Ideas or Interests: Privacy in Electronic Communications

This article examines why the idea of privacy failed to structure policymaking in the case of the Electronic Communications Privacy Act (ECPA). Although the relatively quick passage of ECPA might appear to be a case of the politics of ideas, the model of interest group politics more simply explains policy making. The analysis of this case suggests several factors as important in establishing the conditions under which a politics of ideas will be realized.     

Making screen production work at the margins: path-dependent development in Brisbane and the Gold Coast

While screen production is notoriously centralised, it is still found outside major media cities where the central problem for actors in these subordinate media cities is how to create sustainable levels of screen production capabilities in circumstances of increasing centralisation and globalisation in media production and its design. This article discusses how the screen production sectors of two subordinate media cities, Brisbane and the Gold Coast, are organised. Each city represents a different pathway for the sustainability of a media sector. The Gold Coast is a production location for globally and nationally dispersed high-budget feature film and TV drama production; while Brisbane is mostly a ‘national production’ location for domestically oriented news, documentary, infotainment and sports programming with a focus on lower budgeted feature filmmaking and occasionally, television drama. These different city pathways are the product of the creative resources and infrastructure evident in each city.     

Experimental characterization of the constitutive materials composing an old masonry vaulted tunnel of the Paris subway system

A significant proportion of the Paris metro tunnels comprise a masonry vault built out of stone blocks and mortar joints, and sidewalls and slabs made of unreinforced concrete. In order to provide the necessary data for future structural evaluation, an extensive laboratory testing programme has been conducted to characterize the materials of the tunnel separately, i.e., mortar, stone, and concrete. The tests, carried out on specimens taken from cores extracted from a 1930s tunnel, enabled to determine the mechanical properties, including direct tensile, shear strength, and mode I fracture energy, as well as the properties of the stone-mortar interface. Results show that the masonry mortar joints could reach 10 cm in width, and that blocks of stone varied in composition and porosity, thus producing a wide range of mechanical properties. The concrete was composed of large-sized aggregates and showed low stiffness and strength. Based on these experimental results, ratios between mechanical characteristics are hereby proposed. Perspectives on the use of this experimental data in a finite element model are then discussed.     

The Role of Personal Factors in the Location Decision of Software Services Start-up Firms

This paper explores the factors which influence the business location decisions of start-ups, focusing in particular on the role of personal factors. Established explanations of industry location emphasize proximity to firms in the same or related industries and proximity to a wider set of business services, though recent research suggests that personal factors may play an important role in explanations of industry location—particularly in technology-enabled sectors. A survey of 97 new firms, founded between 2008 and 2012, in the Irish software services sector, shows that the business location decision is influenced by the personal motivation of entrepreneurs to attain a desired quality of life, and that this outweighs economic factors such as proximity to firms within the same or related industries, proximity to a broader set of supporting business services, infrastructure or the availability of government support schemes. Personal factors are particularly important to firms located outside the Dublin metropolitan area and to home-based businesses. This has important policy implications for national and regional governments seeking to encourage entrepreneurship in technology-enabled service sectors.     

Inherited competence and spin-off performance

In this paper we extend the hereditary theory of spin-off formation, developed by Klepper, by relating the concept of inherited competence to two different types of spin-offs—university and private sector spin-offs—and two different types of inherited competence—R&D competence and innovation competence. We then utilize this extension of Klepper's framework to study the evolution of a science-based industry—the biotech industry. Using the Irish biotech industry as a case-study, we find that differences in pre-entry experience manifest themselves most markedly in terms of the firm's capacity to attract venture capital, with private sector spin-offs considerably outperforming university spin-offs. We argue that the superior performance of the private sector spin-offs is explained by the nature of their inherited competence in that they are characterized by higher levels of innovation competence.