Engage

NASA designed the website more than a decade ago to engage young learners using space-related content, information and activities that are safe, educational and fun. In addition to the reliable, fact-based information provided, visitors to the site can play games, do puzzles and answer trivia questions, all while learning the basic tenets of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math).

Interactive features are packaged into five progressive skill set levels, allowing for both challenges and successes that keep the audience wanting more. At Level 1, students use observational skills to solve puzzles and challenges. By Level 5, they are learning about the planets in our solar system and what properties make each unique.

Keeping up-to-date

There are modules on Orion, NASA’s next-generation spacecraft that will take astronauts farther than ever before: airplanes and flight; stars and how their brightness and temperature vary; the components that make up a rocket. New activities are featured on a weekly basis.

NASA Kids’ Club has something for everyone, whether you’re a kid or just a kid at heart. Now in Space is a regular feature that highlights the current Expedition crew living and working aboard the International Space Station, 250 miles above Earth.

From virtual to historical

In March 2015, American astronaut Scott Kelly began a yearlong stay on the space station. That has never been done before, and the agency is hoping to gain valuable insight on the effects of long-duration spaceflight on humans. This will be essential as NASA prepares to send future crews to Mars and other destinations in our solar system.  

By taking young students along on these virtual journeys, NASA hopes to spark their interest in exploration and inspire them to pursue STEM studies, and eventually STEM careers. They are America’s next generation of scientists, engineers and explorers—and the beginning of their journey of discovery is just one click away.

The post Calling the Explorers of Tomorrow: NASA Wants You appeared first on Education and Career News.

Chasing fulfillment

I was fortunate. My mother, wanting me to follow my heart, never dissuaded me from pursuing the arts. She knew how much joy I got from playing the piano. What she didn’t know at the time was that by encouraging my passion, she was also helping to create a ripple effect of benefits integral to our everyday lives.

According to the Bureau of Economic Analysis, 3.2 percent of the nation’s 2011 GDP was attributable to arts and culture. That’s $504 billion—more money than even tourism and agriculture contributed to the economy. So pursuing a career in the arts is about more than just personal fulfillment. It’s about making a long-term investment in the nation’s economic health. 

The benefits of creativity

Of course, the arts cannot just be measured in dollar value alone. There are few pursuits more commendable than enhancing the lives of others, and that is essentially what a career in the arts allows us to do. Whether creating work ourselves, or working in arts administration, we are helping to bring beauty and meaning to people’s lives, and adding vitality to our communities. As creative professionals, we are conduits for bringing the value of the arts to the American people.

Not every child with a creative bent has the same support I received. But by working with our state and regional partners, the National Endowment for the Arts is building artistically rich environments through arts education funding, and programs like Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation contest that has reached two million students since its inception in 2006.

By increasing access to art education, we are not only equipping our children with creative reasoning, but we are helping to cultivate arts appreciation within a new generation. Whether this appreciation develops into a career or patronage, the result will be an enduring framework for the arts, and in turn, a stronger civic and economic framework to increase the quality of life for our nation.

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Typically, pediatric cancer patients are treated with the same toxic combinations of chemotherapies that were developed decades ago. Many die and often those children who live, have significant lifelong complications. In the past 40 years, only four oncology drugs have been approved for first-use in kids.

“The system is broken for development of drugs for children’s cancer,” says Gwen Nichols, MD, chief medical officer at LLS.

She continues, “Although we’ve had quite a bit of success in pediatric cancer, there’s more we need to do. These are critical patients who need more attention.”

Children’s Initiative

LLS is working to find safe and effective treatments that precisely target a patient’s cancer without harming the rest of the child’s body. They’ve launched The LLS Children’s Initiative, a $50 million multi-year effort that more than doubles their investment in pediatric cancer research grants; expands education and support services for children and families; advocates for the development of new treatments and breaks down barriers to care.

“We need to be more specific and less toxic and we can’t do that with the current drug development paradigm,” she says. “This is important because the kids we’re talking about have 60 plus years of life left. We need to be sure they can get that life and that it’s a life of good quality.”

