Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History

We sketch a new synthesis of American business history to replace (and subsume) that put forward by Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., most famously in his book The Visible Hand (1977). We see the broader subject as the history of the institutions of coordination in the economy, with the management of information and the addressing of problems of informational asymmetries representing central problems for firm- and relationship design. Our analysis emphasizes the endogenous adoption of coordination mechanisms in the context of evolving but specific operating conditions and opportunities. This naturally gives rise both to change and to heterogeneity in the population of coordination mechanisms to be observed in use at any moment in time. In discussing the changes in the population of mechanisms over time, we seek to avoid the tendency, exemplified by Chandler's work but characteristic of the field, to see history of adoption in teleological rather than evolutionary perspective. We see a richer set of mechanisms in play than is conventional and a more complex historical process at work, in particular a process in which hierarchical institutions have both risen and, more recently, declined in significance.

Fuller and the Folk: The Inner Morality of Law Revisited

The experimental turn in philosophy has reached several sub-fields including ethics, epistemology, and metaphysics. This paper is among the first to apply experimental techniques to questions in the philosophy of law. Specifically, we examine Lon Fuller's procedural natural law theory. Fuller famously claimed that legal systems necessarily observe eight principles he called "the inner morality of law." We evaluate Fuller's claim by surveying both ordinary people and legal experts about their intuitions about legal systems. We conclude that, at best, we should be skeptical of Fuller's inner morality of law in light of the experimental data

The Effect of High Dose Total Body Irradiation on ACTH, Corticosterone, and Catecholamines in the Rat

Total body irradiation (TBI) or partial body irradiation is a distinct risk of accidental, wartime, or terrorist events. Total body irradiation is also used as conditioning therapy before hematopoietic stem cell transplantation. This therapy can result in injury to multiple tissues and might result in death as a result of multiorgan failure. The hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal (HPA) axis could play a causative role in those injuries, in addition to being activated under conditions of stress. In a rat model of TBI, we have established that radiation nephropathy is a significant lethal complication, which is caused by hypertension and uremia. The current study assessed HPA axis function in rats undergoing TBI. Using a head-shielded model of TBI, we found an enhanced response to corticotropin-releasing hormone (CRH) in vitro in pituitaries from irradiated compared with nonirradiated rats at both 8 and 70 days after 10-Gy single fraction TBI. At 70, but not 8 days, plasma adrenocorticotrophic hormone (ACTH) and corticosterone levels were increased significantly in irradiated compared with nonirradiated rats. Plasma aldosterone was not affected by TBI at either time point, whereas plasma renin activity was decreased in irradiated rats at 8 days. Basal and stimulated adrenal steroid synthesis in vitro was not affected by TBI. In addition, plasma epinephrine was decreased at 70 days after TBI. The hypothalamic expression of CRH messenger RNA (mRNA) and hippocampal expression of glucocorticoid receptor mRNA were unchanged by irradiation. We conclude that the hypertension of radiation nephropathy is not aldosterone or catecholamine-dependent but that there is an abscopal activation of the HPA axis after 10 Gy TBI. This activation was attributable at least partially to enhanced pituitary ACTH production

Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History

IN THIS ESSAY, we offer a new synthesis of American business history that aims to replace, but also subsume, the dominant Chandlerian framework. Writing in the mid-1970s, Alfred D. Chandler, Jr., attributed the success of the U.S. economy in the twentieth century to the rise of large, vertically integrated, managerially directed enterprises in the nation\u27s most important industries. These enterprises, Chandler argued, were dramatically more efficient than the small, family-owned and managed firms that previously had characterized the economy. Where small firms were dependent on the market to coordinate their purchases of raw materials and the sale of their output, large firms took on these supply and marketing functions themselves, using hierarchies of salaried managers to coordinate them administratively. This visible hand of management, Chandler claimed, represented such a vast improvement over the invisible hand of the market that firms that developed these capabilities were able not only to dominate their own industries but to diversify into other sectors of the economy and attain positions of power there as well

An information-bearing seed for nucleating algorithmic self-assembly

Self-assembly creates natural mineral, chemical, and biological structures of great complexity. Often, the same starting materials have the potential to form an infinite variety of distinct structures; information in a seed molecule can determine which form is grown as well as where and when. These phenomena can be exploited to program the growth of complex supramolecular structures, as demonstrated by the algorithmic self-assembly of DNA tiles. However, the lack of effective seeds has limited the reliability and yield of algorithmic crystals. Here, we present a programmable DNA origami seed that can display up to 32 distinct binding sites and demonstrate the use of seeds to nucleate three types of algorithmic crystals. In the simplest case, the starting materials are a set of tiles that can form crystalline ribbons of any width; the seed directs assembly of a chosen width with >90% yield. Increased structural diversity is obtained by using tiles that copy a binary string from layer to layer; the seed specifies the initial string and triggers growth under near-optimal conditions where the bit copying error rate is 17 kb of sequence information. In sum, this work demonstrates how DNA origami seeds enable the easy, high-yield, low-error-rate growth of algorithmic crystals as a route toward programmable bottom-up fabrication

