Public Policy and Emerging Sources of Technology and Technical Information Available to Industry

As technologies grow in complexity, firms often target their internal R&D resources on core competencies and utilize outside sources for supporting knowledge and technology. Where do firms turn to find such resources? This paper reports the perceptions of technology transfer managers in United States manufacturing firms toward federal and university labs and identifies the types of farms that are better positioned to utilize externally available technological resources. Based on replies from research-intensive companies within the United States, the authors find that larger firms with high research and development (R&D) budgets tend to ascribe greater significance to external sources than do smaller ones. Also, companies spending over $500 million in R&D rank universities the most significant external source of knowledge, followed by V S.-based firms, and then foreign firms.     

Policy Gridlock in Waste Management

Current federal hazardous and low-level radioactive waste management policies (under conjoint federalism) fail to balance national concerns for consistency with state concerns for equity, discretion, and adequate resources. Congress should expand conjoint federalism to permit states to charge differential fees on imported hazardous waste as it does for low-level radioactive waste. For low-level radioactive waste, clarification of the "take title" issue makes the present framework for state discretion implementable, given sufficient time.     

IMAGINING SAFE URBAN SPACE: THE CONTRIBUTION OF DETECTIVE FICTION TO RADICAL GEOGRAPHY

Radical geographers often discuss how contemporary urban space is becoming increasingly violent and dangerous. They pay much less attention to the question of how to make this space safe. In contrast, detective fiction focuses precisely on how to take danger out of the city. It therefore provides radical geographers with imaginative models of how different levels of space are linked through forms of violence. Detective fiction challenges accounts of the urban spatialization of power that over-simplify relations between city inhabitants as a clash between “oppressor” and “oppressed.” By suggesting how a subject can simultaneously oppress through and be oppressed by volence, detective fiction shows the contradictory multiplicity of people's spatial identifications.