Putting a Pricetag on Life: The Value of Life and the FDA

Regulatory agencies like the Food and Drug Administration are in the business of protecting American lives. These agencies are constantly making judgment calls as to whether prospective products are sufficiently safe, whether proposed regulations will do more harm than good, and whether costs of compliance will justify the benefits. And yet, what cost is too high to save a human life? Although we would like to live in a world that needed not spare any expense to save a life, we know that ours is a world of scarcity. This fact requires that we, as a society, make difficult decisions about how much to spend to save lives – in other words, how to value human life. This paper first looks at different theoretical approaches for deriving a value of life, and asks which is the most appropriate for use in the regulatory context. The paper next considers the legal framework that plays a role in guiding agencies in the use of value of life figures. Finally, the paper examines the practices of regulatory agencies, the FDA in particular, regarding setting a value of life, and applying it in their decision-making. A web of legal authority, political pressures, and shear administrative difficulties come into play. Together, these competing influences create significant challenges to the usefulness of value of life analysis

Finitely Generated Groups Are Universal

Universality has been an important concept in computable structure theory. A class $\mathcal{C}$ of structures is universal if, informally, for any structure, of any kind, there is a structure in $\mathcal{C}$ with the same computability-theoretic properties as the given structure. Many classes such as graphs, groups, and fields are known to be universal. This paper is about the class of finitely generated groups. Because finitely generated structures are relatively simple, the class of finitely generated groups has no hope of being universal. We show that finitely generated groups are as universal as possible, given that they are finitely generated: for every finitely generated structure, there is a finitely generated group which has the same computability-theoretic properties. The same is not true for finitely generated fields. We apply the results of this investigation to quasi Scott sentences

Insulin Antigenicity

Thus we have seen that evidence of insulin antigenicity in one or more forms is present in most individuals receiving intermediate insulins for six weeks or longer. A number of clinical manifestations of insulin antigenicity and their treatment have been discussed

The entangled relationship between Indigenous spatiality and government service delivery

Drawing on research in Yamatji country, Western Australia, this paper examines the complex and often contested relationship between mobile Indigenous people living in regional and remote areas and the delivery of State housing, health and education services. The delivery of basic government services to remotely living and frequently mobile Indigenous populations is a highly contentious issue. Drawing on research in Yamatji country, Western Australia, Sarah Prout examines the complex and often contested relationship between Indigenous people living in regional and remote areas and/or who continue to engage in frequent movements, and the delivery of State housing, health and education services

The State of Insulin in the Blood

Diabetes mellitus has been reviewed as a group of conditions with impaired function of one or more portions of a feed-back system involving the release and utilization of insulin. It is hoped that this may form a useful scheme by which we can study and understand a number of complex metabolic states which we must still collectively refer to as diabetes mellitus

First performance of the gems + gmos system. Part1. Imaging

During the commissioning of the Gemini MCAO System (GeMS), we had the opportunity to obtain data with the Gemini Multi-Object Spectrograph (GMOS), the most utilised instrument at Gemini South Observatory, in March and May 2012. Several globular clusters were observed in imaging mode that allowed us to study the performance of this new and untested combination. GMOS is a visible instrument, hence pushing MCAO toward the visible.We report here on the results with the GMOS instruments, derive photometric performance in term of Full Width Half Maximum (FWHM) and throughput. In most of the cases, we obtained an improvement factor of at least 2 against the natural seeing. This result also depends on the Natural Guide Star constellation selected for the observations and we then study the impact of the guide star selection on the FWHM performance.We also derive a first astrometric analysis showing that the GeMS+GMOS system provide an absolute astrometric precision better than 8mas and a relative astrometric precision lower than 50 mas.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figures, accepted for publication in MNRAS on March 23rd 201

Scalable System Scheduling for HPC and Big Data

In the rapidly expanding field of parallel processing, job schedulers are the "operating systems" of modern big data architectures and supercomputing systems. Job schedulers allocate computing resources and control the execution of processes on those resources. Historically, job schedulers were the domain of supercomputers, and job schedulers were designed to run massive, long-running computations over days and weeks. More recently, big data workloads have created a need for a new class of computations consisting of many short computations taking seconds or minutes that process enormous quantities of data. For both supercomputers and big data systems, the efficiency of the job scheduler represents a fundamental limit on the efficiency of the system. Detailed measurement and modeling of the performance of schedulers are critical for maximizing the performance of a large-scale computing system. This paper presents a detailed feature analysis of 15 supercomputing and big data schedulers. For big data workloads, the scheduler latency is the most important performance characteristic of the scheduler. A theoretical model of the latency of these schedulers is developed and used to design experiments targeted at measuring scheduler latency. Detailed benchmarking of four of the most popular schedulers (Slurm, Son of Grid Engine, Mesos, and Hadoop YARN) are conducted. The theoretical model is compared with data and demonstrates that scheduler performance can be characterized by two key parameters: the marginal latency of the scheduler $t_s$ and a nonlinear exponent $\alpha_s$. For all four schedulers, the utilization of the computing system decreases to < 10\% for computations lasting only a few seconds. Multilevel schedulers that transparently aggregate short computations can improve utilization for these short computations to > 90\% for all four of the schedulers that were tested.Comment: 34 pages, 7 figure