Research and development

Summary

Research and development (R&D or R+D; known in Europe as research and technological development or RTD), is the set of innovative activities undertaken by corporations or governments in developing new services or products, and improving existing ones. Research and development constitutes the first stage of development of a potential new service or the production process. R&D activities differ from institution to institution, with two primary models of an R&D department either staffed by engineers and tasked with directly developing new products, or staffed with industrial scientists and tasked with applied research in scientific or technological fields, which may facilitate future product development. R&D differs from the vast majority of corporate activities in that it is not intended to yield immediate profit, and generally carries greater risk and an uncertain return on investment. However R&D is crucial for acquiring larger shares of the market through

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_and_development

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Predictive Hydrology: A Frequency Analysis Approach

Anne-Catherine Favre

The unusual frequency of hydro-meteorological events in recent decades, often with catastrophic consequences for society and the environment, require new methods for designing water management projects and the structures meant to protect us from natural hazards. These methods and techniques are often based on the statistical modeling techniques of frequency analysis. Predictive Hydrology: A Frequency Analysis Approach is the first book to address both the theoretical concepts and the methodological approaches used in frequency hydrology—spelling out the fundamental methods to consider, providing concise instruction on the techniques that are involved, and including examples and critiques based on practical applications. It explores some of the recent research developments in the field. Published originally in French, this English translation targets students in civil engineering, environmental sciences and technology, hydrology, geography, geology and ecology. This book will also serve as a useful reference not only for teachers and researchers, but for engineering practitioners, who are constantly faced with the problems of handling data, but often find themselves without the appropriate analytical tools.

Science Publishers, CRC Press2012

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In the coming decades, the threat and consequences of climate change and of the reconcentration of crude oil production in the Near East will compel industrialised nations to make much more efficient use of energy. R&D that helps realise energy efficiency potentials is likely to be regarded as important in scientific, entrepreneurial, and political realms. Demand for highly energy-efficient technologies will rise steeply, and firms that can provide them will prosper. The identification of energy-efficient technologies and related energy conservation potentials undertaken in this pre-study is a first step toward designing a R&D strategy that is consistent with the need to evolve towards a 2000 Watt per capita society. Reaching this level by 2050 implies reducing primary energy use from 1200 to 460 PJ per year, despite a projected 65% economic expansion..............................

2002

Background: The discovery of the CRISPR-Cas9-based gene editing method has opened unprecedented new potential for biological and medical engineering, sparking a growing public debate on both the potential and dangers of CRISPR applications. Given the speed of technology development and the almost instantaneous global spread of news, it is important to follow evolving debates without much delay and in sufficient detail, as certain events may have a major long-term impact on public opinion and later influence policy decisions. Objective: Social media networks such as Twitter have shown to be major drivers of news dissemination and public discourse. They provide a vast amount of semistructured data in almost real-time and give direct access to the content of the conversations. We can now mine and analyze such data quickly because of recent developments in machine learning and natural language processing. Methods: Here, we used Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), an attention-based transformer model, in combination with statistical methods to analyze the entirety of all tweets ever published on CRISPR since the publication of the first gene editing application in 2013. Results: We show that the mean sentiment of tweets was initially very positive, but began to decrease over time, and that this decline was driven by rare peaks of strong negative sentiments. Due to the high temporal resolution of the data, we were able to associate these peaks with specific events and to observe how trending topics changed over time. Conclusions: Overall, this type of analysis can provide valuable and complementary insights into ongoing public debates, extending the traditional empirical bioethics toolset.

JMIR PUBLICATIONS, INC2020