The One Percent Solution: How Corporations are Remaking America One State at a Time

[Excerpt] In January 2015, Tennessee’s Republican governor, Bill Haslam, unveiled a proposal to expand his state’s Medicaid program to provide health insurance to two hundred thousand low-income residents. At the time, Haslam was at the peak of his power: he had just won reelection with 70 percent of the vote and had been named to head the Republican Governors Association. Haslam insisted that his plan was “not Obamacare”; indeed, he had gained concessions from the Obama administration allowing him to write conservative requirements into the program. His Republican colleagues—who controlled both houses of the legislature—supported his proposal, based partly on polling showing widespread voter approval. And yet none of this was enough. An advocacy group funded by the billionaire Koch brothers, Americans for Prosperity (AFP), sent field organizers into the state, ran weeks of advertising, and staged demonstrations insisting that any Medicaid expansion whatsoever amounted to “a vote for Obamacare.” Republican caucus chair Glen Casada termed AFP’s campaign “politics of intimidation.” But it worked; the governor’s bill was defeated. Declaring victory, an AFP spokesman warned that “other governors [should] look at Tennessee as an example.” The Tennessee experience raises important questions about American politics and the forces that shape Americans’ economic lives. How could an outside advocacy group overturn the will of elected officials and their constituents? What led a corporate-backed group to undermine its Republican allies? Why would the Koch brothers, whose primary interests are in the oil industry, care enough about Medicaid to bankroll this type of campaign? And finally, if corporate lobbies have the power to do what they did in Tennessee, what else could they do? In what other ways might they be trying to rewrite the rules that govern our economy? In answering these questions, this book aims to show how America’s most powerful corporate lobbies are working to remake the country’s economy in ways that will affect all Americans profoundly—and yet are largely invisible to most of us. Understanding these forces’ legislative agenda is essential to comprehending America’s current political and economic trajectory. Because this agenda has been enacted in state legislatures rather 4han the U.S. Congress, it is state-level initiatives that form the subject of this book

Educational Practices for a New Nigeria: An Exploratory Study

This article reports on a qualitative study conducted at the Nigerian Turkish International Colleges (NTICs) in Abuja, Nigeria. Twenty-two participants comprised of three administrators, seven teachers, four parents, and eight students participated in the study. The data collected through observations, informal, formal and semi-structured in-depth individual interviews, focus groups, document analysis (of teachers’ syllabi, coursework materials, Nigerian nation-wide exam reports, and copies of district and state lesson design guidelines), and field notes were used for content analysis. Themes of the study were constructed to explore the schools’ role in promoting openness, mutual understanding, and habits of discourse vital to democracy in a society that is deeply divided along religious, ethnic, and geographical lines. This article explains the value of NTICs by focusing on the role of curriculum in promoting tolerance, unity, economic prosperity, and stability. This article also considers how these NTICs attempt to encourage the establishment of a civil society based upon democratic principles of governance while focusing on multicultural values. Cet article présente les résultats d’une étude entreprise aux Nigerian Turkish International Colleges (NTICs) à Abuja, au Nigeria. L’étude a impliqué 22 participants, dont trois administrateurs, sept enseignants, quatre parents et huit étudiants. Les données ont été recueillies lors de séances d’observation, d’entrevues individuelles approfondies (informelles, formelles et semi-structurées), de groupes de discussion, d’analyse documentaire (plans de cours des professeurs, matériel de cours, rapports portant sur des examens à l’échelle du Nigeria, lignes directrices de la part des districts et de l’état pour la conception des cours) et par des notes prises sur le terrain. Les thèmes élaborés pour l’étude visaient l’exploration du rôle de l’école dans la promotion de l’ouverture, la compréhension mutuelle et les habitudes de discours essentielles à la démocratie dans une société qui est profondément divisée selon des clivages religieux, ethniques et géographiques. Cet article explique la valeur des NTICs en se penchant sur le rôle des programmes d’études dans la promotion de la tolérance, l’unité, la prospérité économique et la stabilité. De plus, il considère les efforts de ces NTICs pour encourager l’établissement d’une société civile reposant sur des principes démocratiques de gouvernance tout en tenant compte de valeurs multiculturelles

Parallel, multi-stage processing of colors, faces and shapes in macaque inferior temporal cortex

Visual-object processing culminates in inferior temporal (IT) cortex. To assess the organization of IT, we measured fMRI responses in alert monkey to achromatic images (faces, fruit, bodies, places) and colored gratings. IT contained multiple color-biased regions, which were typically ventral to face patches and, remarkably, yoked to them, spaced regularly at four locations predicted by known anatomy. Color and face selectivity increased for more anterior regions, indicative of a broad hierarchical arrangement. Responses to non-face shapes were found across IT, but were stronger outside color-biased regions and face patches, consistent with multiple parallel streams. IT also contained multiple coarse eccentricity maps: face patches overlapped central representations; color-biased regions spanned mid-peripheral representations; and place-biased regions overlapped peripheral representations. These results suggest that IT comprises parallel, multi-stage processing networks subject to one organizing principle

Lack of Z-DNA Conformation in Mitomycin-Modified Polynucleotides Having Inverted Circular Dichroism

