The Future of Socialism

An unpromising title, this, in the seventh year of the third millennium of the Common Era; rather like “Recent Developments in Ptolemaic Astronomy” or “Betamax—a Technology Whose Time Has Come.” My grandfather’s dream, the faith of my younger days, has turned to ashes. And yet, I remain persuaded that Karl Marx has something important to teach us about the world in which we live today. In what follows, I propose to take as my text a famous statement from Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy1—a sort of preliminary sketch of Das Kapital2—and see what it can tell us about the capitalism of our day. I shall try to show you that Marx was fundamentally right about the direction in which capitalism would develop, but that because of his failure to anticipate three important features of the mature capitalist world, his optimism concerning the outcome of that development was misplaced. Along the way, I shall take a fruitful detour through the arid desert of financial accounting theory

The Pimple on Adonis\u27s Nose: A Dialogue on the Concept of Merit in the Affirmative Action Debate

Efforts at progressive educational reform in general, and affirmative action in particular, frequently encounter a rhetorically powerful objection: Merit. The story of merit proclaims that highachieving applicants -those who have already made effective use of educational opportunities in the past and demonstrated a likelihood of being able to do so in the future-enjoy a morally superior claim in the distribution of scarce educational resources. Past achievement, in other words, entitles an applicant to a superior education. This moral framework of merit serves as a constant counterpoint in debates over affirmative action. It provides the first rejoinder to any suggestion that the race of non-White applicants might play a role in a university\u27s admission policy. It is presumed by many to define the arena within which all admissions decisions must be made. That presumption, in turn, is the central principle from which affirmative action is said to derogate. The harm associated with affirmative action, under this received view, is not merely the consideration of race in the abstract. Rather, it is the use of race to distort or displace an evaluative process, the tenets of which are presumed to be an essential element of university admissions. This Article challenges that received view. It offers a robust illustration of a principle that has long been recognized by philosophers but has yet to find effective voice in constitutional debates over educational reform: The distribution of resources that results from rewarding the most accomplished applicants is neither necessary nor inevitable, nor imbued with any a priori moral superiority. Rather, rewarding merit constitutes a distributive choice in the allocation of scarce educational resources, and there is good reason to think that, standing alone, it is neither the most efficient distributional policy nor the most just. Using the narrative device of a debate between two law professors punctuated by a keynote address at a conference, this Article draws a comparison between the vastly different distributional policies that our American systems of health care and education employ. It thereby exposes the distributional policies that predominate in American higher education-policies that the story of merit threatens to conceal-and subjects those distributional policies to rigorous analysis. Finally, the Article considers the implications of this shift of focus for the constitutional treatment of affirmative action following Gratz and Grutter and concludes that the Court should move away from strict scrutiny and adopt the type of predominance analysis that it already employs in reapportionment disputes

Targeted and all-sky search for nanosecond optical pulses at Harvard-Smithsonian

We have built a system to detect nanosecond pulsed optical signals from a target list of some 10,000 sun-like stars, and have made some 20,000 observations during its two years of operation. A beamsplitter feeds a pair of hybrid avalanche photodetectors at the focal plane of the 1.5m Cassegrain at the Harvard/Smithsonian Oak Ridge Observatory (Agassiz Station), with a coincidence triggering measurement of pulse width and intensity at sub-nanosecond resolution. A flexible web-enabled database, combined with mercifully low background coincidence rates (approximately 1 event per night), makes it easy to sort through far-flung data in search of repeated events from any candidate star. An identical system will soon begin observations, synchronized with ours, at the 0.9m Cassegrain at Princeton University. These will permit unambiguous identification of even a solitary pulse. We are planning an all-sky search for optical pulses, using a dedicated 1.8m f/2.4 spherical glass light bucket and an array of pixelated photomultipliers deployed in a pair of matched focal planes. The sky pixels, 1.5 arcmin square, tessellate a 1.6 by 0.2 degree patch of sky in transit mode, covering the Northern sky in approximately 150 clear nights. Fast custom IC electronics will monitor corresponding pixels for coincident optical pulses of nanosecond timescale, triggering storage of a digitized waveform of the light flash

Targeted therapy of advanced gallbladder cancer and cholangiocarcinoma with aggressive biology: eliciting early response signals from phase 1 trials.

PurposePatients with advanced cholangiocarcinoma (CC) and gallbladder carcinoma (GC) have few therapeutic options for relapsed disease. methods: Given the overall poor prognosis in this population and the availability of novel targeted therapies, we systematically analyzed the characteristics and outcomes for GC and CC patients treated on phase I trials with an emphasis on targeted agents and locoregional therapies.ResultsOf 40 treated patients (GC=6; CC=34; median age, 60 years), 8 (20%) had stable disease (SD) > 6 months, 3 (8%) partial response (PR), on protocols with hepatic arterial drug infusion and anti-angiogenic, anti-HER-2/neu or novel MAPK/ERK kinase (MEK) inhibitors. Median progression-free survival (PFS) on phase I trials was 2.0 months (95% CI 1.7, 2.8) versus 3.0 months (95% CI 2.4, 5.0), 3.0 months (95% CI 2.3, 4.6), and 3.0 months (95% CI 2.4, 3.9) for their first-, second-, and last-line FDA-approved therapy. In univariate analysis, >3 metastatic sites, elevated alanine aminotransferase (ALT) (>56IU/L), serum creatinine (>1.6mg/dL), and CA19-9 (>35U/mL) were associated with a shorter PFS. Mutational analysis revealed mutation in the KRAS oncogene in 2 of 11 patients (18%). The SD >6 months/PR rate of 28% was seen with hepatic arterial infusion of oxaliplatin, and inhibitors of angiogenesis, HER-2/neu or MEK.ConclusionsThe PFS in phase I trials was similar to that of the first, second, and last-line therapy (P=0.95, 0.98, 0.76, respectively) with FDA-approved agents given in the advanced setting, emphasizing a role for targeted agents in a clinical trials setting as potentially valuable therapeutic options for these patients

