Adam Smith and Colonialism

In the context of debates about liberalism and colonialism, the arguments of Adam Smith have been taken as illustrative of an important line of anti-colonial liberal thought. The reading of Smith presented here challenges this interpretation. It argues that Smith’s opposition to colonial rule derived largely from its impact on the metropole, rather than on its impact on the conquered and colonised; that Smith recognised colonialism had brought ‘improvement’ in conquered territories and that Smith struggled to balance recognition of moral diversity with a universal moral framework and a commitment to a particular interpretation of progress through history. These arguments have a wider significance as they point towards some of the issues at stake in liberal anti-colonial arguments more generally

Comparing Mutuality and Solidarity in Its Application to Disaster Ethics

Often it has been observed that in disaster situations, people (including victims) become altruistic and are very willing to listen, obey and act in a manner that would help bring an end to the situation. In this chapter, linking disaster ethics and human rights, it is argued that this indeed is how it should be, disaster or otherwise, and that we have moral duties to oneself and to others. An individual exhibiting solidarity, comradery and altruism during a disaster is indeed behaving as a reasonable Self, and exercising ethical individualism as per Gewirthian philosophy. It is the duty of the State and society to act as a supportive State and a caring society. In order to do this, we need to be conditioned for ethical rationality before any whiff of disaster arises, i.e. in our day-to-day conduct and decision-making, at a personal, institutional and transnational level. Our ethical resilience during disasters can only be as robust as our rational moral compass during ‘peace-time’. This chapter argues that Gewirthian solidarity ethics (GSE) should play a role in European policy and action in order to provide a system that conditions ethical rationality and in order to fulfil human rights. This involves addressing our current understanding of human rights as distinct categories of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights and to effect a shift towards a more holistic understanding of human rights, whereby the hierarchy of fulfilment does not always prioritise civil and political rights.Peer reviewe

A Comparative Study of the ReCell® Device and Autologous Spit-Thickness Meshed Skin Graft in the Treatment of Acute Burn Injuries.

Early excision and autografting are standard care for deeper burns. However, donor sites are a source of significant morbidity. To address this, the ReCell® Autologous Cell Harvesting Device (ReCell) was designed for use at the point-of-care to prepare a noncultured, autologous skin cell suspension (ASCS) capable of epidermal regeneration using minimal donor skin. A prospective study was conducted to evaluate the clinical performance of ReCell vs meshed split-thickness skin grafts (STSG, Control) for the treatment of deep partial-thickness burns. Effectiveness measures were assessed to 1 year for both ASCS and Control treatment sites and donor sites, including the incidence of healing, scarring, and pain. At 4 weeks, 98% of the ASCS-treated sites were healed compared with 100% of the Controls. Pain and assessments of scarring at the treatment sites were reported to be similar between groups. Significant differences were observed between ReCell and Control donor sites. The mean ReCell donor area was approximately 40 times smaller than that of the Control (P < .0001), and after 1 week, significantly more ReCell donor sites were healed than Controls (P = .04). Over the first 16 weeks, patients reported significantly less pain at the ReCell donor sites compared with Controls (P ≤ .05 at each time point). Long-term patients reported higher satisfaction with ReCell donor site outcomes compared with the Controls. This study provides evidence that the treatment of deep partial-thickness burns with ASCS results in comparable healing, with significantly reduced donor site size and pain and improved appearance relative to STSG

Spintronics: Fundamentals and applications

Spintronics, or spin electronics, involves the study of active control and manipulation of spin degrees of freedom in solid-state systems. This article reviews the current status of this subject, including both recent advances and well-established results. The primary focus is on the basic physical principles underlying the generation of carrier spin polarization, spin dynamics, and spin-polarized transport in semiconductors and metals. Spin transport differs from charge transport in that spin is a nonconserved quantity in solids due to spin-orbit and hyperfine coupling. The authors discuss in detail spin decoherence mechanisms in metals and semiconductors. Various theories of spin injection and spin-polarized transport are applied to hybrid structures relevant to spin-based devices and fundamental studies of materials properties. Experimental work is reviewed with the emphasis on projected applications, in which external electric and magnetic fields and illumination by light will be used to control spin and charge dynamics to create new functionalities not feasible or ineffective with conventional electronics.Comment: invited review, 36 figures, 900+ references; minor stylistic changes from the published versio

“There was something very peculiar about Doc…”: Deciphering Queer Intimacy in Representations of Doc Holliday

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in American Nineteenth-Century History on 8-12-14, available online: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14664658.2014.971481This essay discusses representations of male intimacy in life-writing about consumptive gunfighter John Henry “Doc” Holliday (1851-1887). I argue that twentieth-century commentators rarely appreciated the historical specificity of Holliday’s friendships in a frontier culture that not only normalized but actively celebrated same-sex intimacy. Indeed, Holliday lived on the frayed edges of known nineteenth-century socio-sexual norms, and his interactions with other men were further complicated by his vicious reputation and his disability. His short life and eventful afterlife exposes the gaps in available evidence – and the flaws in our ability to interpret it. Yet something may still be gleaned from the early newspaper accounts of Holliday. Having argued that there is insufficient evidence to justify positioning him within modern categories of hetero/homosexuality, I analyze the language used in pre-1900 descriptions of first-hand encounters with Holliday to illuminate the consumptive gunfighter’s experience of intimacy, if not its meaning

Healing Multiculturalism: Middle-Ground Liberal Forgiveness in a Diverse Public Realm

