Forecast: Slowing Economy Dampens Research and Development Spending

Total funding for research and development (R&D) is expected to increase just 3.3 percent in 2008 from the $355 billion funded in 2007 to the $367 billion expected to be funded in 2008, according to the annual Battelle R&D Magazine forecast.

The generally sluggish movement of R&D funding and performance continues the enterprise's pattern of small year-to-year changes. The dampening of overall spending on R&D can be attributed to some developing
trends including:

-- Restructuring of the major corporate R&D approaches in industry
-- Significant growth of the practice of off-shore out-sourcing of R&D
-- Shift in federal government priorities as a result of world events
-- Growth of the federal deficit.

"There is little doubt that there are some basic problems facing the U.S. research environment, not the least of which include consideration of energy, environment, and the economy," says Battelle senior researcher and
study co-author Jules Duga. "And to a degree not seen in recent years, the average person on the
street is calling for long-term relief from high energy costs, improved (but non-intrusive) security, and resolution of environmental problems."


Funding By Sector

-- The federal government is expected to spend $25.2 billion funding R&D efforts in 2008, a 1.16 percent increase over the $24.9 billion spent in 2007
-- Industrial investments in R&D are expected to reach $258.7 billion in 2008, an increase of 3.4 percent over 2007 levels of $250.3 billion
-- Academia and other non-profits are expected to expend $70.5 billion on R&D in 2008. Academia is forecasted to increase by 5.3 percent from $51.9 billion in 2007 to $54.6 billion in 2008. Non-profit expenditures on
R&D are expected to increase by 4.3 percent from $15.3 billion in 2007 to $16 billion in 2008
-- Federally Funded Research & Development Centers (FFRDC) is a new category to the annual R&D Forecast. The 36 centers are established by various government agencies and are designed to carry out special long-term
research programs on behalf of their parent agencies. Funding for 2007 was $12.7 billion which is expected to drop by 2.3 percent to $12.4 percent in 2008.

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Children's Ability to Describe Past Event Develops Over Time

In the first study to examine how children talk about the time-related features of their experiences--when, how often, in what order events occur--researchers have found intriguing changes as children grow older. The study’s findings may have implications for understanding these aspects of cognitive development as well as for questioning child witnesses and victims.
The study was conducted by researchers at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development and the University of Cambridge. It appears in the July/August 2007 issue of the journal Child Development.

The researchers analyzed forensic interviews of 250 four- to 10-year-old children who were alleged victims of sexual abuse, focusing on the kinds of references to time they made when describing these real-life events.

The children made increasing numbers of references to time-related characteristics of experienced events as they grew older, the researchers found. However, witnesses under 10 seldom mentioned specific times or dates, or what happened before reported events or actions. There were dramatic increases to such references at the age of 10.

References to the sequence of events or parts of events were most common, and their increase with age may be related to children’s developing capability to elaborate. Children were more likely to mention time spontaneously when asked to recall what happened than when they were asked specific recognition questions. This is pertinent because information retrieved from memory by recall is much more likely to be accurate than information retrieved in response to questions that ask children to select among options offered by the interviewer (such as “Did he …"” or “Was it x or y"”).

The children remembered the times of past events by making references to clock times, events that occurred in the same time frame, or the calendar, the researchers found. While older children were capable of using both short- and long-scale time patterns (such as time of day and day of the month), younger children mostly referred to short-scale time patterns (such as time of day), or they anchored the events to familiar activities (such as “when I returned from school”).

These findings have important implications for forensic interviews, where the ability to provide information about the number of incidents, the time of occurrences, and the sequence of events may allow suspected victims and witnesses to define specific episodes of allegedly experienced crimes. This ability increases children’s competence as witnesses and the prospect that their cases will be pursued in the criminal justice system. In addition, awareness that children acquire some temporal skills late in their development may discourage attempts to discredit child witnesses when they fail to provide the requested time-related information.

“By helping forensic interviewers to recognize children’s capabilities and limitations, our findings may also encourage interviewers to seek essential temporal information using age-appropriate techniques,” according to Yael Orbach, staff scientist at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) and the study’s lead author.

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Company Commercializes Caltech Tech To Improve Security

A company that commercializes technologies from NASA and the US Department of Defense, announced that the company has made significant strides leveraging so-called "SHINE" expert system technology licensed from Caltech to pursue major opportunities in the commercial, defense, and homeland security sectors.

To penetrate the growing market formaritime container screening, port security, automated threat detection, real-time sensor fusion and embedded diagnostics/prognostics applications, VIASPACE Security says it is identifying and developing relationships with potential new customers, adding staff and resources to its SHINE-based development efforts, executing on its contract with L-3 Communications forthe US Department of Homeland Security's Advanced Container Security Device project, and teaming with Raytheon Company's Network Centric Systems on security and surveillance applications.

VIASPACE has an exclusive license from Caltech to commercialize SHINE technology for most major applications including container security, diagnostics/prognostics, sensor fusion and homeland defense. SHINE is areal-time inference engine and software platform originally developed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory for space flight operations, and is used in several NASA applications including the Mars Exploration Rover and Spacecraft Health Automatic Reasoning Pilot (SHARP) program.

Security Inc. is leveraging the technology along with its own development efforts to deliver high performance, real-time inference andsensor data fusion-based technologies, products and services. Sensor fusion combines large volumes of data, observations, and inferences derived frommultiple sources and sensors to generate reliable decision-supportinformation in critical applications where speed, accuracy and ease of deployment are crucial, the company says.


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