Additional White Papers

Characterizing Airborne Particulates in Hunting Park, Phase 1

by Robert Brzozowski, Gwen Ottinger, Adam Cutler, Kate Zaidan, Douglas Lisk, and Matthew Hill  | View • Download

Airborne particulate matter (PM) has long been a concern for residents of Hunting Park, a North Philadelphia neighborhood designated as an environmental-justice community. 

Hunting Park residents suspect that PM created by emissions from local industrial facilities and associated truck traffic may be harming their health, but they lack the quantitative data needed to be informed about their exposures to PM. The Hunting Park Stakeholders group thus sought an independent assessment of the air quality in their community, intending to focus first on the concentration, and second on the composition of PM in the ambient air.

Burning Biomass in Delaware? Energy Needs and Environmental Impacts

by Allen A. Denio, Gwen Ottinger, and Jim Black | View • Download

This report surveys the environmental benefits and concerns associated with Ciba Corporation’s switch from natural gas to biomass, and it outlines a series of questions that remain to be answered before the extent of the conversion’s environmental impacts can be assessed. The report recommends that if the project is permitted, it should be approached as an experiment, with the resulting impacts on air quality closely monitored. 

Understanding Moore’s Law: Four Decades of Innovation

Edited by David C. Brock | View • Download • Purchase

The rise of semiconductor electronics is among the most important global developments of the past half-century. Clearly, insights into the dynamics that have brought us this silicon revolution are vital to our understanding of the world today and our common future.

With the proliferation of silicon chips into nearly every aspect of contemporary life, Moore’s law is increasingly looked to as a bellwether for the whole of technological development.  This text places the silicon revolution in a broad context and charts Gordon Moore's development of his eponymous law across its forty-year life.

The CHF Center for Contemporary History and Policy Research Report 2004–2006

By Arthur Daemmrich | View • Download

This report brings together information about the conferences, public lectures, research, and publications carried out between 2004 and 2006 by CHF staff who now make up the Center for Contemporary History and Policy.

The report focuses on three major themes that cut across all the Center’s research projects: innovation and entrepreneurship, risk and regulation, and scientific and industrial infrastructure. For the Center, contemporary history and policy generally encompass the intertwined phenomena of invention; discovery; industrial or business application; government development, sponsorship, or regulation; and public response to and participation with the chemical sciences and industries between 1950 and the present. [From the text]

Setting an Agenda for the Social Studies of Nanotechnology

by Hyungsub Choi, Sarah Kaplan, Cyrus C. M. Mody and Jody A. Roberts  
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To foster greater collaboration between social scientists and stakeholders in the nanotechnology arena, the Wharton School and the Chemical Heritage Foundation presented a joint symposium to encourage debate about the most productive role of the social sciences in nanotechnology.

Social scientists benefited from hearing various nanotechnology stakeholders discuss what research would be most helpful. Stakeholders, in turn, had the opportunity to consider what social scientists can offer in terms of understanding the evolution of technology, technology-in-use, the economics of technical change, risk analysis, and communication.