Accepting Collective Responsibility for the Future

Existing institutions do not seem well-designed to address paradigmatically global, intergenerational and ecological problems, such as climate change. 1 In particular, they tend to crowd out intergenerational concern, and thereby facilitate a “tyranny of the contemporary” in which successive generations exploit the future to their own advantage in morally indefensible ways (albeit perhaps unintentionally). Overcoming such a tyranny will require both accepting responsibility for the future and meeting the institutional gap. I propose that we approach the first in terms of a traditional “delegated responsibility” model of the transmission of individual responsibility to collectives, and the second with a call for a global constitutional convention focused on future generations. In this paper, I develop the delegated responsibility model by suggesting how it leads us to understand both past failures and prospective responsibility. I then briefly defend the call for a global constitutional convention

Evaluation of routes to chiral core dendrimers

Dendrimers are macromolecules with a highly branched three-dimensional shape, produced in an iterative sequence of reaction steps, in which each reaction results in a new generation. Dendrimers have stimulated wide interest in the field of chemistry and biology, particularly with respect to applications to drug delivery and more recently imaging. They have also been of growing interest as macromolecular hosts, potential catalysts and have been attached to surfaces and polymeric materials, and have significant potential in new materials development. Dendrimers can have comparable molecular dimensions to some proteins and could potentially have internal microenvironments akin to the active site of an enzyme. Encapsulation within dendrimers has significant potential biomedical applications, whilst dendrimer surface behavior is of interest to evaluate interactions of dendrimer surface functionality (its most accessible region) with biological molecules. Exploiting many of these areas are dependent on generating chirality in dendrimers

Dynamic transcription programs during ES cell differentiation towards mesoderm in serum versus serum-freeBMP4 culture

Expression profiling of embryonic stem (ES) cell differentiation in the presence of serum has been performed previously. It remains unclear if transcriptional activation is dependent on complext growth factor mixtures in serum or whether this process is intrinsic to ES cells once the stem cell program has been inactivated. The aims of this study were to determine the transcriptional programs associated with the stem cell state and to characterize mesoderm differentiation between serum and serum-free culture

Efficient Classical Simulation of Optical Quantum Circuits

We identify a broad class of physical processes in an optical quantum circuit that can be efficiently simulated on a classical computer: this class includes unitary transformations, amplification, noise, and measurements. This simulatability result places powerful constraints on the capability to realize exponential quantum speedups as well as on inducing an optical nonlinear transformation via linear optics, photodetection-based measurement and classical feedforward of measurement results, optimal cloning, and a wide range of other processes.Comment: 4 pages, published versio