The Rise of the Platform Business Model and the Transformation of Twenty-First-Century Capitalism

This article explores the changing nature of twenty-first-century capitalism with an emphasis on illuminating the political coalitions and institutional conditions that support and sustain it. Most of the existing literature attributes the changing nature of the firm to developments in markets and technology. By contrast, this article emphasizes the political forces that have driven the transformation of the twentieth-century consolidated firm through the firm as a “network of contracts” and toward the platform firm. Moreover, situating the United States in a comparative perspective highlights the distinctive ways US political-economic institutions have facilitated that transformation and exacerbated the associated inequalities.Abstract Beyond Financialization and Fissurization Facilitating the Rise of Platform Capitalism: The United States in Comparative Perspective Countervailing Power, Regulation, and Restraint on the Platform Firm Conclusion Acknowledgements Note

The State and Coordinated Capitalism: Contributions of the Public Sector to Social Solidarity in Post-Industrial Societies

This article investigates the politics of change in coordinated market econo\mies, and explores why some countries (well known for their highly cooperative arrangements) manage to sustain coordination when adjusting to economic transformation, while others fail. The authors argue that the broad category of “coordinated market economies” subsumes different types of cooperative engagement: macrocorporatut forms of coordination are characterized by national-level institutions for fostering cooperation and feature a strong role for the state, while forms of coordination associated with enterprise cooperation more typically occur at the level of sector or regional institutions and are often privately controlled. Although these diverse forms of coordination once appeared quite similar and functioned as structural equivalents, they now have radically different capacities for self-adjustment. The role of the state is at the heart of the divergence among European coordinated countries. A large public sector affects the political dynamics behind collective outcomes, through its impact both on the state's construction of its own policy interests and on private actors' goals. Although a large public sector has typically been written off as an inevitable drag on the economy, it can provide state actors with a crucial political tool for shoring up coordination in a postindustrial economy. The authors use the cases of Denmark and Germany to illustrate how uncontroversially coordinated market economies have evolved along two sharply divergent paths in the past two decades and to reflect on broader questions of stability and change in coordinated market economies. The two countries diverge most acutely with respect to the balance of power between state and society; indeed, the Danish state—far from being a constraint on adjustment (a central truism in neoliberal thought)—plays the role of facilitator in economic adjustment, policy change, and continued coordination

Deep Depth From Focus

Depth from focus (DFF) is one of the classical ill-posed inverse problems in computer vision. Most approaches recover the depth at each pixel based on the focal setting which exhibits maximal sharpness. Yet, it is not obvious how to reliably estimate the sharpness level, particularly in low-textured areas. In this paper, we propose `Deep Depth From Focus (DDFF)' as the first end-to-end learning approach to this problem. One of the main challenges we face is the hunger for data of deep neural networks. In order to obtain a significant amount of focal stacks with corresponding groundtruth depth, we propose to leverage a light-field camera with a co-calibrated RGB-D sensor. This allows us to digitally create focal stacks of varying sizes. Compared to existing benchmarks our dataset is 25 times larger, enabling the use of machine learning for this inverse problem. We compare our results with state-of-the-art DFF methods and we also analyze the effect of several key deep architectural components. These experiments show that our proposed method `DDFFNet' achieves state-of-the-art performance in all scenes, reducing depth error by more than 75% compared to the classical DFF methods.Comment: accepted to Asian Conference on Computer Vision (ACCV) 201

Comprehensive Chronic Pain Treatment: Does Smoking Affect Outcomes?

Abstract Objective: To determine whether smoking status effects pain and functional outcomes in a chronic pain program. Methods: A retrospective cohort study of 178 patients treated at the Nebraska Medicine comprehensive Pain Management Program over a five year period was completed. Outcomes measures were the Visual Analog Scale Past Month Average Pain score (VAS-PMA), Multidimensional Pain Inventory pain and interference scales (MPI-P and MPI-I), and the Pain and Impairment Relationship Scale (PAIRS). Patients were categorized by smoking status into non-smoker or current smoker groups. Wilcoxon tests were used to compare the pre scores, post scores, and post-minus-pre scores between smoking status groups. Results: The pre-treatment VAS-PMA and MPI-P median scores were significantly higher in the current smoker group (81.5 and 5.0, respectively) compared to the non-smoker group (76.5 and 4.3, respectively), whereas post-treatment median scores did not differ. Furthermore, the current smoker group had a significantly greater decrease on the MPI-P from pre- to post-treatment (median=-2.0) than the non-smoker group (median=-1.6). In addition, smokers had a significantly higher pre-treatment PAIRS score (73.5) than nonsmokers (70), whereas post-treatment scores did not differ. Conclusion: Smokers and non-smokers both benefit from the program, but smokers, who report greater initial pain and stronger beliefs about the association between pain and functional impairment, may benefit more than non-smokers

