The long-awaited policy seeks to sustain rapid economic growth of 9% while tackling the threat of climate change, but stops short of setting targets for reducing emissions

In a memorandum of understanding that was signed today, the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation agreed to work cooperatively to support social-science research on topics of interest to the Pentagon.

As widely expected, the NSF has agreed to help review proposals submitted to the Pentagon’s Minerva Research Initiative, a fledgling program that will offer grants to university-based scholars to study the Chinese military, the records of Saddam Hussein’s regime, and other specific topics.

The two agencies will soon — possibly within a week — release a joint request for Minerva-related proposals. Those proposals will be judged by the NSF’s typical merit-review panels, though both the science foundation and the Pentagon will have the right to nominate experts to serve on those panels. (The Pentagon is also accepting Minerva proposals through a separate pathway known as a broad agency announcement. Proposals that are submitted via this second track will reviewed through the Defense Department’s usual processes, not by NSF panels.)

But today’s agreement is broader than Minerva: It also creates a mechanism through which the Department of Defense can help to finance other national-security-related proposals submitted to the NSF. In such cases, scholars will have the option to decline the Pentagon’s money.

“We’re delighted,” said David W. Lightfoot, the NSF’s assistant director for social, behavioral, and economic sciences, in an interview. “We’ve always been concerned to do research that helps to secure the national defense. That’s part of the NSF’s charter. This new agreement will allow the Department of Defense to help us to do more of that kind of work, subject to the usual NSF merit-review process.”

Mark L. Weiss, the NSF’s division director for behavioral and cognitive sciences, said that Minerva projects would meet the agency’s usual standards of transparency. “All of the work that we will be supporting will be unclassified,” he said. “And there will be no constraints at all on the researchers’ freedom to publish results.”

Some scholars have expressed deep skepticism about the Minerva initiative. In an essay published last week, David H. Price, an associate professor of anthropology and sociology at St. Martin’s University, warned that military-financed social science would crowd out other forms of academic inquiry. (This week’s Chronicle Review contains a selection of opinions on Minerva.) —David Glenn

Wharton's admissions office may be in transition, but it's not missing a beat when it comes to the 2009 application. It posted the 2009 ...

Former Australian foreign minister Alexander Downer confirmed he will become United Nations special envoy to the Cyprus peace process, quitting domestic politics this week

Manufacturing businesses in the eurozone produced less in June than the month before, the first time in three years manufacturing activity has contracted in the 15-nation currency block and a sure sign that economic growth is slowing

The western countries' energy watchdog warned that oil production is set to tighten over the next five years leaving consumers facing higher prices as demand remains relatively strong

A former trustee of Monroe Community College, Lori A. Van Dusen, describes a politically tainted Board of Trustees in her recent resignation letter. Ms. Van Dusen’s departure followed widespread anger over a failed presidential search at the college, in Rochester, N.Y., including complaints from elected officials and overwhelming votes of no confidence in the trustees taken by students and faculty members.

The presidential search ended in a deadlock last month. The board, whose 10 members belong to the Republican or Conservative Parties, unilaterally added two Republican candidates to the list of finalists vetted by two search committees. The board was then split on the two late additions.

Ms. Van Dusen questioned the integrity of a new search process and whether the next president would be protected from “political self-interests,” according to the resignation letter, which was obtained by the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle.

Five members of the board are appointed by the county legislature, four are selected by New York’s governor, and one is a student. The newspaper reported that trustees on Monday had hired Larry W. Tyree, a former community-college president, to lead the college until a full-time replacement is found. —Paul Fain

Saad Eskander, director of the Iraqi National Library and Archive, is still waging his public battle to wrest control back from a private foundation of key records taken from Iraq after the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, according to today’s New York Times.

In February, The Chronicle broke the news that about seven million pages of records on Iraq’s Baath Party held by the Iraq Memory Foundation would be transferred to the Hoover Institution, the conservative think tank and library affiliated with Stanford University. The deal between the foundation, which was founded by Kanan Makiya, an Iraq-born professor of Middle East studies at Brandeis University, and the institution followed a bitter and public dispute between Mr. Makiya and Mr. Eskander over the provenance of the records and the propriety of their possession by a private group.

The seven million documents in question are a subset of 100 million documents seized by the U.S. government after the downfall of Saddam Hussein, Iraq’s Baathist leader, in the wake of the invasion. Mr. Makiya asserts that he had permission from the U.S.-led coalition forces to remove those files from a series of basement rooms in Baghdad after the invasion, and that he now has legal authority from Iraq’s government to collect and possess them until the country is stabilized.