Precision medicine

Treating pediatric leukemia has had a one-size-fits-all approach. But Nichols says that’s not working.  Enter LLS PedAL (Pediatric Acute Leukemia), a groundbreaking global precision medicine clinical trial in acute pediatric leukemia.

The goal is for the program to have up to 200 clinical sites worldwide, including the U.S. LLS PedAL will consolidate pediatric cancer data from multiple institutions, define and analyze the data, and make it available to researchers globally. The hope is for the trial to begin treating its first patient by next spring.

“We can all partner together to actualize this work to get drugs approved for the kids,” says Nichols, co-chair of LLS’s PedAL initiative. “The more we share, the better.”

The post Working Together To Find New Therapies to Treat Childhood Cancers appeared first on Education and Career News.

Trying to launch yourself as a market researcher in a global world can be an intimidating experience. That’s why it’s so important to be aware of both the software tools that can help you, but equally as important are the professional market research facilitation teams that can make you look your best to your clients, whether right in your own backyard or around the world.

In the past, a market research professional was tied down to what could be achieved within a fixed geography – running focus groups or conducting interviews in far flung places in multiple languages would have been impossible.

Today’s market researcher has a plethora of tools that work worldwide at their fingertips. But the critical factor in achieving a project success continues to be the people you rely on to make you successful. Security issues compound the situation. Know the company you keep when you get involved in global research. Rely on a partner you can trust and success will fall into place.

SOURCE: Civicom, us.editorial@mediaplanet.com

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Oceans are critical to the Earth’s ecosystem, and effective research allows us to understand how it works. We spoke to Brett Loveman, director of communications at advocacy group Mission Blue, about the best ways to communicate scientific finds to the public.

What are your best strategies for communicating science findings to a general audience?

We believe in the power of social media and storytelling. As such, we have grown an online following of nearly 1 million ocean lovers that are actively building their knowledge about the ocean and the issues that face it. Through knowledge comes caring and through caring comes action!

Considering how little we know about the ocean, how critical is research to our understanding of conservation? How much do we know?

Research is the bedrock upon which ocean policy decisions should be based, however, as a whole, we have invested far too little in ocean research over the past decades. We have more accurate maps of the surface of Mars than of our own ocean. It’s time to change our priorities for the sake of the planet and ourselves.

What advice do you have for future generations of scientists? Alternatively, how can a culture of awareness enabled by research lead us to a better future for life on Earth?

To the scientists, we would emphasize the importance of effectively communicating their findings to the public. Now, more than ever, we need science to guide the public discussion.

To learn more about how Mission Blue is using research to protect our oceans check out https://mission-blue.org/about/.

Staff, us.editorial@mediaplanet.com

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Massachusetts is home to five of the top six NIH-funded hospitals and some of the top life science companies, and we can state medical innovation and scientific research is at an all-time high. 

However, it often takes decades to translate scientific research into therapies that will benefit patients, and, often, even the best science can get stuck inside research institutions with no clear pathway to commercialization. We can help accelerate the process by facilitating academia/industry collaboration, and promoting mentorship of aspiring life science entrepreneurs.

Several trends are creating more opportunities and hurdles for converting great science to patient benefit. A positive trend is that major pharma companies are embracing external innovation and expanding pipelines by partnering with innovative biotechs and academia. We have also seen many venture capital firms shift to a venture creation model where companies are created in-house with larger amounts of money allocated to fewer companies. 

This shift in company formation and capital allocation, however, can present formidable challenges to the commercialization of cutting-edge research, and highlights the need for industry, academia, and investors to collaborate, and expand the scope and search for innovative ideas. 

Fostering collaboration

Academia and industry are critical ingredients in a healthy ecosystem. Academia is known for cutting-edge research, however, academia’s mission and lack of funding make it difficult to undertake the translation efforts that are essential to converting research to therapies. 

Industry possesses the capital and the interdisciplinary teams required for translation, but needs greater access to groundbreaking research. Industry also tends to be more interested in performing less research and affecting more evolution — a successful collaboration would integrate respective efforts. 