Loss of CLN7 results in depletion of soluble lysosomal proteins and impaired mTOR reactivation

Defects in the MFSD8 gene encoding the lysosomal membrane protein CLN7 lead to CLN7 disease, a neurodegenerative lysosomal storage disorder belonging to the group of neuronal ceroid lipofuscinoses (NCLs). Here we have performed a SILAC-based quantitative analysis of the lysosomal proteome using Cln7-deficient mouse embryonic fibroblasts (MEFs) from a Cln7 knockout (ko) mouse model. From 3335 different proteins identified, we detected 56 soluble lysosomal proteins and 29 highly abundant lysosomal membrane proteins. Quantification revealed that the amounts of 12 different soluble lysosomal proteins were significantly reduced in Cln7 ko MEFs compared with wild type controls. One of the most significantly depleted lysosomal proteins was Cln5 protein that underlies another distinct NCL disorder. Expression analyses showed that the mRNA expression, biosynthesis, intracellular sorting and proteolytic processing of Cln5 were not affected, whereas the depletion of mature Cln5 protein was due to increased proteolytic degradation by cysteine proteases in Cln7 ko lysosomes. Considering the similar phenotypes of CLN5 and CLN7 patients, our data suggest that depletion of CLN5 may play an important part in the pathogenesis of CLN7 disease. In addition, we found a defect in the ability of Cln7 ko MEFs to adapt to starvation conditions as shown by impaired mammalian target of rapamycin complex 1 reactivation, reduced autolysosome tubulation and increased perinuclear accumulation of autolysosomes compared to controls. In summary, depletion of multiple soluble lysosomal proteins suggest a critical role of CLN7 for lysosomal function, which may contribute to the pathogenesis and progression of CLN7 disease

A comparative framework: how broadly applicable is a 'rigorous' critical junctures framework?

The paper tests Hogan and Doyle's (2007, 2008) framework for examining critical junctures. This framework sought to incorporate the concept of ideational change in understanding critical junctures. Until its development, frameworks utilized in identifying critical junctures were subjective, seeking only to identify crisis, and subsequent policy changes, arguing that one invariably led to the other, as both occurred around the same time. Hogan and Doyle (2007, 2008) hypothesized ideational change as an intermediating variable in their framework, determining if, and when, a crisis leads to radical policy change. Here we test this framework on cases similar to, but different from, those employed in developing the exemplar. This will enable us determine whether the framework's relegation of ideational change to a condition of crisis holds, or, if ideational change has more importance than is ascribed to it by this framework. This will also enable us determined if the framework itself is robust, and fit for the purposes it was designed to perform — identifying the nature of policy change

Institutional change in varieties of capitalism

Contemporary approaches to varieties to capitalism are often criticized for neglecting issues of institutional change. This paper develops an approach to institutional change more extended than the one provided in Hall and Soskice (in Varieties of Capitalism: The Institutional Foundations of Comparative Advantage, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001) but congruent with its varieties-of-capitalism perspective. It begins by outlining an approach to institutional stability, which suggests that the persistence of institutions depends not only on their aggregate welfare effects but also on the distributive benefits that they provide to the underlying social or political coalitions; and not only on the Pareto-optimal quality of such equilibria but also on continuous processes of mobilization through which the actors test the limits of the existing institutions. It then develops an analysis of institutional change that emphasizes the ways in which defection, reinterpretation and reform emerge out of such contestation and assesses the accuracy of this account against recent developments in the political economies of Europe. The paper concludes by outlining the implications of this perspective for contemporary analyses of liberalization in the political economy.Governmen