Assessing Core-Monopolization and the Possibilities for the Semi-Periphery in the World-System Today

Drawing upon both classic and more contemporary world-systems analysis, along with oft-forgotten sections of Arghiri Emmanuel’s work on technology, this paper studies, through a quantitative and qualitative comparative method, the history and development of the global semiconductors industry, its selective spatial re-organization/peripheralization over time, and the logic of technology transfers within the context of core-monopolization of high profit industries. The paper then draws comparisons between semiconductors and prior core-monopolized industries like the automobile industry, and analyzes attempts at entry into core-like production by the large semi-peripheries such as China and India and the difficulties faced by them not only by the structural limitations of the world-system but also due to opposition from the core nations (like the U.S.-China Trade War). Resultingly, the analysis concludes that significant upward mobility for the large semi-peripheries through entry into core industries is, within the current capitalist world-system, largely unfeasible

Designing Equitable Transit Networks

Public transit is an essential infrastructure enabling access to employment, healthcare, education, and recreational facilities. While accessibility to transit is important in general, some sections of the population depend critically on transit. However, existing public transit is often not designed equitably, and often, equity is only considered as an additional objective post hoc, which hampers systemic changes. We present a formulation for transit network design that considers different notions of equity and welfare explicitly. We study the interaction between network design and various concepts of equity and present trade-offs and results based on real-world data from a large metropolitan area in the United States of America.Comment: Accepted in the non-archival track at the ACM Conference on Equity and Access in Algorithms, Mechanisms, and Optimization (EAAMO), 202

Robust estimation of bacterial cell count from optical density

Optical density (OD) is widely used to estimate the density of cells in liquid culture, but cannot be compared between instruments without a standardized calibration protocol and is challenging to relate to actual cell count. We address this with an interlaboratory study comparing three simple, low-cost, and highly accessible OD calibration protocols across 244 laboratories, applied to eight strains of constitutive GFP-expressing E. coli. Based on our results, we recommend calibrating OD to estimated cell count using serial dilution of silica microspheres, which produces highly precise calibration (95.5% of residuals <1.2-fold), is easily assessed for quality control, also assesses instrument effective linear range, and can be combined with fluorescence calibration to obtain units of Molecules of Equivalent Fluorescein (MEFL) per cell, allowing direct comparison and data fusion with flow cytometry measurements: in our study, fluorescence per cell measurements showed only a 1.07-fold mean difference between plate reader and flow cytometry data