Big Enough to Be Inconsistent: Abraham Lincoln Confronts Slavery and Race

Lincoln and Race Big Enough to Be Inconsistent results from George M. Fredrickson’s Du Bois lectures at Harvard University in November 2006. This widely recognized historian of race and racism died in February 2008. His principal work, White Supremacy: A Comparative Study in A...

Tennessee\u27s Private Prison Act of 1986: An Historical Perspective With Special Attention to California\u27s Experience

In 1918 James H. Wilkins proudly proclaimed that crime was on the wane. Speaking at the end of a long career in California\u27s state prison system, Wilkins had seen the presumed eradication of the opium habit among State prisoners, the reduction and sup-posed elimination of corporal punishment in the State\u27s prisons,and the introduction of the parole system. He wrote: All this tends to material betterment in the present condition and future out-look of prison populations .... It is a long cry before our prisons, jails and other like institutes of detention will bear upon their rusty gates the legend closed for want of inmates. But we are heading in the right direction, and in that direction I trust society will persevere. We, however, live in another time. Today, few share Wilkins\u27unabashed optimism for the possibility of reforming America\u27s prisons and their inhabitants. Far more common now is the concern that past and present experiments in prison reform have proven too costly. The dominant mood today is that prison management should be more cost-effective. At a time when all social services are under review, state prison expenses are experiencing especially close scrutiny. Within this context, private, for-profit prisons are viewed as a possible alternative.\u2

Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898

Repressive reconciliation One (white, Protestant) nation, under God In the first two chapters of Edward J. Blum\u27s Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898, northern opinion leaders during Reconstruction are aflame with redefining th...

The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era

The Politics of the Civil War Era Liberal Republicanism as a Movement Liberal Republican is a term narrowly associated with the presidential election of 1872. Andrew L. Slap\u27s book is concerned with much more than that. At the outset, he orients the reader, explaining that his ...

Legacy of Disunion: The Enduring Significance of the American Civil War

Modern memories Essay collection reflects the elusive legacy of the War Legacy of Disunion is a book of essays by twelve different authors, all concerned with modern memories of the nation\u27s most horrific conflict. Susan-Mary Grant, a Reader in American History at the Univ...

Effect of omega-3 polyunsaturated fatty acid (n-3 PUFA) supplementation to lactating sows on growth and indicators of stress in the post-weaned pig

The first experiment was designed to determine the concentration of protected fish oil product (PFO), as GromegaTM, to be added that would sufficiently decrease the polyunsaturated fatty acid (PUFA) ratio in the sows’ milk and colostrum. Of the 3 diets tested (0.25%, 0.5% and 1%) with a control (0% PFO), only the 1% PFO diet had an effect on the PUFA concentrations. The docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) concentration tended (P = 0.05) to be greater in the 1% PFO diet for both colostrum and milk samples. A second experiment was designed to examine the effects of feeding the 1 versus 0% PFO supplemented diet to sows on growth, markers of acute inflammation and stress in their offspring (16 piglets/treatment group) on d 0 (day of weaning) and d 1 and 3 postweaning. Piglets from sows supplemented the 1% PFO diet had greater gains in weight (P =0.03) postweaning. These pigs also had a lower (P ˂ 0.01) n-6:n-3 PUFA in the plasma when compared to piglets on the control diet. There was an overall treatment effect (P = 0.02) on plasm atotal cortisol, observed by lower concentrations in pigs on the 1% PFO diet. Plasma corticosteroid-binding globulin (CBG) concentrations were not different between treatment groups but were lower (P ˂ 0.001) on d 1 and 3 when compared to d 0. The calculated free cortisol index [FCI (cortisol/CBG)] of pigs on the 1% diet was lower (P = 0.02) on d 1 and 3 when compared to the controls. The cytokines, IL-1β [beta], IL-6, and TNF-α [alpha] were measured following an ex vivo lipopolysaccharide (LPS) stimulation of monocytes and neutrophils in whole blood collected on d 0 and 1. Pigs on the 1% PFO diet tended to have a lower (P = 0.098) mean concentration of TNF-α in response to LPS when compared with that of the controls. These results suggest that providing a PFO supplement as 1% of the diet to sows beginning in late gestation and during lactation can lower the n-6:n-3 PUFA ratio in their offspring, which may reduce the acute physiological stress response in the pigs postweaning

Fixed Price Approximability of the Optimal Gain From Trade

Bilateral trade is a fundamental economic scenario comprising a strategically acting buyer and seller, each holding valuations for the item, drawn from publicly known distributions. A mechanism is supposed to facilitate trade between these agents, if such trade is beneficial. It was recently shown that the only mechanisms that are simultaneously DSIC, SBB, and ex-post IR, are fixed price mechanisms, i.e., mechanisms that are parametrised by a price p, and trade occurs if and only if the valuation of the buyer is at least p and the valuation of the seller is at most p. The gain from trade is the increase in welfare that results from applying a mechanism; here we study the gain from trade achievable by fixed price mechanisms. We explore this question for both the bilateral trade setting, and a double auction setting where there are multiple buyers and sellers. We first identify a fixed price mechanism that achieves a gain from trade of at least 2/r times the optimum, where r is the probability that the seller's valuation does not exceed the buyer's valuation. This extends a previous result by McAfee. Subsequently, we improve this approximation factor in an asymptotic sense, by showing that a more sophisticated rule for setting the fixed price results in an expected gain from trade within a factor O(log(1/r)) of the optimal gain from trade. This is asymptotically the best approximation factor possible. Lastly, we extend our study of fixed price mechanisms to the double auction setting defined by a set of multiple i.i.d. unit demand buyers, and i.i.d. unit supply sellers. We present a fixed price mechanism that achieves a gain from trade that achieves for all epsilon > 0 a gain from trade of at least (1-epsilon) times the expected optimal gain from trade with probability 1 - 2/e^{#T epsilon^2 /2}, where #T is the expected number of trades resulting from the double auction

Synergies in Wireless Telephony: Evidence from the Broadband PCS Auctions

We examine bid data from the first two broadband PCS spectrum auctions for evidence of value synergies. First, we estimate a benchmark regression for the determinants of final auction prices. Then, we include variables reflecting the extent to which bidders ultimately won or already owned the adjacent wireless properties. Consistent with geographic synergies in an ascending-bid auction, prices were higher when the highest-losing bidder had adjacent licenses. The footprints of winning bidders suggest that they were often successful in realizing these synergies.Auctions; Multi-Object Auctions; Spectrum Auctions