39 research outputs found
The culls
The Culls is a fictional account of a teenage farm boy searching for his moral compass after his mother has passed away. Edgar Hildal, who grew up on a small, family farm, now works in a modern hog confinement, where he struggles with the ethics of industrial farming
How Ordinary Elimination Became Gaussian Elimination
Newton, in notes that he would rather not have seen published, described a
process for solving simultaneous equations that later authors applied
specifically to linear equations. This method that Euler did not recommend,
that Legendre called "ordinary," and that Gauss called "common" - is now named
after Gauss: "Gaussian" elimination. Gauss's name became associated with
elimination through the adoption, by professional computers, of a specialized
notation that Gauss devised for his own least squares calculations. The
notation allowed elimination to be viewed as a sequence of arithmetic
operations that were repeatedly optimized for hand computing and eventually
were described by matrices.Comment: 56 pages, 21 figures, 1 tabl
Size Doesn't Matter: Towards a More Inclusive Philosophy of Biology
notes: As the primary author, OâMalley drafted the paper, and gathered and analysed data (scientific papers and talks). Conceptual analysis was conducted by both authors.publication-status: Publishedtypes: ArticlePhilosophers of biology, along with everyone else, generally perceive life to fall into two broad categories, the microbes and macrobes, and then pay most of their attention to the latter. âMacrobeâ is the word we propose for larger life forms, and we use it as part of an argument for microbial equality. We suggest that taking more notice of microbes â the dominant life form on the planet, both now and throughout evolutionary history â will transform some of the philosophy of biologyâs standard ideas on ontology, evolution, taxonomy and biodiversity. We set out a number of recent developments in microbiology â including biofilm formation, chemotaxis, quorum sensing and gene transfer â that highlight microbial capacities for cooperation and communication and break down conventional thinking that microbes are solely or primarily single-celled organisms. These insights also bring new perspectives to the levels of selection debate, as well as to discussions of the evolution and nature of multicellularity, and to neo-Darwinian understandings of evolutionary mechanisms. We show how these revisions lead to further complications for microbial classification and the philosophies of systematics and biodiversity. Incorporating microbial insights into the philosophy of biology will challenge many of its assumptions, but also give greater scope and depth to its investigations
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Use of High Resolution DAQ System to Aid Diagnosis of HD2b, a High Performance Nb3Sn Dipole
A novel voltage monitoring system to record voltage transients in superconducting magnets is being developed at LBNL. This system has 160 monitoring channels capable of measuring differential voltages of up to 1.5kV with 100kHz bandwidth and 500kS/s digitizing rate. This paper presents analysis results from data taken with a 16 channel prototype system. From that analysis we were able to diagnose a change in the current-temperature margin of the superconducting cable by analyzing Flux-Jump data collected after a magnet energy extraction failure during testing of a high field Nb{sub 3}Sn dipole
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Continuous versus intermittent BRAF and MEK inhibition in patients with BRAF-mutated melanoma: a randomized phase 2 trial.
Preclinical modeling suggests that intermittent BRAF inhibitor therapy may delay acquired resistance when blocking oncogenic BRAFV600 in melanoma1,2. We conducted S1320, a randomized, open-label, phase 2 clinical trial (NCT02196181) evaluating whether intermittent dosing of the BRAF inhibitor dabrafenib and the MEK inhibitor trametinib improves progression-free survival in patients with metastatic and unresectable BRAFV600 melanoma. Patients were enrolled at 68 academic and community sites nationally. All patients received continuous dabrafenib and trametinib during an 8-week lead-in period, after which patients with non-progressing tumors were randomized to either continuous or intermittent dosing of both drugs on a 3-week-off, 5-week-on schedule. The trial has completed accrual and 206 patients with similar baseline characteristics were randomized 1:1 to the two study arms (105 to continuous dosing, 101 to intermittent dosing). Continuous dosing yielded a statistically significant improvement in post-randomization progression-free survival compared with intermittent dosing (median 9.0 months versus 5.5 months, Pâ=â0.064, pre-specified two-sided αâ=â0.2). Therefore, contrary to the initial hypothesis, intermittent dosing did not improve progression-free survival in patients. There were no differences in the secondary outcomes, including overall survival and the overall incidence of treatment-associated toxicity, between the two groups