Bringing "The Moth" to Light: A Planet-Sculpting Scenario for the HD 61005 Debris Disk

The HD 61005 debris disk ("The Moth") stands out from the growing collection of spatially resolved circumstellar disks by virtue of its unusual swept-back morphology, brightness asymmetries, and dust ring offset. Despite several suggestions for the physical mechanisms creating these features, no definitive answer has been found. In this work, we demonstrate the plausibility of a scenario in which the disk material is shaped dynamically by an eccentric, inclined planet. We present new Keck NIRC2 scattered-light angular differential imaging of the disk at 1.2-2.3 microns that further constrains its outer morphology (projected separations of 27-135 AU). We also present complementary Gemini Planet Imager 1.6 micron total intensity and polarized light detections that probe down to projected separations less than 10 AU. To test our planet-sculpting hypothesis, we employed secular perturbation theory to construct parent body and dust distributions that informed scattered-light models. We found that this method produced models with morphological and photometric features similar to those seen in the data, supporting the premise of a planet-perturbed disk. Briefly, our results indicate a disk parent body population with a semimajor axis of 40-52 AU and an interior planet with an eccentricity of at least 0.2. Many permutations of planet mass and semimajor axis are allowed, ranging from an Earth mass at 35 AU to a Jupiter mass at 5 AU.Comment: Accepted to AJ; added Figure 5 and minor text edit

Search for Nanosecond Optical Pulses from Nearby Solar‐Type Stars

With "Earth 2000" technology we could generate a directed laser pulse that outshines the broadband visible light of the Sun by 4 orders of magnitude. This is a conservative lower bound for the technical capability of a communicating civilization; optical interstellar communication is thus technically plausible. We have built a pair of systems to detect nanosecond pulsed optical signals from a target list that includes some 13,000 Sun-like stars, and we have made some 16,000 observations totaling nearly 2400 hr during five years of operation. A beam splitter-fed pair of hybrid avalanche photodetectors at the 1.5 m Wyeth Telescope at the Harvard/Smithsonian Oak Ridge Observatory (Agassiz Station) triggers on a coincident pulse pair, initiating measurement of pulse width and intensity at subnanosecond resolution. An identical system at the 0.9 m Cassegrain at Princeton's Fitz-Randolph Observatory performs synchronized observations with 0.1 μs event timing, permitting unambiguous identification of even a solitary pulse. Among the 11,600 artifact-free observations at Harvard, the distribution of 274 observed events shows no pattern of repetition, and is consistent with a model with uniform event rate, independent of target. With one possible exception (HIP 107395), no valid event has been seen simultaneously at the two observatories. We describe the search and candidate events and set limits on the prevalence of civilizations transmitting intense optical pulses

A Prospective Randomized Crossover Trial of Systemic Chemotherapy in Patients with Low-Grade Mucinous Appendiceal Adenocarcinoma

View full abstracthttps://openworks.mdanderson.org/leading-edge/1048/thumbnail.jp

Use of GRADE for assessment of evidence about prognosis: rating confidence in estimates of event rates in broad categories of patients.

Summary pointsMain concepts- The Grades of Recommendation, Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) approach defines quality of evidence as confidence in effect estimates; this conceptualization can readily be applied to bodies of evidence estimating the risk of future of events (that is, prognosis) in broadly defined populations- In the field of prognosis, a body of observational evidence (including single arms of randomized controlled trials) begins as high quality evidence- The five domains GRADE considers in rating down confidence in estimates of treatment effect—that is, risk of bias, imprecision, inconsistency, indirectness, and publication bias—as well as the GRADE criteria for rating up quality, also apply to estimates of the risk of future of events from a body of prognostic studies- Applying these concepts to systematic reviews of prognostic studies provides a useful approach to determine confidence in estimates of overall prognosis in broad populationsLay summary- The Grading of Recommendations, Assessment, Development and Evaluation (GRADE) approach to rating confidence in the results of research studies was initially developed for therapeutic questions- The GRADE approach considers study design (randomized trials versus non-randomized designs), risk of bias, inconsistency, imprecision, indirectness, and publication bias; size and trend in the effect are also considered- Observational studies looking at patients’ prognosis may provide robust estimates of the likelihood of undesirable or desirable outcomes in both treated and untreated patients- Patients will often find this information helpful in understanding the likely course of their disease, in planning their future, and in engaging in shared decision making with their healthcare providers- In a previous article, we examined factors that affect confidence in estimates of baseline risk (the risk of bad outcomes in untreated patients), providing examples of how this might influence the confidence in estimates of absolute treatment effect- This paper provides guidance for the use of the GRADE approach to determine confidence in estimates of future events in systematic reviews of prognostic studies in broad categories of patient