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This paper addresses the relationships between innovation, research and development (R&D) and productivity in domestic ICT firms in Costa Rica. Factors considered were the types of innovation outputs produced by domestic ICT firms, the relative importance of innovation inputs, the impacts of innovation on firm productivity, the protection of innovations, and impediments to innovation. While most firms engaged in all types of output and input innovations, they appear to be driven by retaining or increasing market share rather than increasing productivity. Half of firms do not formally protect the intellectual property created by their innovations, are not familiar with methods for protecting innovation or the availability of government grants for such purposes, and face barriers associated with the Costa Rican Patent Office. Other impediments include lack of knowledge about financial resources available and scarcity of human resources. There is also evidence of knowledge spillovers through worker mobility from multinationals operating in Costa Rica to domestic ICT firms.

Millisecond pulsars (MSPs) are old neutron stars that spin hundreds of times per second and appear to pulsate as their emission beams cross our line of sight. To date, radio pulsations have been detected from all rotation-powered MSPs. In an attempt to discover radio-quiet gamma-ray MSPs, we used the aggregated power from the computers of tens of thousands of volunteers participating in the Einstein@Home distributed computing project to search for pulsations from unidentified gamma-ray sources in Fermi Large Area Telescope data. This survey discovered two isolated MSPs, one of which is the only known rotation-powered MSP to remain undetected in radio observations. These gamma-ray MSPs were discovered in completely blind searches without prior constraints from other observations, raising hopes for detecting MSPs from a predicted Galactic bulge population. ; This work was supported by the Max-Planck-Gesellschaft, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft through an Emmy Noether Research Grant [no. PL 710/1-1 (H.J.P.)], and NSF award 1104902. C.J.C. acknowledges support from the European Research Council under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 715051; Spiders). W.M. was partially supported by the Thailand Research Fund (grants TRG5880173 and RTA5980003). M.R. was funded by the Italian Ministry of Education, University and Research (contract no. FIRB-2012-RBFR12PM1F). Work at the Naval Research Laboratory is supported by NASA. The Parkes Observatory is part of the Australia Telescope, funded by the Commonwealth of Australia for operation as a National Facility managed by the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). The Fermi LAT Collaboration acknowledges generous ongoing support from a number of agencies and institutes that have supported both the development and the operation of the LAT, as well as scientific data analysis. These include the National Aeronautics and Space Administration and the Department of Energy in the United States, the Commissariat à l'Energie Atomique and the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique/Institut National de Physique Nucléaire et de Physique des Particules in France; the Agenzia Spaziale Italiana and the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare in Italy, the Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science and Technology (MEXT), High Energy Accelerator Research Organization (KEK), and Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency (JAXA) in Japan; and the K. A. Wallenberg Foundation, the Swedish Research Council, and the Swedish National Space Board in Sweden. Additional support for science analysis during the operations phase is gratefully acknowledged from the Istituto Nazionale di Astrofisica in Italy and the Centre National d'Études Spatiales in France. This work performed in part under DOE Contract DE-AC02-76SF00515. ; Peer Reviewed