Direct Cause

An interventionist account of causation characterizes causal relations in terms of changes resulting from particular interventions. We provide an example of a causal relation for which there does not exist an intervention satisfying the common interventionist standard. We consider adaptations that would save this standard and describe their implications for an interventionist account of causation. No adaptation preserves all the aspects that make the interventionist account appealing

Mismanagement: Labor\u27s Rightful Cause

[Excerpt] Mismanagement is so widespread and its effects upon job security, wages and standards are so damaging to labor that unions must expand the traditional boundaries of their authority and begin to experiment with ways to challenge management prerogatives. While some people may argue that such a direction will lead to enterprise unionism, those arguments have many of the same weaknesses as those against worker ownership and power-sharing. The alternative in our current situation is to passively allow managers to continue to destroy jobs and communities. Those who hope to rebuild our economy based upon more humane principles will need a constituency which includes union members who have, at the local level, really dug in and challenged mismanagement, posing alternatives to save jobs. The discussion below covers the most common and damaging forms of mismanagement; the rest of this issue of Labor Research Review shows what unions can and have done to challenge bad management. It does nor cover subjects which many of us consider mismanagement of the overall economy, such as socially destructive deregulation, laissez-faire trade policies, or the massive diversion of precious financial and technical resources to the military. While not ignoring such national economic issues, the training for empowerment for more grass-roots control of the economy has to begin with local campaigns where local unions and their allies have immediate organizing handles

Cause of Chirality Consensus

Biological macromolecules, proteins and nucleic acids are composed exclusively of chirally pure monomers. The chirality consensus appears vital for life and it has even been considered as a prerequisite of life. However the primary cause for the ubiquitous handedness has remained obscure. We propose that the chirality consensus is a kinetic consequence that follows from the principle of increasing entropy, i.e. the 2nd law of thermodynamics. Entropy increases when an open system evolves by decreasing gradients in free energy with more and more efficient mechanisms of energy transduction. The rate of entropy increase is the universal fitness criterion of natural selection that favors diverse functional molecules and drives the system to the chirality consensus to attain and maintain high-entropy non-equilibrium states.Comment: 8 pages, 2 figure

An Unusual Cause of Abdominal Ascites.

Abdominal ascites is most commonly caused by portal hypertension from liver cirrhosis. When present, portal hypertension is associated with an elevated serum-ascites albumin gradient (SAAG) ≥1.1 g/dL. In contrast, a SAAG < 1.1 g/dL suggests malignancy, tuberculosis, pancreatitis, or nephrotic syndrome. Here, we present a case of low SAAG ascites caused by epithelioid peritoneal mesothelioma in a woman with no known liver disease. The diagnosis proved elusive until diagnostic laparoscopy with biopsy was performed

Generalised Reichenbachian common cause systems

The principle of the common cause claims that if an improbable coincidence has occurred, there must exist a common cause. This is generally taken to mean that positive correlations between non-causally related events should disappear when conditioning on the action of some underlying common cause. The extended interpretation of the principle, by contrast, urges that common causes should be called for in order to explain positive deviations between the estimated correlation of two events and the expected value of their correlation. The aim of this paper is to provide the extended reading of the principle with a general probabilistic model, capturing the simultaneous action of a system of multiple common causes. To this end, two distinct models are elaborated, and the necessary and sufficient conditions for their existence are determined