Poly(dG-dC)· poly(dG-dC) and Micrococcus lysodeikticus DNA were modified by exposure to reductively activated mitomycin C, an antitumor antibiotic. The resulting covalent drug-polynucleotide complexes displayed varying degrees of CD inversions, which are strikingly similar to the inverted spectrum observed with Z-DNA. The following criteria have been used to establish, however, that the inverted CD pattern seen in mitomycin C-polynucleotide complexes does not reflect a Z-DNA conformation. (i) The ethanol-induced transition of poly(dG-dC)· poly(dG-dC) from B to Z conformation is not facilitated but rather is inhibited by mitomycin C modification. This may be due to the presence of crosslinks. (ii) Radioimmunoassay indicated no competition for Z-DNA-specific antibody by any of the mitomycin C-modified polynucleotides. (iii) 31P NMR of the complexes yielded a single relatively narrow resonance, which is inconsistent with the dinucleotide repeat characteristic of Z-DNA. Alternative explanations for the inverted CD pattern include a drug-induced left-handed but non-Z conformational change or the superposition of an induced CD onto the CD of B-DNA due to drug-base electronic interactions. These results illustrate the need for caution in interpreting CD changes alone as an indication of Z-DNA conformation

Additional records and new synonyms of Cicindelidae and Carabidae (Coleoptera) from the lsland of Sakhalin in the Russian Far East

Faunistic records of three cicindelid and 47 carabid beetle species are given for the Island of Sakhalin in the Russian Far East. Most records refer to a material collected in 1993 and 1994 in SW Sakhalin by the two junior authors. The following five carabid species are here reported from Sakhalin for the first time: Bembidion chloropus Bates, Pterostichus neglectus A. Morawitz, Agonum jankowskii Lafer, A. piceum (Linnaeus) and Microlestes minutulus (Goeze). The gross distributions of all mentioned species are given, with special emphasis on the Far East. The following syn. nov. are given: Pterostichus (Euryperis) eximius A. Morawitz, 1862 (= crassiceps A. Morawitz, 1862; = rudnicus Jedlicka, 1938; = obliquebasalis Jedlicka, 1962; = prochazkorum Jedlicka, 1967; = sakhalinensis Kirschenhofer, 1985)

Color-Biased Regions of the Ventral Visual Pathway Lie between Face- and Place-Selective Regions in Humans, as in Macaques

The existence of color-processing regions in the human ventral visual pathway (VVP) has long been known from patient and imaging studies, but their location in the cortex relative to other regions, their selectivity for color compared with other properties (shape and object category), and their relationship to color-processing regions found in nonhuman primates remain unclear. We addressed these questions by scanning 13 subjects with fMRI while they viewed two versions of movie clips (colored, achromatic) of five different object classes (faces, scenes, bodies, objects, scrambled objects). We identified regions in each subject that were selective for color, faces, places, and object shape, and measured responses within these regions to the 10 conditions in independently acquired data. We report two key findings. First, the three previously reported color-biased regions (located within a band running posterior–anterior along the VVP, present in most of our subjects) were sandwiched between face-selective cortex and place-selective cortex, forming parallel bands of face, color, and place selectivity that tracked the fusiform gyrus/collateral sulcus. Second, the posterior color-biased regions showed little or no selectivity for object shape or for particular stimulus categories and showed no interaction of color preference with stimulus category, suggesting that they code color independently of shape or stimulus category; moreover, the shape-biased lateral occipital region showed no significant color bias. These observations mirror results in macaque inferior temporal cortex (Lafer-Sousa and Conway, 2013), and taken together, these results suggest a homology in which the entire tripartite face/color/place system of primates migrated onto the ventral surface in humans over the course of evolution.National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant EY13455)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant EY023322)National Institutes of Health (U.S.) (Grant 5T32GM007484-38)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (STC Award CCF-1231216)National Science Foundation (U.S.) (Grant 1353571)National Science Foundation (U.S.). Graduate Research Fellowshi

Homenagem: JK, o homem, o Presidente, a atualidade

O sucesso do governo JK está ligado à qualidade do seu juízo político, que lhe permitiu promover o desenvolvimento econômico com estabilidade política democrática, lastreado numa tolerância liberal que levou a bom termo a meta da legalidade democrática. Ele criou o novo a partir do existente, em sintonia com as polaridades da sua personalidade: um homem de ação, preocupado em fazer coisas e, ao mesmo tempo, um bem-sucedido exemplo de planejador; um homem moderno com apego a tradições; um cosmopolita com aspectos provincianos; um intuitivo com a capacidade do diagnóstico a partir da experiência de médico. Ele mudou o país com imaginação política, imaginação administrativa, talento, liderança, criatividade.JK government’s success is due to the great quality of his political insights, which allowed him to promote economic development along with democratic political stability, hedged by a liberal tolerance that allowed him to achieve his goals of democratic legitimacy. He created the newness from what already existed, well-tuned with the characteristics of his personality: he was a man of action, concerned with doing things, and at the same time a successful public planner; he was a modern man with a penchant for traditions, a cosmopolitan with small town peculiarities; an intuitive with diagnosis capacity that came together with his experience as a physician. He changed the country with political imagination, management imagination, talent, leadership, creativity

Human Rights Challenges in the Contemporary World. Reflections on a Personal Journey of Thought and Action

Following the steps indicated by Hannah Arendt  regarding the epistemological role of  experience, Celso Lafer, discusses how his experiences as professor, as a Human Rights lawyer and as Brazilian Public Official shaped his views regarding Human Rights. He examines the challenges in the contemporary world that the Human Rights agenda faces in the national and international sphere. His organizing perspective is a broad and heuristic use of Hannah Arendt’s “The Right to have Rights”. He stresses and exemplifies that the proper access of individuals and groups to an effective legal order is a key variable to enable the containment of the nullification and impairment of Human Rights