Resumo: Este trabalho tem por objetivo identificar possíveis causas da lacuna existente entre as pesquisas acadêmicas e a aplicação destas pelas empresas, traduzindo-se em um baixo grau de inovação nos produtos ou serviços prestados de que resulta o pequeno número de patentes concedidas em nosso País. Foi utilizada a técnica de análise de conteúdo para exame dos dados coletados. Dado o grau de subjetividade deste trabalho as hipóteses formuladas não são irrefutáveis, porém a abordagem procura possibilitar que a ciência prospere também através do reconhecimento de seus erros e da adoção de medidas destinadas a eliminá-los. As mudanças tecnológicas tornam a concorrência cada vez mais acirrada em todos os níveis, inclusive entre regiões e países. O conhecimento tornou-se essencial para a geração de riqueza e para a promoção do bem-estar social. A inovação é um dos principais fatores para que o emprego e a empresa não entrem em um estado estacionário rumo à extinção. Fortalecer a capacidade inovadora do País, com a crescente utilização da tecnologia gerada internamente, faz com que a tecnologia, no sentido econômico, seja um bem passível de comercialização. Sabe-se que a produção de conhecimento no Brasil é significativa, porém a transformação desse conhecimento em resultado econômico ainda tem muito que avançar. Além disso, o país investe pouco em P&D (pesquisa e desenvolvimento), se comparado às economias mais desenvolvidas. As principais causas apontadas para esse distanciamento estão relacionadas às diferentes missões da universidade, da empresa e do Estado, à formação dos recursos humanos, à baixa cultura empreendedora e às dificuldades oriundas dos marcos regulatórios, tudo servindo de obstáculo para alavancar o desenvolvimento científico e tecnológico de produtos, processos e serviços / Abstract: This work aims to identify possible causes of the gap between academic research and its utilization by companies, causing a low degree of innovation in products or services which results in the small number of patents granted in our country. We used the technique of content analysis to examine the data collected. Given the degree of subjectivity of the working hypotheses, they are not irrefutable; however the approach of this work seeks to enable science to prosper also by recognizing its errors and by adopting the necessary steps to eliminate them. Technological changes contribute to the increasingly fierce competition on all levels, including among regions and countries. Knowledge has become essential for generation of wealth and promotion of social welfare. Innovation is a key factor for employment and for companies to avoid a stationary state which would certainly lead to its extinction. Strengthening the innovative capacity of the country, with the increasing use of domestically generated technology, makes the technology an asset which can be marketed in the economic sense. It is known that the knowledge production in Brazil is significant, however transferring that knowledge into economic output still has a long way to go. Moreover, the country invests little in R & D (research and development) compared to more developed economies. The main causes for this detachment are related to the different missions of universities, companies and State, the training of human resources, the low entrepreneurial culture and the difficulties arising from regulatory frameworks, all serving as a barrier to enhance the scientific and technological development of products, procedures and services / Orientador: Tomaz Manabu Hashimoto / Coorientador: Antonio Jorge Abdalla / Banca: Herman Jacobus Cornelis Voorwald / Banca: Nicolau Andre Silveira Rodrigues / Banca: Carlos de Moura Neto / Banca: Severino Antonio Moreira Barbosa / Doutor

Evoking his early personal experiences, computer art pioneer Paul Brown wrote in the mid-1990s that to work with computers was akin to a ‘kiss of death’. According to him, as a result of sheer prejudice, the majority of people in the art world did not acknowledge such artworks as interesting, valid or important. Although recurrent in the literature concerned with such art, Brown’s claims must be confronted with the relative success of artistic practices interchangeably labelled as computer, new media, cybernetic, electronic or simply digital art. However, as attested by this proliferation of labels as well as by the development of numerous dedicated awards, degrees, galleries, museums, awards and publications, the success of such practices cannot be explained by artistic merit alone. Since many in the art world do not accept these artworks, as Brown and others suggest, how can we explain the works’ success in securing and developing their own space over the course of fifty years? This thesis investigates the emergence, development and institutionalisation of the field termed here as ‘art, science and technology’ (AST) between 1965 and the mid-1970s in Europe and North America. Also recognised by the aforementioned labels (among others), AST is an umbrella term that arguably designates the artistic practices interested in the adoption, theorisation and dissemination of post-war technologies and, particularly, information technology. Yet, despite this shared interest, here I argue that it is the particular institutional arrangement of AST that best distinguishes it from other artistic practices. A direct consequence of its rejection, AST’s emergence as a separate field is here explained via a revision of its initial social and cultural contexts. Arising from the technophile cultural climate of the long 1950s, and alongside the massive investments in technology made by Western governments in the same period, early AST developed not within traditional artistic spaces but within industries and universities. In the late 1960s, however, with the rise of economic, political and social uncertainties alongside escalating international conflicts, it became increasingly difficult to justify an art produced with the tools and support of the military– industrial complex. If on the one hand artists such as Brown understood these new artworks as central to art and its history, a normative development of a new technological era, on the other hand opponents located at the centre of contemporary art lambasted these new artworks for their supposedly scientific, commercial and aesthetic pretensions. Differently from previous attempts aimed at justifying the artistic worthiness of art produced with post-war technology, this thesis presents the history of such practices from the point of view of its own struggle – that is, its fight for survival. Ultimately, here I explain and describe how AST became detached from art while claiming its status. This is an effort not interested in the merits of these practices per se but, instead, concerned with AST’s development as an autonomous and prosperous field.

