using markets or market-like aspects as a means to resolve public concerns. It reports findings from a case of procuring radiation therapy equipment for a university hospital in Stockholm, Sweden. By extending a line of literature built on economic sociology as well as science and technology studies (STS), the study elaborates on public actors’ efforts in framing markets to promote innovation. The case illustrates how the participating actors constructed the notion of innovativeness to be introduced into health care as means of addressing various public concerns. It also reveals the intended—and unintended—consequences of PPI as manifested in various actors’ claims on the value of PPI realized in practice. The study suggests that it is extremely difficult to frame a market for the realization of innovation via procurement as a policy instrument because we cannot predict the ultimate impacts of devices and practices employed in such initiatives. By formulating a practice-based critique of PPI, our study invites important questions about the potentiality of such instruments for governing innovation without delimiting their consequences to the success-or-failure dichotomy as prescribed in predefined tools and strategies.
An organisational entity (non-governmental organisation, company, public institution or authority) should not be seen socially responsible if its staff is not satisfied and motivated. However, despite many publications of social responsibility in the literature, papers focusing on the social responsibility of the organisation towards employees are rare. The following article aims to analyse the social responsibility of an atypical NGO towards its employees. In this regard, a survey conducted by using one questionnaire was used. The analysis is based on several aspects of the organisations’s social responsibility towards employees, namely recruitment and employees’ retention, employees' health and safety, effects generated by the employees’ satisfaction and dissatisfaction, reward system. The study revealed that the workplace atmosphere, the organisation’s concern towards the employees' problems, as well as the reward for their efforts leads to the increasing their loyalty and to achieving high performances.
Public relations. Industrial publicity, Political institutions and public administration (General)