But Mr. Eskander believes that the records properly belong in his national library, and he has sent an open letter to the Hoover Institution demanding their immediate return to Iraq.

“The Baath documents are the property of the Iraqis and the institutions that represent them,” writes Mr. Eskander, “and so it is arrogant and unethical for one person (an émigré) to decide the destiny of millions of sensitive official documents that have had and will continue to have considerable impact on the private lives of millions of Iraqi citizens.” —Richard Byrne

Hanoi, Vietnam — Vietnam has created nearly 100 universities in the past three years, yet the number of lecturers has increased only negligibly, VietNamNet Bridge, a state-controlled English-language news service, reported today.

Vietnam’s deputy minister of education and training, Banh Tien Long, said the shortage of professors means that the universities can function at only 60 percent of capacity, a situation that has affected the quality of education.

Vietnam, where two-thirds of the population is under the age of 30, is struggling to cope with a growing demand for higher education. In 2003, the last year for which official statistics were available, Vietnam had 111 universities and 119 colleges. Last year alone, according to the state-run news media, 40 universities were added.

But with faculty salaries averaging around $150 per month, there is little incentive for college graduates to go into teaching. Universities increasingly use moonlighting lecturers from other institutions to teach their classes.

This year, the Ministry of Education and Training started a program to produce 20,000 Ph.D.’s by 2020. Because Vietnam has a limited capacity to produce graduate students, the government will send half of that number abroad for training.

But Pham Phu, a professor and education activist at Ho Chi Minh City National University, said this month that such efforts would not yield a sufficient number of lecturers to staff all of the new universities. —Martha Ann Overland

California’s oversight of for-profit colleges expired on Monday as a state law expired while state legislators battled over how to regulate the industry, which enrolls 400,000 students a year there.

Without state oversight, the students lack recourse if the proprietary colleges go out of business. The Bureau for Private Postsecondary and Vocational Education also went out of business last year, when lawmakers failed to reach agreement over renewing regulations that established it. A new law in 2007 subsequently re-established it.

Republicans in the Legislature rejected a bill on Monday that would have replaced the oversight law, which expired at midnight, the Los Angeles Times reported. The new bill would have offered protections for the students, including a state-run reimbursement fund. In exchange, the bill would have relaxed rules for the colleges, including dropping a requirement that 70 percent of their graduates must be placed in jobs.

Critics said the bill would have preserved too much red tape. “Certainly we need to protect students, but we also have to be mindful of the viability of the institutions,” an assemblyman, Roger Niello, told the Times.

The debate over regulating for-profit colleges has a long history in California, with consumer advocates arguing for stronger protection for students and better reporting of job-placement data. The colleges, meanwhile, have argued that bureaucracy and overregulation have hampered their efforts to expand in the state. —Kate Moser

ExxonMobil, the world's biggest listed integrated energy group blamed the government of Kazakhstan for delaying the development of Kashagan, the world's biggest new oilfield

Gerhard R. Andlinger, an investment manager, has pledged $100-million to Princeton University, in large part to stimulate research and education on efforts to prevent global warming.

Princeton’s School of Engineering and Applied Science plans to use $70-million of the gift to create a center for the study of energy and the environment. The remainder will go toward engineering-research laboratories, hiring four new faculty members, and an endowment to finance research in areas too new to qualify for federal support.

A portion of the money will also support a program to bring industry experts, policy makers, scientists, engineers, and scholars together to study and work on energy and environmental issues.

Shirley M. Tilghman, Princeton’s president, said the university hoped the new center would enable researchers to use their discoveries to help scientists and engineers create better ways to manage carbon-dioxide emissions and create new types of alternative energies.

“We also hope to educate the next generation of scientists, engineers, and policy makers, who will take out of Princeton a deep sensitivity to global warming, and educate citizens,” said Ms. Tilghman.

Mr. Andlinger, who is 77 and a Princeton graduate, is the founder and chairman of Andlinger & Company, an international investment and management firm in Tarrytown, N.Y. He was born in Austria and came to the United States in 1948, when he won an essay-writing contest sponsored by the New York Herald Tribune. He has previously donated $27-million to the university. —Maria Di Mento

A report on state finances being released today delivers another round of bad news about budget conditions, signaling that more spending cuts could lie ahead for higher education and other state programs.

State tax collections are at their weakest in five years, according to the report, by the State University of New York’s Nelson A. Rockefeller Institute of Government.