In the past fifty years, a need to address the ethical and social dimensions in the biosciences has become pervasive. To this end, notions of bioethics, and an associated range of methodologies have been institutionalised throughout the UK biosciences; talk of research ethics, public engagement, various forms of technology assessment, and recently notions of responsible innovation in technoscientific worlds is increasingly commonplace. A desire to unpack discourse and action surrounding these practices sits at the heart of this thesis. Of particular interest are the ways that different groups construct the ethical dimensions of biofuel development and deployment and then distribute responsibility for addressing them. To achieve this, I find analytic power by deploying theory from the interpretative social sciences, namely the sociology of bioethics and science and technology studies. Empirically, I use controversy about the development and deployment of biofuels as a means to analyse, primarily through documentary analysis and qualitative interview, how three prominent groups (non-governmental organisations, public research funders and scientists) construct understandings of ethics and then distribute responsibility for addressing those issues. This approach makes it possible to see that the constitution of ethical issues (their ‘form’) and the ways that they are addressed (the ‘task’ of ethics) are both tightly coupled to the situations from which they arise. They are thus fundamentally multiple, locally contingent and often unpredictable. Using a range of discursive strategies and actions, actors are able to negotiate, blurring in and out of focus, what counts as an appropriate issue of concern, who should be addressing it and how. Dominant traditions of theory and practice have a tendency to standardise the form and task of ethics, such as in terms of issue types (e.g. ‘Playing God’) and the methods for addressing them (e.g. public engagement). I argue that ethical dimensions’ situated nature should be acknowledged rather than ignored and is fundamental to making research more ‘socially robust’. However, this tension between dominant institutionalised forms and lived experiences is not easily resolved because it forces an engagement with the roles of those who are tasked with steering knowledge production. Hope is, however, offered by new approaches that have explicitly sought to deal with such tensions in new forms of knowledge production and new models of collaboration.

This dissertation examines how writers helped scientists and engineers transform “efficiency” from a mathematical tool for assessing machine performance to an organizing principle for society. Historians and literary critics have helpfully sketched this transformation. They have paid particular attention to manifestations of Taylorism and Fordism in modernism, especially in the “kinetic” poetics of Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, and John Dos Passos. But while scholars have illustrated how modernism pushed efficiency into contexts like labor and politics, they have only begun to consider efficiency’s role in Gilded Age fiction, particularly in the works of utopian thinkers—such as Edward Bellamy and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—and technological cynics—including Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Frank Norris, and María Amparo Ruiz de Burton. I argue that efficiency was a decidedly aesthetic concern in the novels of the Gilded Age, an idea so exciting and anxiety producing that writers felt compelled to scrutinize it in terms of literary form. Indeed, the writers examined in this dissertation developed nuanced rhetorical and narratological programs to explore efficiency’s conceptual possibilities outside the factory, specifically in the domestic sphere, the pastoral places of California, and the writer’s study. Moreover, these writers struggled to make sense of efficiency’s conceptual expansion. Thus, their novels reflect the difficulties of realizing different kinds of social efficiency. The texts I analyze either try but fail to represent the promises of a machine-made society, or they use self-destructive literary forms that call attention to the wastes of industrial capitalism. By attending to the poetics and competing definitions of efficiency advanced by these writers, my dissertation explores how Americans adapted traditional literary structures to promote or challenge the idea of technological progress. This dissertation includes previously published material.

