The impact of government policy on technology transfer: An aircraft industry case study

This case study explores the interaction between domestic and foreign governmental policy on technology transfer with the goal of exploring the long-term impacts of technology transfer. Specifically, the impact of successive licensing of fighter aircraft manufacturing and design to Japan in the development of Japan's aircraft industry is reviewed. Results indicate Japan has built a domestic aircraft industry through sequential learning with foreign technology transfers from the United States, and design and production on domestic fighter aircraft. This process was facilitated by governmental policies in both Japan and the United States. Published by Elsevier B.V.

Functional requirements for reward-modulated spike-timing-dependent plasticity.

Recent experiments have shown that spike-timing-dependent plasticity is influenced by neuromodulation. We derive theoretical conditions for successful learning of reward-related behavior for a large class of learning rules where Hebbian synaptic plasticity is conditioned on a global modulatory factor signaling reward. We show that all learning rules in this class can be separated into a term that captures the covariance of neuronal firing and reward and a second term that presents the influence of unsupervised learning. The unsupervised term, which is, in general, detrimental for reward-based learning, can be suppressed if the neuromodulatory signal encodes the difference between the reward and the expected reward-but only if the expected reward is calculated for each task and stimulus separately. If several tasks are to be learned simultaneously, the nervous system needs an internal critic that is able to predict the expected reward for arbitrary stimuli. We show that, with a critic, reward-modulated spike-timing-dependent plasticity is capable of learning motor trajectories with a temporal resolution of tens of milliseconds. The relation to temporal difference learning, the relevance of block-based learning paradigms, and the limitations of learning with a critic are discussed.

Noise and stability in giant-chirp oscillators mode-locked with a nanotube-based saturable absorber

We compare experimental results showing stable dissipative-soliton solutions exist in mode-locked lasers with ultra-large normal dispersion (as large as 21.5 ps2), with both the analytic framework provided by Haus' master-equation and full numerical simulations. © 2010 Optical Society of America.