Science and Enterprise

Tag: statistics

  • Sandia Lab Contributes Nearly $1B to California Economy

    An analysis of economic output generated by Sandia National Laboratories shows the lab contributes nearly $1 billion to the California economy, particularly in and around its Livermore campus in the Bay Area. The report was prepared by the Center for Economic Development (CED) at California State University in Chico. The CED report defines economic output…

  • Non-Native Insects Costing Local Governments, Homeowners

    Scientists from U.S. and Canadian universities and the U.S. Forest Service built a statistical model to compute the cost of damage caused by invasive tree-feeding insects that are inadvertently imported to the U.S. The team from the National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis (NCEAS) at University of California in Santa Barbara published their findings…

  • Insomnia Costs U.S. Employers Billions in Lost Productivity

    Researchers from universities, hospitals, and companies in the U.S. and Europe calculated the lost productivity of Americans suffering from insomnia at an annual cost of $63.2 billion to employers. Their findings from the study, funded by the pharmaceutical company Merck, appear in the 1 September issue of the journal Sleep (paid subscription required). The team…

  • People Without Jobs and Insurance Skip Medicine, Health Care

    A report from the Commonwealth Fund in New York says the vast majority of people who lost both their jobs and health insurance in the past two years skipped needed health care or did not fill prescriptions because of the cost. The data for the study come from the Commonwealth Fund’s 2010 Biennial Health Insurance…

  • Evaluation Tool Developed to Predict Death in Obese People

    Medical researchers and statisticians from Canada and the U.S. have developed a rating scale to predict mortality of overweight and obese people. The Edmonton obesity staging system, named for the city in Alberta, Canada where the scale was developed, is described in the 15 August issue of CMAJ (Canadian Medical Association Journal). The most common…

  • University 2010 Start-Ups, Patents Rise; Licensing Stalls

    The number of start-up companies and U.S. patents applied for and issued based on research at American universities gained in 2010 compared to 2009, according to the Association of University Technology Managers (AUTM), an organization of technology transfer specialists. However, the licensing of those findings and creation of new products leveled off or fell in…

  • Top European Corporate R&D to Increase 5 Pct a Year

    Leading R&D investing companies based in the EU expect their global research and development investments to grow by five percent annually from 2011 to 2013, according to a survey released today by the European Commission in Brussels. The findings by the EC’s Joint Research Centre are based on survey responses from 205 mainly larger companies…

  • To Grow Economies with Small Businesses, Think Local

    Economists at Pennsylvania State University have found that small, locally owned businesses and start-ups tend to generate higher incomes for people in a community. Stephan Goetz and graduate student David Fleming from the Northeast Regional Center for Rural Development at Penn State published their findings in the August issue of the journal Economic Development Quarterly…

  • 2011 Q2 VC Funding Up for Life Sciences, CleanTech Stalls

    Venture capital (VC) funds and the number of VC deals increased in the second quarter of 2011 compared to the first quarter, with companies in the life sciences and semiconductors among those reaping the benefits. The data were collected by Thomson Reuters and published in the MoneyTree Report from PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP and the National Venture…

  • Study: Start-Ups Hiring and Keeping Fewer Workers

    A new study by the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation indicates recent start-up businesses — like those formed by scientists to commercialize their research findings — are not generating the numbers of jobs created by earlier start-up businesses. The foundation says the trend of less hiring by start-ups pre-dates the 2007-2009 recession. The Kauffman findings show…