Another Brick in the Wall?

In the short space allowed me here, I want to share some of my thoughts with you in response to Another Brick in the Wall. Time will not permit me to qualify my remarks, to explore other important dimensions of the issue, or to acknowledge contrary viewpoints as much as I would like to. Please do not judge me harshly for what I have had to leave out. Alas, I do not have time to ponder the exact meaning of brick and wall, least of all the meaning intended by the songwriter. I do not have time to acknowledge adequately that bricks and walls” are surely in some sense good and necessary, as I imagine some in this audience would like to insist. I cannot even explore the question someone like George Carlin would ask--if the purpose of education is not to produce bricks, then why do we require teachers and students at commencement to wear hats called MORTAR boards ? Instead, I will do just two things. First I will describe what I take to be the fundamental purpose of higher education which is precisely the opposite of what this song suggests. And secondly I will consider how such an education can or cannot equip a student to fit into the wall of gainful employment he or she will face upon graduation

Uneven Developments: Toward Inclusive Land Governance in Contemporary Cambodia

Cambodia has long had a difficult mix of resource wealth and weak land governance, a function of its legacy of enduring postwar conflict and neoliberal development policies of the 1990s. Since 2012, however, its government has undertaken a series of self-described ‘deep reforms’ aimed at overcoming the poverty, land conflict, and unequal rural landholdings created during the 2000s, when over 2 million hectares of economic land concessions were allocated to private companies. This paper, commissioned as part of a Swiss Agency for Development and Cooperation (SDC) ‘learning journey’ on inclusive land governance, inquires whether these reforms constitute durable institutional change, or temporary and calculated forms of social inclusion aimed at managing an increasingly volatile political and economic landscape. We use the example of community forestry in Cambodia’s northeastern Stung Treng province to examine (1) rural land scarcity at the village scale, which is caused by a mix of corporate plantation concessions and land markets involving inter-province migrants and other business interests, and (2) regulatory geographies and overlaps among competing state authorities, which are exacerbated by recent reforms. The study concludes with a set of ‘ways forward’ for SDC and other actors interested in inclusive land governance, both in Cambodia and elsewhere, focusing on the enhancement of tenure-protecting institutions, the cultivation of discussion and debate, cross-sectoral land-related programming, and legal areas for additional possible reforms

Impulse oscillometry identifies peripheral airway dysfunction in children with adenosine deaminase deficiency.

Adenosine deaminase-deficient severe combined immunodeficiency (ADA-SCID) is characterized by impaired T-, B- and NK-cell function. Affected children, in addition to early onset of infections, manifest non-immunologic symptoms including pulmonary dysfunction likely attributable to elevated systemic adenosine levels. Lung disease assessment has primarily employed repetitive radiography and effort-dependent functional studies. Through impulse oscillometry (IOS), which is effort-independent, we prospectively obtained objective measures of lung dysfunction in 10 children with ADA-SCID. These results support the use of IOS in the identification and monitoring of lung function abnormalities in children with primary immunodeficiencies

Mixed Messages: How Bacteria Resolve Conflicting Signals

An elegant new study by Bollenbach and Kishony (2011) in this issue of Molecular Cell shows how bacteria resolve the apparent conflicts created when they face two signals with opposite effects on gene expression

The impact of infrastructure investment on economic growth in the United Kingdom

ABSTRACT Infrastructure investment has long been held as an accelerator or a driver of the economy. Internationally, the UK ranks poorly with the performance of infrastructure and ranks in the lower percentile for both infrastructure investment and GDP growth rate amongst comparative nations. Faced with the uncertainty of Brexit and the likely negative economic impact this will bring, infrastructure investment may be used to strengthen the UK economy. This study aims to examine how infrastructure funding impacts economic growth and how best the UK can maximize this potential by building on existing work. The research method is based on interviews carried out with respondents involved in infrastructure operating across various sectors. The findings show that investment in infrastructure is vital in the UK as it stimulates economic growth through employment creation due to factor productivity. However, it is critical for investment to be directed to regional opportunity areas with the potential to unlock economic growth and maximize returns whilst stimulating further growth to benefit other regions. There is also a need for policy consistency and to review UK infrastructure policy to streamline the process and to reduce cost and time overrun, with Brexit likely to impact negatively on infrastructure investment. Keywords: infrastructure; economic growth; investment; constructio

The Principal Axis of the Virgo Cluster

Using accurate distances to individual Virgo cluster galaxies obtained by the method of Surface Brightness Fluctuations, we show that Virgo's brightest ellipticals have a remarkably collinear arrangement in three dimensions. This axis, which is inclined by 10 to 15 degrees from the line of sight, can be traced to even larger scales where it appears to join a filamentary bridge of galaxies connecting Virgo to the rich cluster Abell 1367. The orientations of individual Virgo ellipticals also show some tendency to be aligned with the cluster axis, as does the jet of the supergiant elliptical M87. These results suggest that the formation of the Virgo cluster, and its brightest member galaxies, have been driven by infall of material along the Virgo-A1367 filament.Comment: 8 pages, 4 figures, accepted for publication in ApJ Letter

Accurate prediction of gene feedback circuit behavior from component properties

A basic assumption underlying synthetic biology is that analysis of genetic circuit elements, such as regulatory proteins and promoters, can be used to understand and predict the behavior of circuits containing those elements. To test this assumption, we used time‐lapse fluorescence microscopy to quantitatively analyze two autoregulatory negative feedback circuits. By measuring the gene regulation functions of the corresponding repressor–promoter interactions, we accurately predicted the expression level of the autoregulatory feedback loops, in molecular units. This demonstration that quantitative characterization of regulatory elements can predict the behavior of genetic circuits supports a fundamental requirement of synthetic biology