The Architecture and Landscape of Slavery in Fredericksburg, Virginia

The African Americans who endured institutional enslavement played a critical role in the history of Fredericksburg from its 18th-century founding to its Civil War era turmoil. Only recently have historians, archaeologists, and architectural historians brought scholarly and more public attention to bear on the people who comprised over a third of the city’s population as well as its main labor force. Surprisingly little archaeological work on slave-related sites and structures has occurred. This research relies on a combination of architectural and documentary evidence to visualize slavery’s built environment in Fredericksburg as well as the demographic and cultural parameters that framed slaves’ lives. A series of contextual predictions for slave-related sites and households are advanced that hopefully archaeologists will test with future excavations. Such efforts would allow archaeologists to better characterize Fredericksburg’s bonded African Americans as active consumers, agents of change, and members of their own vibrant community

Approaches to lowering the cost of large space telescopes

New development approaches, including launch vehicles and advances in sensors, computing, and software, have lowered the cost of entry into space, and have enabled a revolution in low-cost, high-risk Small Satellite (SmallSat) missions. To bring about a similar transformation in larger space telescopes, it is necessary to reconsider the full paradigm of space observatories. Here we will review the history of space telescope development and cost drivers, and describe an example conceptual design for a low cost 6.5 m optical telescope to enable new science when operated in space at room temperature. It uses a monolithic primary mirror of borosilicate glass, drawing on lessons and tools from decades of experience with ground-based observatories and instruments, as well as flagship space missions. It takes advantage, as do large launch vehicles, of increased computing power and space-worthy commercial electronics in low-cost active predictive control systems to maintain stability. We will describe an approach that incorporates science and trade study results that address driving requirements such as integration and testing costs, reliability, spacecraft jitter, and wavefront stability in this new risk-tolerant "LargeSat" context.Comment: Presented at SPIE, Optics+Photonics 2023, Astronomical Optics: Design, Manufacture, and Test of Space and Ground Systems IV in San Diego, CA, US

No Exit? Withdrawal Rights and the Law of Corporate Reorganizations

Bankruptcy scholarship is largely a debate about the comparative merits of a mandatory regime on one hand and bankruptcy by free design on the other. By the standard account, the current law of corporate reorganization is mandatory. Various rules that cannot be avoided ensure that investors’ actions are limited and they do not exercise their rights against specialized assets in a way that destroys the value of a business as a whole. These rules solve collective action problems and reduce the risk of bargaining failure. But there are costs to a mandatory regime. In particular, investors cannot design their rights to achieve optimal monitoring as they could in a system of bankruptcy by free design. This Article suggests that the academic debate has missed a fundamental feature of the law. Bankruptcy operates on legal entities, not on firms in the economic sense. For this reason, sophisticated investors do not face a mandatory regime at all. The ability of investors to place assets in separate entities gives them the ability to create specific withdrawal rights in the event the firm encounters financial distress. There is nothing mandatory about rules like the automatic stay when assets can be partitioned off into legal entities that are beyond the reach of the bankruptcy judge. Thus, by partitioning assets of one economic enterprise into different legal entities, investors can create a tailored bankruptcy regime. In this way, legal entities serve as building blocks that can be combined to create specific and varied but transparent investor withdrawal rights. This regime of tailored bankruptcy has been unrecognized and underappreciated and may be preferable to both mandatory and free design regimes. By allowing a limited number of investors to opt out of bankruptcy in a particular, discrete, and visible way, investors as a group may be able to both limit the risk of bargaining failure and at the same time enjoy the disciplining effect that a withdrawal right brings with it

Functional genomic screening identifies dual leucine zipper kinase as a key mediator of retinal ganglion cell death

Glaucoma, a major cause of blindness worldwide, is a neurodegenerative optic neuropathy in which vision loss is caused by loss of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs). To better define the pathways mediating RGC death and identify targets for the development of neuroprotective drugs, we developed a high-throughput RNA interference screen with primary RGCs and used it to screen the full mouse kinome. The screen identified dual leucine zipper kinase (DLK) as a key neuroprotective target in RGCs. In cultured RGCs, DLK signaling is both necessary and sufficient for cell death. DLK undergoes robust posttranscriptional up-regulation in response to axonal injury in vitro and in vivo. Using a conditional knockout approach, we confirmed that DLK is required for RGC JNK activation and cell death in a rodent model of optic neuropathy. In addition, tozasertib, a small molecule protein kinase inhibitor with activity against DLK, protects RGCs from cell death in rodent glaucoma and traumatic optic neuropathy models. Together, our results establish a previously undescribed drug/drug target combination in glaucoma, identify an early marker of RGC injury, and provide a starting point for the development of more specific neuroprotective DLK inhibitors for the treatment of glaucoma, nonglaucomatous forms of optic neuropathy, and perhaps other CNS neurodegenerations

Side-Payments and the Costs of Conflict

Conflict and competition often impose costs on both winners and losers, and conflicting parties may prefer to resolve the dispute before it occurs. The equilibrium of a conflict game with side-payments predicts that with binding offers, proposers make and responders accept side-payments, generating settlements that strongly favor proposers. When side-payments are non-binding, proposers offer nothing and conflicts always arise. Laboratory experiments confirm that binding side-payments reduce conflicts. However, 30 % of responders reject binding offers, and offers are more egalitarian than predicted. Surprisingly, non-binding side-payments also improve efficiency, although less than binding. With binding side-payments, 87 % of efficiency gains come from avoided conflicts. However, with non-binding side-payments, only 39 % of gains come from avoided conflicts and 61 % from reduced conflict expenditures