In fact, a recent MassBio survey highlighted the common interest and benefit in collaboration while also finding that significant gaps remain. Listening closely to academic and industry partners, MassBio recently launched the first Massachusetts Academic-Industry Roundtable Series to define best practices and catalyze academic-industry collaboration, and create better pathways to help ensure the best research migrates from “bench” to “bedside”. 

Mentoring entrepreneurs

Mentorship programs, like MassBio’s MassCONNECT program, are also important catalysts to early-stage entrepreneurs. They connect aspiring entrepreneurs to industry experienced mentors, and the deep reservoir of knowledge and talent in the Massachusetts ecosystem. 

The MassCONNECT mentor base is like the “Wikipedia of Life Sciences,” and as a MassCONNECT mentor for the past 10 years, I have often seen examples where mentors have helped entrepreneurs avoid repeating experiments that have already been done, and learning lessons that have already been learned. These mentors play a vital role in helping entrepreneurs perform elegant pivots, dramatic transformations, and, in some cases, fast failures.

Access to mentors gives first-time entrepreneurs an unparalleled opportunity to leverage scientific, regulatory, and commercial wisdom to vet science and define commercial strategy. Mentors also receive the benefits of giving back to the next generation and opportunities to get an early view of cutting-edge innovation.

The life sciences industry has experienced incredible growth over the past decade and the global unmet medical need is rising alongside it. To meet that need, the legacy roles and models of academia, industry, investors, and other stakeholders will need to blur and evolve. 

As an industry, we have achieved great success and learned many lessons over the past several decades. Among the most important are the need to keep patients at the center of everything we do and continue helping academia, industry, and entrepreneurs navigate to the new reality to swiftly bring the next generation of medicine to patients. 

The path from “bench” to “bedside” is a long road paved with great intentions. It is now our responsibility to commit to widening that path for entrepreneurs and to create a better roadmap for academia.

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The “Jonas Salk Middle School” is a few miles from my house. I remember being impressed the first time I saw it because local schools get named for someone who has had a major impact on the community or the world.  

It is appropriate for a school to be named after Salk. He discovered the first vaccine for Polio, which had ravished the United States and the world. His discovery literally saved millions.

I recently read that Salk never made a penny off the vaccine; he didn’t patent it and viewed it as a gift to the world. 

There are other schools around the world named after scientists like Einstein, Curie, and Pasteur. Einstein, ironically, was working in the Swiss Patent Office in 1905 when he wrote a series of papers that changed physics, including special relativity. He never patented any of it.  

I am unaware of any local schools named after a market researcher.  

Why is that?  

Commercial appeal

It isn’t that market researchers are bad people. Most are good people who are charitable and devote time to improving their communities.

I think the main reason you won’t find schools named after market researchers is that market research is fundamentally a commercial enterprise, unlike basic scientific research or medical research, which primarily aim to better mankind (and no, I am not idealizing scientific researchers; I have read too many academic satires by David Lodge for that).

Basic scientific/medical research is essentially an open process.  Anyone should be able to replicate your work after reading your report in a refereed journal. It is the job of editors and anonymous referees to make sure everything is on the up and up. In medical research, that is done commercially by pharma companies; the FDA ensures the methods used prove the new drug has the claimed benefits.

Protecting Assets

The commercial world of market research is not open because it is fundamentally about getting a commercial advantage. There is a veil of secrecy that is always kept up, either by clients or by market research companies. 

The best work I’ve done in my career for clients has been kept hidden so their competitors don’t find out. If I wanted to speak about it at a conference, I had to blind it so nobody really knew who I was speaking about, or what I really found.   

Market research companies gain commercial advantage by developing proprietary services. They don’t get a patent for them unless there is some technology involved.   In speaking or writing about them, critical components are kept hidden; otherwise, they could be ripped off. Clients don’t get the full story about validation the way a refereed science journal or the FDA would demand.

Therefore, the commercial world of market research is essentially a ”buyer beware” world. The overwhelming majority of market researchers I’ve met do their best, but at the end of the day, you never really know what you’re getting.  

Organizations like the ARF and MSI do yeoman’s work in getting the validation that only real openness can provide, but they only touch a small percentage of market research.

