Henry James Sr.: Nineteenth Century Theologian

High praise for Henry James Sr. came only from the few that understood his philosophy and theology. James was more often described as an undisciplined, radical, iconoclastic, new age nabob, or as the poet Ellery Channing imparted, "a little fat, rosy Swedenborgian amateur with the look of a broker, & the brains & heart of a Pascal." Thoreau, although a visitor to James's home, barely elevated the discussion, chronicling James as a man who "utters quasi philanthropic dogmas in metaphysical dress." Looking through the inerrant eyes of history, and understanding the enormous social and religious changes that James participated in during the 1830-50s, it is easier to recognize James as the enigmatic genius worthy of his small renaissance. Once credited only for being the father of two of America's great minds at the tum of the twentieth century, there is now an effort among scholarly circles to reassess James's work as a theologian and writer. James the theologian was prototypical of much religious thought in America today, as his son's work as a philosopher was prototypical of much philosophical thought in America today.

Eminent Domain

For decades, local governments have used the power of eminent domain to evict low-income residents across the United States. Reversing this trend of government-sanctioned displacement, the City of Richmond, California has developed an innovative use of eminent domain to keep residents in their homes and prevent foreclosure. By using the power of eminent domain to purchase underwater mortgages developed during the housing bubble at today’s market value, Richmond could save residents thousands of dollars and allow them to stay in their homes. This approach has met with strong resistance from Wall Street, where these mortgages have become profitable investment vehicles. Richmond’s success will be based on the City’s ability to develop new partnerships with activists and investors outside the municipal boundaries.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/120414/1/Norman_EminentDomain.pd

Expanding the CRISPR toolbox in Culicine mosquitoes: in vitro validation of Pol III promoters

CRISPR–Cas9-based “gene drive” technologies have been proposed as a novel and effective means of controlling human diseases vectored by mosquitoes. However, more complex designs than those demonstrated to date—and an expanded molecular toolbox with which to build them—will be required to overcome the issues of resistance formation/evolution and drive spatial/temporal limitation. Foreseeing this need, we assessed the sgRNA transcriptional activities of 33 phylogenetically diverse insect Polymerase III promoters using three disease-relevant Culicine mosquito cell lines (Aedes aegypti, Aedes albopictus, and Culex quinquefasciatus). We show that U6 promoters work across species with a range of transcriptional activity levels and find 7SK promoters to be especially promising because of their broad phylogenetic activity. We further show that U6 promoters can be substantially truncated without affecting transcriptional levels. These results will be of great utility to researchers involved in developing the next generation of gene drives

The relationship between body shape, body size and locomotor mode in extant lepidosaurs.

Despite historic work, the mechanisms and evolutionary drivers associated with the adoption of a facultatively bipedal locomotor mode in extant lepidosaurs are unclear. Recent work has provided insights into the biomechanical triggers of bipedal locomotion, but the associated anatomies are yet to be fully understood, particularly with regard to body size across Lepidosauria. Using a dataset derived from museum specimens, representing a range of lepidosaur body shapes, we highlight the differences between obligate quadrupeds and facultative bipeds within this group and demonstrate the value of non-caudal skeletal material in identifying facultative bipeds using osteology alone. We use multiple statistical approaches to identify trends across locomotor modes relative to body size. Body size has a significant effect upon body proportions across the two locomotor modes, especially in the hindlimbs. Forelimbs lengths do not differ significantly across locomotor modes for animals of similar body size, but distal hindlimbs are significantly longer in facultative bipeds. Interestingly, femoral length does not differ across locomotor modes of a similar body size. Our findings contrast with historical tropes, and are significant for future work attempting to identify the factors driving the evolution of a facultatively bipedal locomotor mode in Lepidosauria

Testing for a facultative locomotor mode in the acquisition of archosaur bipedality

Bipedal locomotion is a defining characteristic of humans and birds and has a profound effect on how these groups interact with their environment. Results from extensive hominin research indicate that there exists an intermediate stage in hominin evolution—facultative bipedality—between obligate quadrupedality and obligate bipedality that uses both forms of locomotion. It is assumed that archosaur locomotor evolution followed this sequence of functional and hence character-state evolution. However, this assumption has never been tested in a broad phylogenetic context. We test whether facultative bipedality is a transitionary state of locomotor mode evolution in the most recent early archosaur phylogenies using maximum-likelihood ancestral state reconstructions for the first time. Across a total of seven independent transitions from quadrupedality to a state of obligate bipedality, we find that facultative bipedality exists as an intermediary mode only once, despite being acquired a total of 14 times. We also report more independent acquisitions of obligate bipedality in archosaurs than previously hypothesized, suggesting that locomotor mode is more evolutionarily fluid than expected and more readily experimented with in these reptiles

The anatomy of friendship:neuroanatomic homophily of the social brain among classroom friends