Over all, tax revenues increased by only 1.7 percent during the first quarter of this year, compared with the same period a year ago, the report says, marking the slowest growth rate since 2003. During that same period, for the first time in six years, sales taxes (a key revenue source) showed no growth from the year before, the report says.

Today’s report follows the release last month of a similarly gloomy report by the National Governors Association and the National Association of State Budget Officers. Those groups found that overall growth in state spending had slowed significantly across the nation and that an increasing number of states faced revenue shortfalls.

Tighter state budgets often signal bad news for college officials and students, who face cuts in operating budgets and increases in tuition as legislatures struggle to make ends meet. —Sara Hebel

Disunity and recrimination marked the start of France's European Union presidency as Nicolas Sarkozy exchanged accusations with the European Commission over world trade talks

Turkish police have detained two retired generals hours ahead of the first hearing in a case against the ruling AK Party

Global investment in renewable energy surged 60 per cent to $148 billion (74.3
billion) last year and is still accelerating despite the slowdown in the
wider economy, according to the United Nations.$

Commendations go to several readers who, even if not coming up with the best word, identified key features of our current crisis, writes John Kay

Inflation is accelerating in Asia, raising the likelihood that central banks will have to increase interest rates in spite of rising fears of slowing growth

The aim of this year's report by the Bank for International Settlements is clear: it is to reduce the frequency and severity of crises. It is not enough to say that we can clear up afterwards. That is too complacent and too one-sided, writes Martin Wolf

Iceland's 'great unwind' is the result of excesses built up in a framework of light regulation following hasty privatisation, writes Robert Wade

An impression across Europe – not least among the young – is that the EU is in danger of offering pseudo-democracy, writes Larry Siedentop

If you want to get a British entrepreneur worked up, one topic is bound to raise their temperature to boiling point: the clearing banks' behaviour, writes Luke Johnson

ACT Inc. and the College Board have released updated concordance tables — estimates of how students of comparable abilities would score on the ACT and SAT examinations.

For instance, a composite score of 33 (out a of possible 36) on the ACT corresponds to a combined score of 1440 to 1480 (out of a possible 1600) on the SAT’s critical-reading and mathematics sections.

The tables, released on Tuesday, are based on a joint study of more than 300,000 high-school students who took both tests from 2004 to 2006. ACT Inc. and the College Board plan to release a report on the concordance study later this year. —Eric Hoover

An online game developer, Giant Interactive was founded just four years ago. Since then, Shi Yuzhu has parlayed the success of its first game, ZT Online, into an $887m initial public offering on Nasdaq

Angad Paul, chief executive of Caparo, is trying to inject innovation into the family-owned group founded 40 years ago by Lord Paul, his father

The prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran is the biggest threat facing the world, according to one of Barack Obama's senior foreign policy advisers

The rise in food and oil prices could 'severely weaken' the economies of up to 75 developing countries, including Pakistan and Indonesia, the International Monetary Fund said

Institute of International Education, US Study Abroad White Paper Series

(252 KB) Study Abroad White Paper, Issue 2:

Exploring Host Country Capacity for Increasing U.S. Study Abroad

The May 2008 IIE White Paper represents the second publication of the study abroad policy research series on Meeting America's Global Education Challenge.
This new report highlights research and findings from a fall 2007
snapshot survey of over 500 host institutions abroad, and on the
efforts made by these institutions to increase their host capacity for
larger numbers of U.S. students. It also analyzes the challenges these
institutions face as well as their motivations and strategic plans to
undertake efforts toward internationalization. The report aims to
provide policy makers and international education administrators with
focused data on how host institutions and countries perceive greatly
expanding U.S. study abroad participation.

Institute of International Education, US Study Abroad White Paper Series

(252 KB) Study Abroad White Paper, Issue 2:

Exploring Host Country Capacity for Increasing U.S. Study Abroad

The May 2008 IIE White Paper represents the second publication of the study abroad policy research series on Meeting America's Global Education Challenge.
This new report highlights research and findings from a fall 2007
snapshot survey of over 500 host institutions abroad, and on the
efforts made by these institutions to increase their host capacity for
larger numbers of U.S. students. It also analyzes the challenges these
institutions face as well as their motivations and strategic plans to
undertake efforts toward internationalization. The report aims to
provide policy makers and international education administrators with
focused data on how host institutions and countries perceive greatly
expanding U.S. study abroad participation.

