The FDA as Portrayed in Fiction: Incompetent Bureaucracy or Effective Vanguard of Public Health?

This paper will discuss how the Food and Drug Administration (“FDA”) is portrayed in fiction. The seven novels discussed here have been selected because FDA decisions and policies are crucial to each of their plots. This paper is not intended to offer an exhaustive look at how the FDA is depicted in literature, but rather to show how these narratives, through their characters and their personal tribulations, illuminate certain strengths and weaknesses of current FDA practices in a more vivid and personal way than traditional legal analysis. The paper is divided into four sections. First, this paper will discuss some systemic problems within the FDA regulatory process, as identified by these novels. Second, this paper will discuss the way these novels portray personnel issues faced by the Agency. Third, this paper will discuss the novels’ depiction of the FDA’s successes. Fourth, this paper will comment on the utility of using fiction as a lens through which to study a government agency such as the FDA. A plot summary of each novel is attached as Appendix A. Attached as Appendix B is a list of the best available sales data for each book

Lex Mercatoria - Hoist with Its Own Petard?

The literature advocating lex mercatoria has periodically been enhanced by attempts to provide evidence of its existence and, at the same time, to make it more accessible by formulating-or codifying-its rules. One such attempt was a series of proposals to use international law as a tool for imposing uniform special rules for international trade. Others have been the formulation of non- binding general principles of international commercial contract law by UNIDROIT, the Cornell Common Core project, the Lando Commission Principles of European Contract Law, the various ICC formulations and, finally, general lists of principles formulated by prominent scholars in the area of lex mercatoria such as Berthold Goldman, Lord Mustill, and most recently Klaus Peter Berger. I should like to take this opportunity of discussing the relationship of lex mercatoria with both national and international law to reexamine the question of its autonomy in the light of this move towards codification. I shall suggest that these relationships and the inevitable process of institutionalisation through codification undermine all claims to an autonomous lex mercatoria and produce the antithesis of what is offered as its model. [CONT

Nota biographica: Maklouf Levi and Evariste Lévi-Provençal

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Islamic coins and their catalogues II: the collection of the Academia de la Historia

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The Significance Filter, the Winner's Curse and the Need to Shrink

The "significance filter" refers to focusing exclusively on statistically significant results. Since frequentist properties such as unbiasedness and coverage are valid only before the data have been observed, there are no guarantees if we condition on significance. In fact, the significance filter leads to overestimation of the magnitude of the parameter, which has been called the "winner's curse". It can also lead to undercoverage of the confidence interval. Moreover, these problems become more severe if the power is low. While these issues clearly deserve our attention, they have been studied only informally and mathematical results are lacking. Here we study them from the frequentist and the Bayesian perspective. We prove that the relative bias of the magnitude is a decreasing function of the power and that the usual confidence interval undercovers when the power is less than 50%. We conclude that failure to apply the appropriate amount of shrinkage can lead to misleading inferences

First--order continuous models of opinion formation

We study certain nonlinear continuous models of opinion formation derived from a kinetic description involving exchange of opinion between individual agents. These models imply that the only possible final opinions are the extremal ones, and are similar to models of pure drift in magnetization. Both analytical and numerical methods allow to recover the final distribution of opinion between the two extremal ones.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figure

Questions of Identity: The Structure of the Cohen Family in Puigcerdá in the Early Fourteenth Century

Two Jewish wills, fifteen years apart, in Puigcerdá in the early fourteenth century, enable us to reconstruct families. The reconstructions are so similar that they seem to be of a single family; but there are difficulties which make the identity less than perfect. Here, I attempt to reconcile the difficulties. The existence of only one family seems required by the overall statistics: Puigcerdá at this time had only a few hundred families altogether, and only ca. 50 Jewish families.Dos testamentos de judíos de Puigcerdá del siglo XIV nos permiten reconstruir las familias de los testadores. Los datos son tan semejantes entre sí que parece tratarse de una misma familia; sin embargo plantean dificultades ciertas divergencias, de cuya explicación nos ocupamos en este artículo. Además, desde el punto de vista estadístico parece muy probable la identidad de los dos grupos familiares: hay que tener en cuenta que en la Puigcerdá del momento no vivían más que unos centenares de familias, de las cuales sólo unas cincuenta eran judías