Homophily refers to the tendency to like similar others. Here, we ask if homophily extends to brain structure. Specifically: do children who like one another have more similar brain structures? We hypothesized that neuroanatomic similarity tied to friendship is most likely to pertain to brain regions that support social cognition. To test this hypothesis, we analyzed friendship network data from 1186 children in 49 classrooms. Within each classroom, we identified “friendship distance”—mutual friends, friends-of-friends, and more distantly connected or unconnected children. In total, 125 children (mean age = 7.57 years, 65 females) also had good quality neuroanatomic magnetic resonance imaging scans from which we extracted properties of the “social brain.” We found that similarity of the social brain varied by friendship distance: mutual friends showed greater similarity in social brain networks compared with friends-of-friends (β = 0.65, t = 2.03, P = 0.045) and even more remotely connected peers (β = 0.77, t = 2.83, P = 0.006); friends-of-friends did not differ from more distantly connected peers (β = −0.13, t = −0.53, P = 0.6). We report that mutual friends have similar “social brain” networks, adding a neuroanatomic dimension to the adage that “birds of a feather flock together.

Thermal Conductivity Anisotropy in Superconducting UPt3UPt_3

Recent thermal conductivity measurements on $UPt_3$ single crystals by Lussier et al. indicate the existence of a strong b--c anisotropy in the superconducting state. We calculate the thermal conductivity in various unconventional candidate states appropriate for the $UPt_3$ ``B phase" and compare with experiment, specifically the $E_{2u}$ and $E_{1g}$ $(1,i)$ states predicted in some Ginzburg-Landau analyses of the phase diagram. For the simplest realizations of these states over spherical or ellipsoidal Fermi surfaces, the normalized $E_{2u}$ conductivity is found, surprisingly, to be completely isotropic. We discuss the effects of inelastic scattering and realistic Fermi surface anisotropy, and deduce constraints on the symmetry class of the $UPt_3$ ground state.Comment: 4 postscript pages, UFL102

Securing By Design

This article investigates how modern neo-liberal states are 'securing by design' harnessing design to new technologies in order to produce security, safety, and protection. We take a critical view toward 'securing by design' and the policy agendas it produces of 'designing out insecurity' and 'designing in protection' because securing by design strategies rely upon inadequate conceptualisations of security, technology, and design and inadequate understandings of their relationships to produce inadequate 'security solutions' to readymade 'security problems'. This critique leads us to propose a new research agenda we call Redesigning Security. A Redesigning Security Approach begins from a recognition that the achievement of security is more often than not illusive, which means that the desire for security is itself problematic. Rather than encouraging the design of 'security solutions' a securing by design a Redesigning Security Approach explores how we might insecure securing by design. By acknowledging and then moving beyond the new security studies insight that security often produces insecurity, our approach uses design as a vehicle through which to raise questions about security problems and security solutions by collaborating with political and critical design practitioners to design concrete material objects that themselves embody questions about traditional security and about traditional design practices that use technology to depoliticise how technology is deployed by states and corporations to make us 'safe'

Brief of Scholars of the History and Original Meaning of the Fourth Amendment as Amici Curiae in Support of Petitioner, Carpenter v. United States, No. 16-402 (U.S. Aug. 14, 2017)

Obtaining and examining cell site location records to find a person is a “search” in any normal sense of the word — a search of documents and a search for a person and her personal effects. It is therefore a “search” within the meaning of the Fourth Amendment in that it constitutes “examining,” “exploring,” “looking through,” “inquiring,” “seeking,” or “trying to find.” Nothing about the text of the Fourth Amendment, or the historical backdrop against which it was adopted, suggests that “search” should be construed more narrowly as, for example, intrusions upon subjectively manifested expectations of privacy that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable.Entrusting government agents with unfettered discretion to conduct searches using cell site location information undermines Fourth Amendment rights. The Amendment guarantees “[t]he right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches.” The Framers chose that language deliberately. It reflected the insecurity they suffered at the hands of “writs of assistance,” a form of general warrant that granted state agents broad discretion to search wherever they pleased. Such arbitrary power was “unreasonable” to the Framers, being “against the reason of the common law,” and it was intolerable because of its oppressive impact on “the people” as a whole. As emphasized in one of the seminal English cases that inspired the Amendment, this kind of general power to search was “totally subversive of the liberty of the subject.” James Otis’s famous speech denouncing a colonial writ of assistance similarly condemned those writs as “the worst instrument of arbitrary power,” placing “the liberty of every man in the hands of every petty officer.” Thus, although those who drafted and ratified the Fourth Amendment could not have anticipated cellphone technology, they would have recognized the dangers inherent in any state claim of unlimited authority to conduct searches for evidence of criminal activity. Cell site location information provides insight into where we go and what we do. Because this information is constantly generated and can be retrieved by the government long after the activities it memorializes have taken place, unfettered government access to cell site location information raises the specter of general searches and undermines the security of “the people.