I’d love to see a local school named for a market researcher, but it will only happen for something they did outside of market research.

Larry Friedman, Ph.D., Co-Editor, GreenBook Blog, us.editorial@mediaplanet.com

The post Examining the Difference Between Market, Medical, and Scientific Researchers appeared first on Education and Career News.

In recent years, the market research industry has made strides toward inclusion and parity, not only for women, but for other marginalized communities as well. 

For researchers and the companies that employ them, the benefits are twofold: A more diverse insights team offers different perspectives and, in turn, product development that is more representative of an increasingly diverse consumer base. Further, research has shown that a company’s bottom line improves when steered by a diverse leadership team. 

Why, then, do companies continue to lag behind when it comes to corporate diversity efforts?

Finding answers

Women in Research (WIRe), an organization that supports diversity in the market research industry, conducted a Gender & Career Advancement study in 2012 and 2017. In a good example of progress, the study found the pay gap between men and women in senior market research industry roles dropped nearly 60 percent over that five year period.

Despite this advancement, CEOs in market research remained predominantly male and internal corporate diversity goals continued to miss the mark when it came to providing the kinds of resources needed to propel a diverse workforce into leadership roles. Moving forward, if companies want to retain talent and benefit from the unique insights and gifts of a diverse workforce, they must forge a distinct path to leadership as a performance metric for employees from marginalized communities with structures of support, encouragement, and equity leading the way.

Turning the tide

Where does this start? Our 2018 Best Places to Work study asked a gender-diverse set of employees what qualities they look for in a workplace. Top qualities included executive leadership that was in line with their core values, a company attitude that reflects an understanding of employee lives outside of work, and more opportunities for career advancement. 

In an effort to engender more supportive and inclusive workplaces in the market research sphere, WIRe has challenged CEOs in the industry to reach gender parity within every level of the organization over the next few years and to implement these corporate diversity goals as a business performance metric, just like any other key performance indicator. 
The WEF predicts we won’t reach gender parity for another 202 years. The only way we will get there is by challenging companies and stakeholders across industries to empower diverse workforces, elect leaders from myriad backgrounds and experiences, and hold themselves accountable to real, measurable diversity KPIs and goals.

Michelle Andre, Managing Director, WIRe, us.editorial@mediaplanet.com

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Those of us who make our living collecting, processing, sharing, and storing personal data increasingly face an evolving and continually challenging landscape when it comes to privacy and data protection. 

The most obvious example is the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), implemented in May 2018 and then followed by lookalike legislation in Japan, South Korea, Brazil, and California. Legislators around the globe understand a digital economy has great potential for economic expansion, wealth creation, and societal improvement, but they also recognize most industries have had little or no ethical basis to guide the collection and use of personal data. 

All too often, revenue generation has trumped ethical and duty-of-care responsibilities. In recognition of this poor track record of self-regulation, the E.U. brought the GDPR into law.

A model to follow

In all of this, one industry has stood out with an exemplary track record in managing data, respecting privacy and building citizen trust: market research. Its track record of successful self-regulation uniquely positioned ESOMAR, the global voice of the data, research, and insights industry for the past 70 years, to educate and advise legislators on best practices and to secure a series of flexible exemptions within the GDPR legislation. 

Thus, ESOMAR ensured the value inherent in the collection and analysis of personal data could be realized while fully protecting the people who participate or whose data is used in research.

In action

Another EU law, the Copyright Directive, provides one concrete example. This directive would have required any text mining exercise, regardless of source, be subject to copyright payment obligations to every author whose words (including tweets, blog posts, Linkedin comments, and so on) were used in a text analytics exercise. It would have made virtually all text analytics infeasible, abruptly shutting down one of the richest analytic techniques in our toolbox. 

ESOMAR led a consortium of interests that resulted in an unequivocal exemption from the directive for market research.

In 2018, ESOMAR teamed with Kadence International to survey 300 companies in the United States, United Kingdom, and India across a variety of industries. The research verified that businesses are collecting more data from more sources than ever before, and, by their own admission, that data is being shared too freely and must be more carefully controlled. 

