Scavenging by Jumping Spiders (Araneae: Salticidae)

Jumping spiders are usually considered obligate predators where ingestion is preceded by visual or tactile stimuli which elicit hunting behavior. Hungry females of Salticus scenicus were shown to feed upon dead houseflies

The Quiescent Optical and Infrared Counterpart to EXO 0748-676 = UY Vol

We present optical and infrared photometry of the low-mass X-ray binary EXO 0748-676 in quiescence for the first time in 24 years since it became X-ray active in 1985. We find the counterpart at average magnitudes of R=22.4 and J=21.3. We monitored the source approximately nightly through 2008 November to 2009 January. During this time there was considerable night-to-night optical variability but no long term trends were apparent. The night-to-night variability reveals a periodicity of P=0.159331+/-0.000012d, consistent with the X-ray orbital period to within 0.01%. This indicates that the quiescent optical modulation is indeed orbital in nature rather than a superhump. Interestingly, the modulation remains single-peaked with a deep minimum coincident with the times of X-ray eclipse, and there is no indication of a double-peaked ellipsoidal modulation. This indicates that even in `quiescence' emission from the accretion disk and/or X-ray heated inner face of the companion star dominate the optical emission, and implies that obtaining an accurate dynamical mass estimate in quiescence will be challenging.Comment: Accepted for publication by the Astrophysical Journal Letter

Dynamic changes during the treatment of pancreatic cancer

This manuscript follows a single patient with pancreatic adenocarcinoma for a five year period, detailing the clinical record, pathology, the dynamic evolution of molecular and cellular alterations as well as the responses to treatments with chemotherapies, targeted therapies and immunotherapies. DNA and RNA samples from biopsies and blood identified a dynamic set of changes in allelic imbalances and copy number variations in response to therapies. Organoid cultures established from biopsies over time were employed for extensive drug testing to determine if this approach was feasible for treatments. When an unusual drug response was detected, an extensive RNA sequencing analysis was employed to establish novel mechanisms of action of this drug. Organoid cell cultures were employed to identify possible antigens associated with the tumor and the patient\u27s T-cells were expanded against one of these antigens. Similar and identical T-cell receptor sequences were observed in the initial biopsy and the expanded T-cell population. Immunotherapy treatment failed to shrink the tumor, which had undergone an epithelial to mesenchymal transition prior to therapy. A warm autopsy of the metastatic lung tumor permitted an extensive analysis of tumor heterogeneity over five years of treatment and surgery. This detailed analysis of the clinical descriptions, imaging, pathology, molecular and cellular evolution of the tumors, treatments, and responses to chemotherapy, targeted therapies, and immunotherapies, as well as attempts at the development of personalized medical treatments for a single patient should provide a valuable guide to future directions in cancer treatment

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

Uncovering elements of style

This paper relates the style of 16th century Flemish paintings by Goossen van der Weyden (GvdW) to the style of preliminary sketches or underpaintings made prior to executing the painting. Van der Weyden made underpaintings in markedly different styles for reasons as yet not understood by art historians. The analysis presented here starts from a classification of the underpaintings into four distinct styles by experts in art history. Analysis of the painted surfaces by a combination of wavelet analysis, hidden Markov trees and boosting algorithms can distinguish the four underpainting styles with greater than 90% cross-validation accuracy. On a subsequent blind test this classifier provided insight into the hypothesis by art historians that different patches of the finished painting were executed by different hands

Non-profit Contracting: An Old Path to a New Fairness

This article explores the trend of privatization among public, quasi-public, and private institutions. The primary factor that must be resolved is whether a cooperative or a competitive approach is used. Morgan\u27s model of privatization, with greater utilization of the private non-profit sector, coupled with voluntary involvement of dedicated individuals, seems to hold the most promise

Wolf Spiders of the Genus \u3ci\u3ePardosa\u3c/i\u3e (Araneae: Lycosidae) in Michigan

Distribution, life history, and habitat information is given for 11 species of Pardosa which occur in Michigan

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