<p> Libraries often engage in services that require collaboration across stakeholder boundaries to be successful. Institutional repositories (IRs) are a good example of such a service. IRs are an infrastructure to preserve intellectual assets within a university or college, and to provide an open access showcase for that institution&rsquo;s research, teaching, and creative excellence. They involve multiple stakeholders (librarians, IT experts, administrators, faculty, and students) and are typically operated by academic libraries. They have existed since the early 2000s. </p><p> Collaborative leadership has been studied in areas such as health care and business, but it has received little attention in studies of library leadership and management. Collaborative leadership has been shown to be an effective leadership style for an increasingly networked world; it is an interactive process in which people set aside self-interests, share power, work across boundaries, and discuss issues openly and supportively. Collaborative leadership moves organizations beyond mere cooperation towards a state of interdependence; it empowers all members of a team to help each other to achieve broader goals, find personal satisfaction in their work, and sustain productive relationships over time. A better understanding of collaborative leadership can inform both IR development and future complex multi-stakeholder campus services. </p><p> Two methodologies &ndash; content analysis of IR web pages and surveys of library directors and IR developers &ndash; were employed to determine if IRs revealed evidence of collaborative leadership. The study populations were those members of the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Oberlin Group of liberal arts colleges that operated IR services by July 2014 (146 institutions overall). The research examined if IR format, size, age, nomenclature, or technology platform varied between ARL and Oberlin Group members. It asked if there is any difference in the perception of collaborative leadership traits, perceived IR success, or collaborative involvement with stakeholder communities between ARL and Oberlin Group members or between library directors and IR developers. The study found evidence of all six collaborative leadership traits being examined: assessing the environment for collaboration, creating clarity, building trust, sharing power, developing people, and self-reflection. </p><p>

Master of Science / Department of Animal Sciences and Industry / John A. Unruh / The objective of our study was to explore relationships between Japanese color score (JCS) and pork-quality attributes and develop equations to predict JCS. Pork carcass traits in population one (n = 781) was used to develop prediction equations and population two (n = 684) was used to test the equations for accuracy. Pearson's correlation coefficients found firmness, ultimate pH, drip loss percentage, L*, a*, b*, hue angle, and chroma were significantly (P < 0.01) correlated to JCS. Correlation loading found 96% of the variation in firmness, pH, drip loss percentage, L*, a*, b*, and hue angle explained 81% of the variation in JCS. Three prediction equations were developed using these traits. Averages for population one traits were used to develop the initial prediction equations. Predicted JCS, which fell within [plus or minus]0.25 of the actual JCS, were retained and multiple linear regression (MLR) was run, resulting in the first prediction equations. Data from population two were then used to evaluate the success of these equations. Equation one using firmness, pH, drip loss percentage, L*, a*, b*, and hue angle was: JCS = 12.698 – (0.00007199 x drip loss) + (0.09008 x pH) – (0.01128 x firmness) – (0.226 x L*) + (0.06923 x a*) – (0.0201 x b*) + (0.02143 x hue angle); r[superscript]2 = 0.916. For the test population, 98.53 and 67.25% of the observations were predicted within [plus or minus]0.50 and 0.25 of the actual JCS, respectively. The second prediction equation, developed utilizing instrumental color measures of L*, b*, and hue angle was: JCS = 15.255 – (0.259 x L*) – (0.213 x b*) + (0.02518 x hue angle); r[superscript]2 = 0.931. For test population, 92.40 and 55.70% of the observations were predicted within [plus or minus]0.50 and 0.25 of the actual JCS, respectively. The third prediction equation developed utilizing L*, a*, and b* was: JCS = 12.920 – (0.219 x L*) + (0.07342 x a*) – (0.02166 x b*); r[superscript]2 = 0.906. For test population, 97.80 and 68.22% of the observations were predicted within [plus or minus]0.50 and 0.25 of the actual JCS, respectively. All prediction equations predicted 92% or more of the JCS observations within [plus or minus]0.50 and would be useful when sorting pork carcasses for export to valuable Asian markets. The second and third prediction equations would be advantageous as they require fewer measurements and could be more rapidly collected.