Chinese security forces are pressing parents to abandon demands for a full investigation into why so many schools collapsed in the May earthquake in Sichuan

Chinese security forces are pressing parents to abandon demands for a full investigation into why so many schools collapsed in the May earthquake in Sichuan

Small shareholders in Northgate, the largest van rental operator in the UK and
Spain, must look back ruefully at the £12 a share offer tabled by private
equity two years ago and subsequently withdrawn after the biggest
institutional investors held out for more. Since then the shares have fallen
more than 70 per cent.

British banks may not be too hot at managing risk, but they are brilliant at
managing ministers.

The US Government moved a step closer yesterday to ripping off the veil of
secrecy that for centuries has protected the identity of UBS clients as a
federal court took the unprecedented step of demanding that the Swiss bank
hand over the names of as many as 20,000 of its customers.

Moody's Investors Service has ousted the head of a key division and pledged to
discipline other staff after an investigation concluded that staff at the
credit agency knowingly rated about $1 billion of securities incorrectly.$

The battered stock market was on the brink of sliding into a new bear market
last night as mounting fears of stagflation, sparked by another spate of
bleak economic news, sent blue- chip shares plunging once more.

Suddenly, it is not the customer who matters; it is the supplier. The stuff
that arrives at the factory loading bay is now expensive; shortages and
logistical logjams are playing havoc and the company that sells you a vital
commodity is digging in its heels, refusing to renew a long-term contract
without a big price increase.

Lord Harris of Peckham, the founder and chairman of Carpetright, fears that
the high street is facing one of its toughest years for half a century, in
the bleakest warning yet about the fallout from the credit crunch.

Alistair Darling confirmed yesterday plans to increase the guarantee on
depositors' savings to £50,000 if their bank fails, but said that the bill
would be met initially by taxpayers, not by the industry.

Companies are calling for a law to allow them to set up charitable foundations independent from the government, a move that could open up space for civil society in Beijing

The comments by a senior Chinese official underscore Beijing's resistance to imposing international sanctions on Zimbabwe in response to its alleged violations of human rights

Indirect deals made by British companies through Mauritius, the British Virgin Islands and Cyprus push investments to more than £8bn, outstripping those from the US

An indictment returned today by a Massachusetts grand jury accuses two former Tufts University administrators of separately stealing from student-activity funds, wrongfully obtaining a total of nearly $1-million, and spending the money on such items as luxury and designer goods, resort vacations, and tickets to concerts by Madonna and Celine Dion.

A news release from the Middlesex district attorney identifies the accused employees as Josephine Nealley, who was director of the university’s Office of Student Activities from 1996 to 2007, and Raymond Rodriguez, who was the office’s budget and fiscal coordinator from 2001 to 2007. Neither Ms. Nealley nor Mr. Rodriguez has yet appeared in court to respond to the charges.

The district attorney’s release quotes Patricia Campbell, executive vice president of Tufts, as saying that the university has “improved student-activities systems to prevent future incidents” and has “taken steps to assure that no student-activities programs are adversely affected.” —Charles Huckabee

Marks & Spencer has issued a dramatic profit warning after a suffering
“marked deterioration” in sales, and announced that Steven Esom will be
leaving as head of its food business after just one year.

Taylor Wimpey today admitted that it has been unable to secure nearly £500
million in funding from investors, putting Britain's largest house builder
at risk of breaching its banking covenants.

Hundreds of angry lorry drivers converged on London today to demand the
Government lower fuel taxes which they say are forcing them out of business.

The number of people out of work in member countries is expected to rise by 9% to 34.8m by the end of next year under the impact of the credit crunch, according to the OECD

A Palestinian rammed a bulldozer into an Israeli commuter bus, cars and pedestrians in Jerusalem, killing at least three people and wounding dozens, emergency services said

Shares in Deutsche Bank rose 3 per cent in pre-market trading after the bank
reassured investors that it would not call on them for extra cash to
strengthen its balance sheet.

The amount of money homeowners are borrowing on their houses has slumped by 64
per cent in the first quarter to a seven-year low as banks continue to
withdraw cheap mortgage deals.

TNK-BP's employees have been granted 49 visas by the Russian migration
service, ending fears its senior executives, including chief executive Bob
Dudley, might be forced to leave the country this month.

Merrill Lynch warned bankruptcy was not out of the question for General Motors
after the car giant released grim sales figures last night.

AstraZeneca, the pharmaceuticals giant, has secured sales of its blockbuster
anti-psychotic drug Seroquel until 2011, as a US court stopped cheaper
copies coming to market.

