Republican Freedom, Popular Control, and Collective Action

Republicans hold that people are dominated merely in virtue of others' having unconstrained abilities to frustrate their choices. They argue further that public officials may dominate citizens unless subject to popular control. Critics identify a dilemma. To maintain the possibility of popular control, republicans must attribute to the people an ability to control public officials merely in virtue of the possibility that they might coordinate their actions. But if the possibility of coordination suffices for attributing abilities to groups, then, even in the best case, countless groups will be dominating because it will be possible for their members to coordinate their actions with the aim of frustrating others' choices. We argue the dilemma is apparent only. To make our argument, we present a novel interpretation of the republican concept of domination with the help of a game-theoretic model that clarifies the significance of collective action problems for republican theory

Popular presidents can influence Congress with the State of the Union, but an unpopular president will simply be ignored

Next year, President Obama will face both a Republican House and Senate, potentially reducing significantly his power over the legislature. Could the increasingly unpopular Obama still exercise some degree of influence through his State of the Union address? Using more than 60 years of data on Congressional policy agendas and the State of the Union John Lovett, Shaun Bevan, and Frank Baumgartner find that the president is more able to influence congressional committees soon after the State of the Union, when they share the same party, and when the president is popular. They also find that this influence is greater over the House than the Senate

Should Republicans be Cosmopolitans?

Contemporary liberalism and republicanism present clearly distinct programs for domestic politics, but the same cannot be said when it comes to global politics: the burgeoning literature on global republicanism has reproduced the divide between cosmopolitan and associational views familiar from long-standing debates among liberal egalitarians. Should republicans be cosmopolitans? Despite presence of a range of views in the literature, there is an emerging consensus that the best answer is no. This paper aims to resist the emerging consensus, arguing that republicans should be cosmopolitans. The considerations offered against cosmopolitanism generally rest on an incomplete understanding of the relationship between economic inequality or poverty on the one hand, and domination on the other. Insofar as republicans agree that promoting freedom from domination should be our central political aim, they should regard the reduction of economic inequality and poverty at home and abroad as equally pressing

Electoral turnover has very little effect on the spending habits of Western democracies

Do new electoral brooms sweep clean the economic policies of the parties that went before? In new research that examines how incoming Western governments set their spending priorities, Derek A. Epp, John Lovett, and Frank R. Baumgartner find that budgets tend to be set with little regard to a government’s ideology, be it left or right. They argue that when setting budgets, incoming policymakers are constrained by social, economic and international realities that are largely beyond their control. This means that budgets are set consistently and inconsistently with what went before at roughly the same rate; left-wing parties do not necessarily favor “big government” nor to right parties always seek to reduce government spending

Effects of gender and ethnicity on outcomes after aortic valve replacement

ObjectiveTo evaluate the clinical outcomes after aortic valve replacement or aortic valve replacement and coronary artery bypass grafting in a large contemporary population, and to determine if outcomes are associated with patient ethnicity and gender status.MethodsUsing the Massachusetts Cardiac Surgery Database, we identified 6809 adults aged 18 years or older who had undergone isolated aortic valve replacement or aortic valve replacement and coronary artery bypass grafting in all non-federal acute-care Massachusetts hospitals from 2002 to 2008. Univariate and multivariate logistic regression analyses were used to identify differences in patient characteristics, major morbidity, and 30-day and 1-year mortality between men (n = 4043) and women (n = 2766) and between whites (n = 6481) and nonwhites (n = 328).ResultsThe unadjusted 30-day mortality rate was 2.6% for the men and 3.1% for the women (P = .296) and 2.8% for whites and 3.7% for nonwhites (P = .342). In adjusted logistic regression models, the 30-day mortality was not different between the female and male patients (odds ratio, 0.88; 95% confidence interval, 0.26–3.02, P = .84) nor between the nonwhites and whites (odds ratio, 1.57; 95% confidence interval, 0.45–5.44; P = .48). The incidence of postoperative stroke was greater in women (3.0% women and 2.2% men, P = .031), and the incidence of postoperative myocardial infarction (10.9% women and 13.6% men; P = .001) and septicemia (1.2% women and 2.0% men; P = .009) was greater in men.ConclusionsEthnicity and gender were not associated with greater 30-day and 1-year mortality after aortic valve replacement or aortic valve replacement and coronary artery bypass grafting. Differences in postoperative outcomes were not observed between ethnic groups

2'-Alkynyl spin-labelling is a minimally perturbing tool for DNA structural analysis

Funding: Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council [EP/M019195/1]; Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council Studentship (to J.S.H.); Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council [BB/J001694/2, BB/R021848/1]; ADTBio; University of Kentucky and NCI Cancer Center Support Grant [P30 CA177558]; The Carmen L. Buck Endowment; Emerging Fields Initiative of the Friedrich-Alexander-University of Erlangen-Nuremberg [Grant title ‘Chemistry in Live Cells’]; Wellcome Trust [099149/Z/12/Z]; Royal Society, University Research Fellowship (to J.E.L.). Funding for open access charge: University of Oxford.The determination of distances between specific points in nucleic acids is essential to understanding their behaviour at the molecular level. The ability to measure distances of 2–10 nm is particularly important: deformations arising from protein binding commonly fall within this range, but the reliable measurement of such distances for a conformational ensemble remains a significant challenge. Using several techniques, we show that electron paramagnetic resonance (EPR) spectroscopy of oligonucleotides spin-labelled with triazole-appended nitroxides at the 2′ position offers a robust and minimally perturbing tool for obtaining such measurements. For two nitroxides, we present results from EPR spectroscopy, X-ray crystal structures of B-form spin-labelled DNA duplexes, molecular dynamics simulations and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy. These four methods are mutually supportive, and pinpoint the locations of the spin labels on the duplexes. In doing so, this work establishes 2′-alkynyl nitroxide spin-labelling as a minimally perturbing method for probing DNA conformation.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

