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research and development (R&D)

Wednesday 21st of January 2026

Artificial intelligence The China-US AI research gap has continued to widen, with Chinese institutions producing 4.5 times as many papers than American institutions since 2010, and significantly more than the US, India, UK, and Germany combined. Moreover, China is significantly leading in areas with implications for security and geopolitics, such as surveillance, autonomy,  scene understanding, and object detection. Nathan Benaich and Ian Hogarth, State of AI Report 2022, Key Themes © 2023 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Although manufacturing now barely reaches double digits as a share of the U.S. economy, it accounts for almost three-quarters of private sector R&D spending in the United States. Edward Luce, Time to Start Thinking  © 2017 Kwiple.com
By the numbers Ratio of the average annual number of deaths in the United States caused by drowning to those caused by gun violence: 1:8 Of federal research funding for drowning to funding for gun violence: 1:1 Harper's Index, April 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
China A research backwater when its economy took off in the 1980s, China has since spent heavily on r&d to obvious effect. A study published by Elsevier, a scientific publisher, and Nikkei, a news business, in 2019 found that China published more high-impact research papers than America did in 23 out of 30 “hot” research fields. The Economist, January 16, 2021 © 2021 Kwiple.com
Dead-in-the-heads say We're not spending money on that anymore. We consider that to be a waste of your money. Mick Mulvaney, Office of Management and Budget Director, defending his and Trump's decision to eliminate funding for research on climate change © 2017 Kwiple.com
Ideas [J]ust to sustain constant growth in GDP per person, the U.S. must double the amount of research effort searching for new ideas every 13 years to offset the increased difficulty of fnding new ideas. “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?,” National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper No. 23782, November 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Global warming The reality is that society places extraordinary value on any medical intervention that will extend or improve life, even if only by a fraction. The same intense demand is not in evidence for innovations that reduce carbon emissions. Since it is costless to emit carbon for most companies in most places, there is almost no market for products that set out to capture it. Countless forlorn Project Bs [to capture it] have died or gone unfunded, even if the technology shows promise. Today, only idealists and optimists will back “cleantech” projects. Robin Harding, Financial Times, Nov. 27, 2018 © 2018 Kwiple.com
Innovation M & A is the new R & D © 2015 Kwiple.com
Kwiple dictionary patent troll (pat'nt trōl), n. Synonym for extortiuonist. © 2015 Kwiple.com
Kwiplers say Require Internet researchers using public data, including data from third parties, to have their research reviewed by an institutional review board or to obtain informed consent, as is required for research involving human subjects © 2017 Kwiple.com
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Making money the new-fashioned way Being a patent troll © 2016 Kwiple.com
Offshoring Some firms recognise that outsourcing production to cheaper locations has eroded innovation, says Ludovico Alcorta at UNIDO [United Nations Industrial Development Organization]. When production is moved elsewhere, opportunities to learn how to do it do it better are often lost. The development of new products and processes can suffer, as can interactions with research organisations and universities. Economist, January 14, 2017 © 2017 Kwiple.com
Pandemics David Baker, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, noted that, although cancer drugs are also expensive to develop and bring to market, “there will always be people dying of cancer.” But pandemics arrive infrequently and don't necessarily stay for long — characterteristics that make them a commercial liability. “It's one of those cases where a traditional market economy doesn't work so well,” [Amesh] Adalja, [a physician at] Johns Hopkins, said. “Suppose yoy made a sars antiviral in 2003,” after its 2002-03 run. “You would not have had a return on investment, because sars was gone.” Michael Hutson, The New Yorker, Apr. 13, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com
 
Research and development In the US, research effort since the 1930s has risen by a factor of 23, an average growth rate of 4.3 per cent a year. But research productivity has fallen by a factor of 41, or minus 5.1 per cent a year, the paper [in the American Economic Review by Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenan and Michael Webb] found. John Thornhill, Financial Times, December 3, 2020 © 2020 Kwiple.com