The International Division of Labor in Economists' Field: Academic Subordination in Exchange for Political Prerogatives in Argentina

Since the 1970s, economics has emerged as a global profession, with economists becoming main characters of the intellectual and political life in many countries. Inspired by Bourdieu, several analyses faced the challenge of “theorizing fields beyond the nation-state” (Buchholz 2016). Some scholars emphasized that internationalization entailed a growing asymmetry between dominant and dominated participants: the former acting as “exporters” and the latter as “importers” of ideas (Dezalay and Garth 2002). Others pointed out the process of “creative destruction” that accompanied the globalization of local fields (Fourcade 2006). Finally, still others noted the emergence of a new field of globalized experts and think tanks (Medvetz 2012). Through a socio-historical depiction of economists in Argentina, we problematize the subordinated role of peripheral economists. Rather than a dominant-dominated logic, we identify a new international division of labor. Based on more than 60 interviews with economists, archival research, and statistical analyses, this paper shows that while a dependent position in the global academic field reduced Argentinian economists’ theoretical autonomy, it gave them the scientific authority that in turn paved the road to access very well-paid work as consultants and high-level public servants

Incorporating prior knowledge improves detection of differences in bacterial growth rate

BACKGROUND: Robust statistical detection of differences in the bacterial growth rate can be challenging, particularly when dealing with small differences or noisy data. The Bayesian approach provides a consistent framework for inferring model parameters and comparing hypotheses. The method captures the full uncertainty of parameter values, whilst making effective use of prior knowledge about a given system to improve estimation. RESULTS: We demonstrated the application of Bayesian analysis to bacterial growth curve comparison. Following extensive testing of the method, the analysis was applied to the large dataset of bacterial responses which are freely available at the web-resource, ComBase. Detection was found to be improved by using prior knowledge from clusters of previously analysed experimental results at similar environmental conditions. A comparison was also made to a more traditional statistical testing method, the F-test, and Bayesian analysis was found to perform more conclusively and to be capable of attributing significance to more subtle differences in growth rate. CONCLUSIONS: We have demonstrated that by making use of existing experimental knowledge, it is possible to significantly improve detection of differences in bacterial growth rate

Solar Flare Intermittency and the Earth's Temperature Anomalies

We argue that earth's short-term temperature anomalies and the solar flare intermittency are linked. The analysis is based upon the study of the scaling of both the spreading and the entropy of the diffusion generated by the fluctuations of the temperature time series. The joint use of these two methods evidences the presence of a L\'{e}vy component in the temporal persistence of the temperature data sets that corresponds to the one that would be induced by the solar flare intermittency. The mean monthly temperature datasets cover the period from 1856 to 2002.Comment: 4 pages, 5 figure