Invaluable: Value Added Tax, Post-Colonialism, & the United States of America

Value-added tax is occasionally proffered as an alternative or even an addition to the federal income tax system. Value-added tax, or VAT, is widely accepted throughout Europe and indeed the world, but the United States remains a notable exception. This choice remains an intriguing one to revisit from time to time. This Note, however, will argue that VAT is arguably a by-product of the colonial frameworks that once dominated our global consciousness, and therefore, that VAT is not right for the United States. The Note will, where appropriate, compare and contrast key differences between the system, or systems, of taxation at work in the United States and VAT. The Note ultimately reaches the conclusion that a switch to (or even from) VAT is unlikely to be practical

Bookreview: The politics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-first century. By Nikolas Rose. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press 2006. ISBN 9780691121918

525BookreviewThepolitics of life itself: biomedicine, power, and subjectivity in the twenty-firstcentury. By Nikolas Rose. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. 2006.$25.95/£14.95. ISBN: 9780691121918SAGE Publications, Inc.2008DOI: 10.1177/14744740080150040708SimonReid-HenryQueen Mary, University of LondonInthe classic analyses of Foucault, the 18th and 19th centuries saw the emergenceof a biopolitical state, in which the very vitality of individual citizenscame to be the subject of systems of management (through state provision forhealth and welfare, for example). Such a politics centred on the human bodyis today being reconfigured, claims the sociologist Nikolas Rose, in his newbook The Politics of life itself. To summarize brutally, new ways of understandinglife have resulted in new forms of managing, shaping and contesting it. Thus,vital politics today, Rose suggests, `is concerned with our growing capacitiesto control, man- age, engineer, reshape, and modulate the very vital capacitiesof human beings as living crea- tures' (p. 3). There is much to admire inhis account of the forms that such a politics is taking, and I would encouragethe reader to engage with this work. But two aspects of Rose's account warrantbrief commentary. First, both life and politics are given, in my view, toonarrow a definition in this book. Central to what Rose seeks to analyse, forexample, is the emergence of a particular `style of thought' – drawingon Ludwig Fleck's phrase – based upon a shift in the scale at whichwe think to understand, act on, and act in relation to, human life: from aclinical gaze cen- tred upon the body, to a molecular gaze that understandslife at the level of its component526parts(sequences of nucleotide bases, transporter genes and the like). This approachis in many ways quite helpful, but to its detriment, I think, it emphasizesquestions of techno- logical novelty at the expense of questions about thedistribution and control of those novel systems, not to mention the socialinequalities from which they actively divert attention and in some cases maybe contributing towards. As in the very western biomedical practices the bookseeks to analyse, the infectious diseases, poverty and inequality that structurethe pol- itics of life for most of the world's population are given scanttreatment. This is not, in fair- ness, Rose's intention, but my point is thatit could have been. That it is not is indicative of a widening gap betweenthe literature on public health and the literature on biomedicine and thebiological sciences. Much is made in this book of the new choices and newresponsibil- ities facing the individual. There is considerable scope forsetting alongside this a fuller appre- ciation of how those choices are shapedby the often rather older and more mundane limits set by one's social andgeographical location. Second, there is a profusion of spatial metaphors andreasoning that I think geographers might usefully elaborate, contest and refine.There is something not just inherently but con- stitutively geographical aboutmany of the changes wrought by the life sciences and biomed- icine in particularthat Rose describes in this book and that many geographers are actively engagedin researching. In addition to using geography as a shorthand for thinkingabout the wider implications and distributional effects of these new technologies,therefore (Rose speaks for example of a `cartography of the future' in lieuof a `history of the present'), geograph- ical notions of space, place andscale might well be usefully brought to bear upon this emer- gent social andscholarly field

A New Funding Ecology : A Blueprint For Action

This work is the result of partnership between Collaborate, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (UK Branch) and the Big Lottery Fund. It is based on UK-wide research with 40 structured interviews, a number of group sessions and informal conversations with a wide range of leaders within the independent funding sector (including a workshop held at the Association of Charitable Funders annual conference). It draws on Collaborate's wider work across public services, and reflects expertise and analysis from a number of organisations and commentators looking at the sector from the outside in. The purpose was to substantiate the initial thinking developed in a first paper, work with a wider range of funders, and develop lines of inquiry and practical solutions using the framework which had been set about the funding ecology

Validation of an observational instrument for measuring role behavior in social work groups as one aspect of maturity

Thesis (M.S.)--Boston Universit

Discovery of An Unusually Blue L Dwarf Within 10 pc of the Sun

We report the discovery of an unusually blue L5 dwarf within 10 pc of the Sun from a search of Sloan Digital Sky Survey (SDSS) spectra. A spectrophotometric distance estimate of 8.0+/-1.6 pc places SDSS J141624.08+134826.7 among the six closest known L dwarfs. SDSS 1416+13 was overlooked in infrared color-based searches because of its unusually blue J-K_S color, which also identifies it as the nearest member of the blue L dwarf subclass. We present additional infrared and optical spectroscopy from the IRTF/SpeX and Magellan/MagE spectrographs and determine UVW motions that indicate thin disk kinematics. The inclusion of SDSS 1416+13 in the 20 pc sample of L dwarfs increases the number of L5 dwarfs by 20% suggesting that the L dwarf luminosity function may be far from complete.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figures, accepted for publication in AJ; updated version includes corrected radial velocit

Epsilon Indi B: a new benchmark T dwarf

We have identified a new early T dwarf only 3.6pc from the Sun, as a common proper motion companion (separation 1459AU) to the K5V star Epsilon Indi (HD209100). As such, Epsilon Indi B is one of the highest proper motion sources outside the solar system (~4.7 arcsec/yr), part of one of the twenty nearest stellar systems, and the nearest brown dwarf to the Sun. Optical photometry obtained from the SuperCOSMOS Sky Survey was combined with approximate infrared photometry from the 2MASS Quicklook survey data release, yielding colours for the source typical of early T dwarfs. Follow up infrared spectroscopy using the ESO NTT and SOFI confirmed its spectral type to be T2.5+/-0.5. With Ks=11.2, Epsilon Indi B is 1.7 magnitudes brighter than any previously known T dwarf and 4 magnitudes brighter than the typical object in its class, making it highly amenable to detailed study. Also, as a companion to a bright nearby star, it has a precisely known distance (3.626pc) and relatively well-known age (0.8-2Gyr), allowing us to estimate its luminosity as logL/Lsun=-4.67, its effective temperature as 1260K, and its mass as ~40-60Mjup. Epsilon Indi B represents an important addition to the census of the Solar neighbourhood and, equally importantly, a new benchmark object in our understanding of substellar objects.Comment: Accepted by A&A (Letters); 5 pages, 3 figure