Spinal cord stimulation for the management of pain: Recommendations for best clinical practice

Spinal cord stimulation (SCS) is an accepted method of pain control. SCS has been used for many years and is supported by a substantial evidence base. A multidisciplinary consensus group has been convened to create a guideline for the implementation and execution of an SCS programme for South Africa (SA). This article discusses the evidence and appropriate context of SCS delivery, and makes recommendations for patient selection and appropriate use. The consensus group has also described the possible complications following SCS. This guideline includes a literature review and a summary of controlled clinical trials of SCS. The group notes that, in SA, SCS is performed mainly for painful neuropathies, failed back surgery, and chronic regional pain syndrome. It was noted that SCS is used to treat other conditions such as angina pectoris and ischaemic conditions, which have therefore been included in this guideline. These recommendations give guidance to practitioners delivering this treatment, to those who may wish to refer patients for SCS, and to those who care for patients with stimulators in situ. The recommendations also provide a resource for organisations that fund SCS. This guideline has drawn on the guidelines recently published by the British Pain Society, and parts of which have beenreproduced with the society’s permission. These recommendations have been produced by a consensus group of relevant healthcare professionals. Opinion from outside the consensus group has been incorporated through consultation with representatives of all groups for whom these  recommendations have relevance. The recommendations refer to the current body of evidence relating to SCS. The consensus group wishes to acknowledge and thank the task team of the British Pain Society for their help and input into this document

From Sesame Street to Beyond: Multi-Domain Discourse Relation Classification with Pretrained BERT

Research efforts in transfer learning have gained massive popularity in recent years. Pretrained language models have demonstrated the most successful results in producing high quality neural networks capable of quality inference after training across domains via transfer learning. This study expands on the domain transfer introduced in \cite{ferracane-etal-2019-news} exploring neural methods for transfer learning of discourse parsing between a news source domain and a medical target domain. \cite{ferracane-etal-2019-news} specifically discuss transfer learning from news articles to PubMed medical journal articles. Experiments in transfer learning in the current work expand to include three domains: Wall Street Journal articles previously annotated with Rhetorical Structure Theory relations, PubMed abstracts, and earnings calls transcripts. BERT pretrained on scientific data, called SciBert \cite{beltagy-etal-2019-scibert}, is used. Experiments are conducted to fine tune SciBert on Wall Street Journal articles and Earnings calls transcripts. The transcripts are annotated through the rstWeb tool (Zeldes 2016) with a subset of RST labels labeling relations between clauses. Results demonstrate progress in transfer learning between distinct domains is extremely challenging. A novel BERT model pretrained on earnings calls data is introduced. There are multiple avenues for innovation and improvement to explore. In-domain training where the pretrained model domain matches the domain of the fine tuned data yielded better results

Comparative outcomes between COVID-19 and influenza patients placed on veno-venous extracorporeal membrane oxygenation for severe ARDS

Background ECMO is an established supportive adjunct for patients with severe, refractory ARDS from viral pneumonia. However, the exact role and timing of ECMO for COVID-19 patients remains unclear. Methods We conducted a retrospective comparison of the first 32 patients with COVID-19-associated ARDS to the last 28 patients with influenza-associated ARDS placed on V-V ECMO. We compared patient factors between the two cohorts and used survival analysis to compare the hazard of mortality over sixty days post-cannulation.Results COVID-19 patients were older (mean 47.8 vs. 41.2 years, p = 0.033), had more ventilator days before cannulation (mean 4.5 vs. 1.5 days, p < 0.001). Crude in-hospital mortality was significantly higher in the COVID-19 cohort at 65.6% (n = 21/32) versus 36.3% (n = 11/28, p = 0.041). The adjusted hazard ratio over sixty days for COVID-19 patients was 2.81 (95% CI 1.07, 7.35) after adjusting for age, race, ECMO-associated organ failure, and Charlson Comorbidity Index. Conclusion ECMO has a role in severe ARDS associated with COVID-19 but providers should carefully weigh patient factors when utilizing this scarce resource in favor of influenza pneumonia