Risky Business: Popular Images and Reality of Capital Markets Handling Risk-From the Tulip Craze to the Decade of Greed

Speculators are often portrayed in popular culture as predatory businesspeople. Sometimes they are seen as fools. But, the portraits are often ill-informed. This article studies speculation found in Tulip Mania and the South Sea Bubble. The article then focuses on speculation in debt from the American Revolution. The Gilded Age and railroad building are surveyed. The article concludes with the Decade of Greed, the 1980s, as envisioned in film. While popular portraits are entertaining, the historic and economic reality is much different. Speculators play an important role providing capital and liquidity, risk taking, and rationing of resources critical for market economies

ESSAY: Law Schools Can Solve the Bar Pass Problem -- Do the Work!

Law schools have a moral and professional obligation, not only to graduate their increasingly heterogeneous student body, but also to enable graduates to practice by preparing them to pass the bar. This essay explains why strategies to improve the bar pass rate by increasing selectivity, either through admissions or attrition, may not succeed. It argues that law schools must work with the students they admit. The essay concludes by offering a number of common sense tactics and strategies to raise exam pass rates without turning law schools into \u27bar schools\u27 (p. 322)

The Recovery of Hong Kong By the People\u27s Republic of China--A Fifty Year Experiment in Capitalism and Freedom

This article analyzes the 1984 UK-PRC agreement which returned Hong Kong to China, and argues that this unique experiment, involving fundamentally dissimilar societies, will permit Hong Kong to flourish and that the PRC must respect the terms of the agreement for sound economic, political, and diplomatic reasons

The Condominium Crisis: A Problem Unresolved

Many factors have contributed to the movement toward condominium conversion

The Condominium Crisis: A Problem Unresolved

Many factors have contributed to the movement toward condominium conversion

Prevalence of surgical procedures at symptomatic onset of prion disease

This case-control study examines the frequency of invasive procedures at the onset of prion disease symptoms to determine the scope of the risk of contamination to future patients

3D molecular MR imaging of liver fibrosis and response to rapamycin therapy in a bile duct ligation rat model

Background & Aims Liver biopsy, the gold standard for assessing liver fibrosis, suffers from limitations due to sampling error and invasiveness. There is therefore a critical need for methods to non-invasively quantify fibrosis throughout the entire liver. The goal of this study was to use molecular Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) of Type I collagen to non-invasively image liver fibrosis and assess response to rapamycin therapy. Methods Liver fibrosis was induced in rats by bile duct ligation (BDL). MRI was performed 4, 10, or 18 days following BDL. Some BDL rats were treated daily with rapamycin starting on day 4 and imaged on day 18. A three-dimensional (3D) inversion recovery MRI sequence was used to quantify the change in liver longitudinal relaxation rate (ΔR1) induced by the collagen-targeted probe EP-3533. Liver tissue was subjected to pathologic scoring of fibrosis and analyzed for Sirius Red staining and hydroxyproline content. Results ΔR1 increased significantly with time following BDL compared to controls in agreement with ex vivo measures of increasing fibrosis. Receiver operating characteristic curve analysis demonstrated the ability of ΔR1 to detect liver fibrosis and distinguish intermediate and late stages of fibrosis. EP-3533 MRI correctly characterized the response to rapamycin in 11 out of 12 treated rats compared to the standard of collagen proportional area (CPA). 3D MRI enabled characterization of disease heterogeneity throughout the whole liver. Conclusions EP-3533 allowed for staging of liver fibrosis, assessment of response to rapamycin therapy, and demonstrated the ability to detect heterogeneity in liver fibrosis.National Cancer Institute (U.S.) (CA140861)National Institutes of Health. National Institute for Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (EB009062)Sanofi Aventis (Firm