Zimbabwean opposition leader Morgan Tsvangirai has spurned a call from African leaders for talks with President Robert Mugabe on forming a unity government, saying conditions were not yet right

Last year, Princeton economics professor Alan S. Blinder reviewed more than 800 occupations in the United States, and estimated that between 22 and 29 percent of them were potentially offshorable. This year, 901 MBA students of Harvard Business School attempted to replicate Blinder's study, with largely similar results and two further insights.

As HBS research associate Troy Smith and Professor Jan W. Rivkin write in a working paper available for download [PDF], "First, Blinder's notion of assessing the 'potential offshorability' of an occupation is tricky. … [M]ore and more, the laws of economics drive the geography of business activity. Second, we feel that one misses something important when one thinks of moving occupations or jobs offshore. It is actually the tasks or activities associated with an occupation or job that move." Conceiving of offshoring in relation to tasks rather than jobs gives companies a broader global palette with which to manage differences across borders, the authors conclude.

Cases on, among other topics, lessons to be learned from the merger of Canada's Toronto-Dominion Bank and the more customer-service oriented Canada Trust, and the marketing dilemmas of software company ScriptLogic round out the week.

— Martha Lagace

Working Papers

Collaborative Architectures for Innovation

Abstract

Collaborative innovation has become a hot topic in innovation today. Scholars, consultants, and the business press all urge companies seeking to boost innovative performance to become more "collaborative." Too often, however, companies fail to distinguish among the various choices they face with respect to alternative modes of collaboration. Collaborative innovation can take a wide variety of forms, each with profound implications for innovative performance and the value a firm can capture from innovation. Building on a number of case studies, this paper presents a simple framework for categorizing different collaborative modes. The framework is based on the notion that there are two critical dimensions along which collaborative efforts can be characterized. The first dimension relates to the degree to which the collaborative network is "open" verses "closed." The second dimension relates to the degree to which the governance structure for collaboration is "hierarchical" verses "flat." While discussions of collaborative innovation often take the position that "open" networks are superior to "closed" networks, and that "flat" governance structures are superior to "hierarchical" structures, our framework provides a more nuanced view of the trade-offs. The choice among alternative collaborative modes should be driven by a number of factors including characteristics of the technology, the capabilities of the firm, and the distribution of competences in the environment. We develop a set of guidelines for helping firms choose among collaborative models and discuss critical enabling conditions required for each to work in practice. In the final section of the paper, we discuss how firms can "mix and match" multiple modes of collaboration into coherent "architectures" that lie at the heart of innovation strategy.

The Future of Social Enterprise

Abstract

The Future of Social Enterprise considers the confluence of forces that is shaping the field of social enterprise, changing the way that funders, practitioners, scholars, and organizations measure performance. We trace a growing pool of potential funding sources to solve social problems, much of it stemming from an intergenerational transfer of wealth and new wealth from financial and high-tech entrepreneurs.

Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-103.pdf

A Replication Study of Alan Blinder's "How Many U.S. Jobs Might Be Offshorable?"

Abstract

In a 2007 working paper, Alan Blinder assessed the "offshorability" of hundreds of U.S. occupations and estimated that between 22% and 29% of all U.S. jobs were potentially offshorable. This note reports the results of an exercise in which members of Harvard Business School's MBA Class of 2009 collectively attempted to replicate Blinder's study. Overall, the MBA students' assessments of offshorability matched Blinder's well. Across occupations, the correlation between Blinder's offshorability rating and the students' was 0.60. The students estimated that between 21% and 42% of U.S. jobs are potentially offshorable. Echoing Blinder, the student data suggested a positive correlation between offshorability and education. The student data also revealed a positive or inverted-U relationship between offshorability and wage level, where Blinder found no correlation. While Blinder found a slight wage penalty for the most offshorable jobs, the student data exhibited no evidence of wage depreciation from job contestability due to offshoring.

Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-104.pdf

Paths to Equality: Walking the Talk in Multi-party Negotiations (revised)

Abstract

Past research has shown that communication in negotiations heightens social awareness, facilitates coordination, increases the utility for the other's positive outcomes, and thereby leads to more equal payoffs. But the role of specific communication strategies in shaping the terms of agreement is largely ignored in models of bargaining behavior. We propose that communication is used to frame negotiations around a logic of fairness or competition, moving parties toward or away from equal-division agreements. These effects outweigh any overall social cohesion effects due to the mere presence of communication. We offer evidence from two laboratory studies with three-party negotiations to support these hypotheses.

Download the paper: http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/08-032.pdf