Pathfinder autonomous rendezvous and docking project

Capabilities are being developed and demonstrated to support manned and unmanned vehicle operations in lunar and planetary orbits. In this initial phase, primary emphasis is placed on definition of the system requirements for candidate Pathfinder mission applications and correlation of these system-level requirements with specific requirements. The FY-89 activities detailed are best characterized as foundation building. The majority of the efforts were dedicated to assessing the current state of the art, identifying desired elaborations and expansions to this level of development and charting a course that will realize the desired objectives in the future. Efforts are detailed across all work packages in developing those requirements and tools needed to test, refine, and validate basic autonomous rendezvous and docking elements

Regulating Identity: Medical Regulation as Social Control

New biomedical technologies offer growing opportunities not only to prevent and treat illnesses, but also to change how healthy people think, feel, behave, and appear to others. Controversies over these nontherapeutic practices are a pervasive feature of contemporary American culture, from students on “study drugs” and cops on steroids to skin-lightening by black celebrities and the over-prescription of antidepressants. Yet the diversity of these controversies often masks their common root—namely, disputes about the propriety of using medical technologies as tools for shaping one’s identity. Some observers believe these so-called “enhancement” practices threaten important values, offering unfair advantages to users and undermining their ability to lead “authentic” lives. But existing systems of medical regulation, which were designed to promote the safety of therapeutic treatments and to deter drug abuse, are largely blind to concerns beyond protecting human health. As identity-modifying practices continue to proliferate, calls are growing to restrict access to these technologies on moral grounds. These proposals overlook the United States’ extensive and unfortunate experiences regulating nontherapeutic medical practices to enforce contested conceptions of morality. From Prohibition and the war on drugs to laws restricting contraceptives and abortion procedures, these efforts have been costly, ineffective, and intrusive. They have also interfered with fundamental liberties involving bodily integrity and identity—a fact that is widely recognized in the context of reproduction technologies, but largely overlooked with respect to other medical interventions. Rather than expanding our reliance on contested moral concerns in policing access to medical interventions, the U.S. should purge its existing regulation of morality-based intrusions and recommit itself to protecting human health

Narratives of Diversity in the Corporate Boardroom: What Corporate Insiders Say About Why Diversity Matters

Over the last generation, the concept of diversity has become commonplace and taken-for-granted in discourses ranging from law to education to business. In higher education, for example, it is hard to imagine a faculty job search or a student admissions discussion that was not heavily laden with talk of diversity, in the sense of the representative inclusion of women and racial and ethnic minorities in a group or organization. In this paper we present the results of an interview-based study of the discourse of diversity in a particular business setting: the corporate boardroom. Our principal observation is that—thirty-one years after the Supreme Court’s Bakke decision introduced the term into public discourse--corporate insiders appear not to have arrived at a master narrative to explain the pursuit of diversity on boards of directors. Instead, their accounts stress a variety of factors and feature few concrete examples

Regulating Identity: Medical Regulation as Social Control

New biomedical technologies offer growing opportunities not only to prevent and treat illnesses, but also to change how healthy people think, feel, behave, and appear to others. Controversies over these nontherapeutic practices are a pervasive feature of contemporary American culture, from students on study drugs and cops on steroids to skin-lightening by black celebrities and the over-prescription of antidepressants. Yet the diversity of these controversies often masks their common root-namely, disputes about the propriety of using medical technologies as tools for shaping one\u27s identity. Some observers believe these so-called enhancement practices threaten important values, offering unfair advantages to users and undermining their ability to lead authentic lives. But existing systems of medical regulation, which were desined to promote the safety of therapeutic treatments and to deter drug abuse, are largely blind to concerns beyond protecting human health. As identity-modifying practices continue to proliferate, calls are growing to restrict access to these technologies on moral grounds. These proposals overlook the United States\u27 extensive and unfortunate experiences regulating nontherapeutic medical practices to enforce contested conceptions of morality. From Prohibition and the war on drugs to laws restricting contraceptives and abortion procedures, these efforts have been costly, ineffective, and intrusive. They have also interfered with fundamental liberties involving bodily integrity and identity-a fact that is widely recognized in the context of reproduction technologies, but largely overlooked with respect to other medical interventions. Rather than expanding our reliance on contested moral concerns in policing access to medical interventions, the U.S. should purge its existing regulation of morality-based intrusions and recommit itself to protecting human health