Civic republican social justice and the case of state grammar schools in England

The aim of this paper is to consider the ways in which civic republican theory can provide a meaningful and useful account of social justice, one that is which holds resonance for educational debates. Recognising the need for educationalists interested in civic republicanism to pay greater attention to ideas of justice – and in particular social justice as it concerns relationships between citizens (citizen to citizen, group to group or citizen to group) – it is argued that a form of civic republicanism committed to freedom as non-domination is capable of providing a substantive model for analysing social (in)justice within educational arenas. After positioning the contribution offered here within existing educational literature on civic republicanism, salient elements of social justice as freedom as non-domination are identified. On this basis, debates concerning the existence and potential expansion of state (public) grammar schools in England are considered in relation to the account of republican social justice as non-domination. It is argued that from this republican position grammar schools (1) represent an arbitrary domination of the interests of those less well off by those with greater material and cultural capital and (2) in doing so lead to advantages for some at the expense of others. Though the focus of the paper is on grammar schools in England, it is suggested that republican justice may be a useful frame for considering similar educational cases in England and elsewhere

The structure of the 5′-end of the protein-tyrosine phosphatase PTPRJ mRNA reveals a novel mechanism for translation attenuation

Analysis of the human protein-tyrosine phosphatase (PTP) PTPRJ mRNA detected three in-frame AUGs at the 5′-end (starting at nt +14, +191 and +356) with no intervening stop codons. This tandem AUG arrangement is conserved between humans and the mouse and is unique among the genes of the classical PTPs. Until now it was assumed that the principal open reading frame (ORF) starts at AUG356. Our experiments showed that: (i) translation of the mRNA synthesized under the PTPRJ promoter starts predominantly at AUG191, leading to the generation of a 55 amino acid sequence preceding the signal peptide; (ii) the longer form is being likewise correctly processed into mature PTPRJ; (iii) the translation of the region between AUG191 and AUG356 inhibits the overall expression, a feature which depends on the sequence of the encoded peptide. Specifically, a sequence of 13 amino acids containing multiple arginine residues (RRTGWRRRRRRRR) confers the inhibition. In the absence of uORF these previously unrecognized characteristics of the 5′-end of the mRNA present a novel mechanism to suppress, and potentially to regulate translation

Assessing sustainability in North America’s ecosystems using criticality and information theory

Sustainability is a key concept in economic and policy debates. Nevertheless, it is usually treated only in a qualitative way and has eluded quantitative analysis. Here, we propose a sustainability index based on the premise that sustainable systems do not lose or gain Fisher Information over time. We test this approach using time series data from the AmeriFlux network that measures ecosystem respiration, water and energy fluxes in order to elucidate two key sustainability features: ecosystem health and stability. A novel definition of ecosystem health is developed based on the concept of criticality, which implies that if a system’s fluctuations are scale invariant then the system is in a balance between robustness and adaptability. We define ecosystem stability by taking an information theory approach that measures its entropy and Fisher information. Analysis of the Ameriflux consortium big data set of ecosystem respiration time series is contrasted with land condition data. In general we find a good agreement between the sustainability index and land condition data. However, we acknowledge that the results are a preliminary test of the approach and further verification will require a multi-signal analysis. For example, high values of the sustainability index for some croplands are counter-intuitive and we interpret these results as ecosystems maintained in artificial health due to continuous human-induced inflows of matter and energy in the form of soil nutrients and control of competition, pests and disease

Utilisation of an operative difficulty grading scale for laparoscopic cholecystectomy

Background A reliable system for grading operative difficulty of laparoscopic cholecystectomy would standardise description of findings and reporting of outcomes. The aim of this study was to validate a difficulty grading system (Nassar scale), testing its applicability and consistency in two large prospective datasets. Methods Patient and disease-related variables and 30-day outcomes were identified in two prospective cholecystectomy databases: the multi-centre prospective cohort of 8820 patients from the recent CholeS Study and the single-surgeon series containing 4089 patients. Operative data and patient outcomes were correlated with Nassar operative difficultly scale, using Kendall’s tau for dichotomous variables, or Jonckheere–Terpstra tests for continuous variables. A ROC curve analysis was performed, to quantify the predictive accuracy of the scale for each outcome, with continuous outcomes dichotomised, prior to analysis. Results A higher operative difficulty grade was consistently associated with worse outcomes for the patients in both the reference and CholeS cohorts. The median length of stay increased from 0 to 4 days, and the 30-day complication rate from 7.6 to 24.4% as the difficulty grade increased from 1 to 4/5 (both p < 0.001). In the CholeS cohort, a higher difficulty grade was found to be most strongly associated with conversion to open and 30-day mortality (AUROC = 0.903, 0.822, respectively). On multivariable analysis, the Nassar operative difficultly scale was found to be a significant independent predictor of operative duration, conversion to open surgery, 30-day complications and 30-day reintervention (all p < 0.001). Conclusion We have shown that an operative difficulty scale can standardise the description of operative findings by multiple grades of surgeons to facilitate audit, training assessment and research. It provides a tool for reporting operative findings, disease severity and technical difficulty and can be utilised in future research to reliably compare outcomes according to case mix and intra-operative difficulty