Doctor of Philosophy / Department of Grain Science & Industry: Food Science Institute / Sajid Alavi / One of the worst pollution menaces of modern times is plastic packaging, because of its poor degradability. Packaging materials based on starch utilize the benefits of natural polymerization, abundant availability of raw material, and fast biodegradability. However, the highly hydrophilic nature and poor mechanical properties of starch based films limit their application. This problem was sought to be overcome by forming a nanocomposite of starch and layered silicate clay. This study utilizes melt extrusion processing to synthesize starch-clay nanocomposites for biodegradable packaging films and investigate the effects of chemical compatibility of starch, plasticizer and nanoclay and melt extrusion conditions on the structure and properties of composite films. In the first part of the study, the influence of clay type, clay content, starch source and amylose content was investigated. Starch-montmorillonite (MMT) hybrids showed an intercalated nanostructure due to the compatibility of the two components and led to cast film with higher tensile strength and better water vapor barrier properties as compared to starch-organically modified montmorillonite (I30E) hybrids, as well as native starch only. With increase in clay content (0-21 wt%), significantly higher (15-92%) tensile strength (TS) and lower (22-67%) water vapor permeability (WVP) were obtained. The results indicated that nanocomposite technology could be applied to improve the properties of starch-based packaging films. The barrier and mechanical properties of nanocomposite films did not vary significantly with different starch sources (corn, wheat and potato starch), whereas films from regular corn starch showed better properties than either high amylopectin or high amylose-based nanocomposite films. The second part of the study investigated the effects of glycerol content (0-20 wt%) and three plasticizers (glycerol, urea, formamide) on the structure and properties of the starch-clay nanocomposite films. With decreasing glycerol content, the extent of clay exfoliation increased. Films with 5% glycerol exhibited the lowest WVP, and the highest TS and glass transition temperature (Tg). The use of urea and formamide improved the dispersion of clay platelets. Compared to glycerol and urea, formamide has an intermediate hydrogen bond forming ability with starch. However, at the same level of plasticizer (15 wt%), formamide plasticized nanocomposite films exhibited the lowest WVP, highest TS and Tg. Results indicated that a balance of interactions between starch, clay surface modifications and plasticizers might control the formation of nanocomposite structure, and in turn affect the performance of the nanocomposite films. The last part of the study investigated the effects of extrusion conditions (screw configuration, barrel temperature profile, screw speed and barrel moisture content) on the structure and properties of the starch-clay nanocomposite films. Increasing the shear intensity significantly improved the exfoliation and dispersion of clay platelets. The combination of lowest barrel moisture content (20%) and high shear screw configuration exhibited almost complete clay exfoliation and the lowest WVP and highest TS of all treatments. Increasing the barrel temperature also improved clay exfoliation and performance of films. The results suggested that, when polymer and clay are chemically compatible, optimization of process conditions (shear intensity, temperature etc.) can enable significant improvement in clay exfoliation and dispersion and the performance of nanocomposite films.

Norovirus is an enteric pathogen transmitted via the fecal-oral route. It is a leading cause of outbreaks and sporadic cases of gastroenteritis worldwide. Outbreaks of norovirus are often linked to contaminated food or water. Ready-to-eat foods are particularly prone to contamination, since they often require handling during preparation and are not usually heated before serving. Norovirus capsids have been shown to interact specifically with histo-blood group antigens (HBGAs). HBGAs are carbohydrates present on the surface of red blood cells, on mucosal epithelial cells and in bodily fluids. The work in this thesis used the interaction between norovirus and HBGAs to develop a method to detect norovirus in food samples. Magnetic beads were coated with multiple types of HBGA [A, B, H(type 2) and H(type 3)]. These beads were added to a 250 mL volume sample and concentrated using either the Pathatrix(TM) or iCropTheBug. Both systems were able to concentrate the beads from a 250 mL sample to 140 muL, using the magnetic properties of the beads. The RNA was then extracted from the sample and the presence of norovirus was determined using realtime Reverse Transcription-PCR. This method was successful at detecting norovirus from artificially-spiked and naturally-contaminated food samples. It was also able to detect multiple strains from norovirus genogroup I and II within the infectious dose range (10-100 particles). These results demonstrate that carbohydrate-conjugated beads can be successfully used to detect norovirus contamination of food products. This method can provide rapid and effective food testing for use in the investigation of suspected norovirus outbreaks.

The purpose of this thesis is to compare the science wars of the 1990s with the two-culture debate of the 1960s. It is a work in the history of intellectual debates, focusing on contested concepts of science. Over the past decade, there have been numerous references made in science wars literature that evoke comparisons to the two-culture controversy. I intend to show that while these comparisons have merit for their popular cultural reference, they are not valid when we consider the structures and contexts of the two debates. Thus, I will compare those structures, summarizing the main points of argument between the relevant actors in each instance, to illustrate the differences. The thesis advanced by C.P. Snow in 1959, and responded to most pointedly by F.R. Leavis in 1962, was predicated on the existence of foundational differences between science and humanities. The broader issues then were what validity a distinction between forms of knowledge had and which domain had the more reliable claim to knowledge. Just as the two-culture controversy called into question the credibility of literary knowledge, the credibility of science studies scholarship was ultimately at stake in the science wars, and is of central concern in this thesis. My contention is that recognizing the differences between the two-culture debate and the science wars can help guide the future of science studies, since those differences demonstrate the importance and validity of STS scholarship. When scholars ignore those differences, and presume that the two debates are comparable, they unintentionally give credibility to those who defend science against perceived assaults by STS scholars. / Master of Science

The common us of social media in everyday life has raised questions on the possible impact it has on individuals’ wellbeing. This study was conducted to determine if there was a correlation between Instagram, a common social media platform, usage and self-esteem of college students. The sample population for this research was 95 undergraduate students at Mississippi State University during the fall semester of 2019. Data was collected via an online survey that included Rosenburg’s Self-Esteem scale and ten additional questions relating to the independent variables and Instagram. The independent variables of this study were the number of Instagram followers, the average number of likes on a post, the frequency of posting, and the pressure to post and the dependent variable was self-esteem according to the Rosenburg scale. This study did not find a correlation between Instagram usage and self-esteem.