This article examines debates about political forgiveness in liberal, pluralist societies. Although the concept of forgiveness is not usually taken up by liberals, I outline a plausible conception by exploring two recent approaches. The first, ‘unattached articulation’, concept requires no real emotional change on the forgiver’s part, but rather a form of civic restraint. In contrast, the second version highlights a strong form of empathy for perpetrators. In spite of their advantages, each concept proves too extreme. The problems are revealed by focusing on the case of the Harkis, who fought for the French during the Algerian war. Often still marginalised in French society, their case helps to highlight the conceivability of a ‘middle-ground’ or moderate concept of political forgiveness. Its core rests on the forgiver’s care for the social world. While this concept brings considerable challenges also, and is not inevitable in any particular case, it entails a more plausible combination of emotional and rational shifts in the forgiver’s world-view. Although the article does not recommend forgiveness by any person or group, it observes, recalling Arendt’s idea of amor mundi or ‘love of the world’, that political forgiveness may sustain a viable connection between diverse citizens’ public and non-public lives

Using high angular resolution diffusion imaging data to discriminate cortical regions

Brodmann's 100-year-old summary map has been widely used for cortical localization in neuroscience. There is a pressing need to update this map using non-invasive, high-resolution and reproducible data, in a way that captures individual variability. We demonstrate here that standard HARDI data has sufficiently diverse directional variation among grey matter regions to inform parcellation into distinct functional regions, and that this variation is reproducible across scans. This characterization of the signal variation as non-random and reproducible is the critical condition for successful cortical parcellation using HARDI data. This paper is a first step towards an individual cortex-wide map of grey matter microstructure, The gray/white matter and pial boundaries were identified on the high-resolution structural MRI images. Two HARDI data sets were collected from each individual and aligned with the corresponding structural image. At each vertex point on the surface tessellation, the diffusion-weighted signal was extracted from each image in the HARDI data set at a point, half way between gray/white matter and pial boundaries. We then derived several features of the HARDI profile with respect to the local cortical normal direction, as well as several fully orientationally invariant features. These features were taken as a fingerprint of the underlying grey matter tissue, and used to distinguish separate cortical areas. A support-vector machine classifier, trained on three distinct areas in repeat 1 achieved 80-82% correct classification of the same three areas in the unseen data from repeat 2 in three volunteers. Though gray matter anisotropy has been mostly overlooked hitherto, this approach may eventually form the foundation of a new cortical parcellation method in living humans. Our approach allows for further studies on the consistency of HARDI based parcellation across subjects and comparison with independent microstructural measures such as ex-vivo histology

Systems-pharmacology dissection of a drug synergy in imatinib-resistant CML

Occurrence of the BCR-ABL[superscript T315I] gatekeeper mutation is among the most pressing challenges in the therapy of chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Several BCR-ABL inhibitors have multiple targets and pleiotropic effects that could be exploited for their synergistic potential. Testing combinations of such kinase inhibitors identified a strong synergy between danusertib and bosutinib that exclusively affected CML cells harboring BCR-ABL[superscript T315I]. To elucidate the underlying mechanisms, we applied a systems-level approach comprising phosphoproteomics, transcriptomics and chemical proteomics. Data integration revealed that both compounds targeted Mapk pathways downstream of BCR-ABL, resulting in impaired activity of c-Myc. Using pharmacological validation, we assessed that the relative contributions of danusertib and bosutinib could be mimicked individually by Mapk inhibitors and collectively by downregulation of c-Myc through Brd4 inhibition. Thus, integration of genome- and proteome-wide technologies enabled the elucidation of the mechanism by which a new drug synergy targets the dependency of BCR-ABL[superscript T315I] CML cells on c-Myc through nonobvious off targets

Multi-messenger observations of a binary neutron star merger

On 2017 August 17 a binary neutron star coalescence candidate (later designated GW170817) with merger time 12:41:04 UTC was observed through gravitational waves by the Advanced LIGO and Advanced Virgo detectors. The Fermi Gamma-ray Burst Monitor independently detected a gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) with a time delay of ~1.7 s with respect to the merger time. From the gravitational-wave signal, the source was initially localized to a sky region of 31 deg2 at a luminosity distance of 40+8-8 Mpc and with component masses consistent with neutron stars. The component masses were later measured to be in the range 0.86 to 2.26 Mo. An extensive observing campaign was launched across the electromagnetic spectrum leading to the discovery of a bright optical transient (SSS17a, now with the IAU identification of AT 2017gfo) in NGC 4993 (at ~40 Mpc) less than 11 hours after the merger by the One- Meter, Two Hemisphere (1M2H) team using the 1 m Swope Telescope. The optical transient was independently detected by multiple teams within an hour. Subsequent observations targeted the object and its environment. Early ultraviolet observations revealed a blue transient that faded within 48 hours. Optical and infrared observations showed a redward evolution over ~10 days. Following early non-detections, X-ray and radio emission were discovered at the transient’s position ~9 and ~16 days, respectively, after the merger. Both the X-ray and radio emission likely arise from a physical process that is distinct from the one that generates the UV/optical/near-infrared emission. No ultra-high-energy gamma-rays and no neutrino candidates consistent with the source were found in follow-up searches. These observations support the hypothesis that GW170817 was produced by the merger of two neutron stars in NGC4993 followed by a short gamma-ray burst (GRB 170817A) and a kilonova/macronova powered by the radioactive decay of r-process nuclei synthesized in the ejecta