For examples, we need to look no further than the rapid growth of advertising technologies that rely on detailed profiles of individual consumers assembled from a wide variety of sources to target messages on the right platform. 

Worse still is the use of this kind of data for algorithmic decision-making that can result in people being denied credit, excluded from job opportunities, and discriminated against in many other ways. A 2018 Pew Research Center study found that a majority of American adults judge these applications to be unfair to those being evaluated.

While practitioners within the broad field of market research know their obligations to those whose data is the lifeblood of our industry, the same cannot be said for other industries. This is the biggest challenge facing every industry sector. 

Experts stand ready to share their knowledge and experience to all comers regardless of industry. At the end of the day, the more we can do to assure citizens that we are using their data responsibly, the greater the chances that the value inherent in that data is realized for the benefit of all, and the more support the digital economy will receive from legislators.

Reg Baker, North American Regional Ambassador, ESOMAR, us.editorial@mediaplanet.com

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Heather Carruthers

US Head of Qualitative, Ipsos

What factors are most critical to impacting a “mindset for inclusion” in market research?

Qualitative should be a pillar of inclusion in research, as it addresses the human side of any research question. It’s understanding the raw emotion that gets at the ‘why’ behind the behavior. We need diversity in a broad sense: in experience, thinking and approaches, and race and gender. Inclusion drives empathy, which is key to answering business questions.

How can embracing new market research methodologies benefit business owners?

Observation and immersion are innovative approaches; the key is to understand real people in real life. In many cases, our clients are designing products for a consumer that is very different from themselves. There is a need to immerse themselves in the lives of their consumers, walk a day in their shoes, feel what they feel, and experience what they do.

What modern innovations are most important to the future of research? 

“Human intelligence” is needed; understanding the context, the “why” and “how” behind what people do. Qualitative insights allow clients to develop very personal and relevant products, services, and messaging that connects with people on a human level. This provides differentiation and break-through in a crowded market.

What motivates your interest in market research? 

As a marketer and brand-builder, I was a client before joining Ipsos.The most eye opening, insightful moments come from qualitative research. For me, MR is critical part of building any kind of innovation or go-to-market plan. Decisions are as emotional than they are functional, and qual uncovers what truly motivates and influences choices.

Ted Marzilli

CEO of Data Products, YouGov

What factors are most critical to impacting a “mindset for inclusion” in market research?

Companies need to demonstrate inclusive practices not only in their entry-level hiring, but at all levels across the organization. That means sourcing the best talent, regardless of gender, age, racial or ethnic identity, sexual identity, or where employees are located. The best indicator of a promising future for a talented individual, is for him or her to see people who look like themselves across an organization’s hierarchy and functional areas. 

How can embracing new market research methodologies benefit business owners?

Fifteen years ago, many companies resisted the idea of conducting research online. Today, it is the primary method of conducting market research in the United States and other developed markets. Businesses who resist more recent advancements, such as syndicated research approaches, imputation, and multilevel regression and post stratification miss out on cost savings, accuracy, and speed.

What modern innovations are most important to the future of research? 

Multilevel regression and post stratification (MRP) has demonstrated a lot of promise. Developed by Professor Ben Lauderdale of the London School of Economics and YouGov, the approach accurately predicted results of the 2017 UK general election at the parliamentary constituency level. MRP has the potential to dramatically impact market research in the future by modeling data across areas with relatively small sample sizes (e.g., DMAs) to predict results in a specific DMA. The approach leverages the fact that people with similar characteristics tend to behave similarly, regardless of where they live.  

What motivates your interest in market research? 

Market research is a means to estimate what is happening, or is going to happen, in the real world. It’s a way to understand the truth, and also help businesses and marketers allocate investments and better meet the evolving needs of consumers. For example, understanding variations across environmentally conscious consumers; what percentage proactively take steps to preserve the environment (e.g., purchasing an alternative fuel vehicle, converting to LED lighting) vs. those that will participate if you make it easy for them (e.g., household recycling). 

Staff, us.editorial@mediaplanet.com

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