Evolution Of Today Research Articles

OAKESHOTTIAN MODES AT THE CROSSROADS OF THE EVOLUTION DEBATES

Abstract.I examine Michael Oakeshott's theory of modes of experience in light of today's evolution debates and argue that in much of our current debate science and religion irrelevantly attack each other or, less commonly but still irrelevantly, seek out support from the other. An analysis of Oakeshott's idea of religion finds links between his early holistic theory of the state, his individualistic account of religious sensibility, and his theory of political, moral, and religious authority. Such analysis shows that a modern individualistic theory of the state need not be barrenly secular and suggests that a religious sensibility need not be translated into an overmastering desire to use state power to pursue moral or spiritual ends in politics. Finally, Oakeshott's vision of a civil conversation, as both a metaphor for Western civilization and as a quasi‐ethical ideal, shows us how we might balance the recognition of diverse modal truths, the pursuit of singular religious or philosophic truth, and a free political order.

Global Imbalances: The Role of Non-Tradabletotal Factor Productivity in Advanced Economies

This paper investigates the role played by total factor productivity (TFP) in the tradable and nontradable sectors of the United States, the euro area, and Japan in the emergence and evolution of today's global trade imbalances. Simulation results based on a dynamic general equilibrium model of the world economy, and using the EU KLEMS database, indicate that TFP developments in these economies can account for a significant fraction of the total deterioration in the U.S. trade balance since 1999, as well as account for some the surpluses in the euro area and Japan. Differences in TFP developments across sectors can also partially explain the evolution of the real effective value of the U.S. dollar during this period.

Global Imbalances: The Role of Non-Tradable Total Factor Productivity in Advanced Economies

This paper investigates the role played by total factor productivity (TFP) in the tradable and nontradable sectors of the United States, the euro area, and Japan in the emergence and evolution of today's global trade imbalances. Simulation results based on a dynamic general equilibrium model of the world economy, and using the EU KLEMS database, indicate that TFP developments in these economies can account for a significant fraction of the total deterioration in the U.S. trade balance since 1999, as well as account for some the surpluses in the euro area and Japan. Differences in TFP developments across sectors can also partially explain the evolution of the real effective value of the U.S. dollar during this period.

The Wrongfulness of Crimes of Unlawful Association

Though always present in penal codes, offenses based on belonging to a criminal organization occupy a vanguard position in today's evolution of penal law systems: organized crime is located at one of the most prominent places in the criminal policy agenda. Nevertheless, neither criminal law theory nor the actual content of criminal provisions nor the putting of theory into practice enables an adequate restriction of the interpretation of the laws against criminal organizations. Therefore we need to investigate the wrongfulness at the base of this offense. European legal scholarship has proposed two basic approaches: to consider that this offense anticipates the possibility of punishing and prosecuting such behavior (anticipation theory) or to consider that it harms a collective interest ("public security," "public peace"). From our perspective, it is necessary to underline the collective wrongfulness embedded in a criminal organization and that, beyond the actual crimes committed, it questions the monopoly of violence exercised by the state. It represents the constitution of a violent organization that counters the basis of state political organization (arrogation of political organization). This approach opens a possibility to adequately define the offense of belonging to a criminal organization.

Productivity and Global Imbalances: The Role of Nontradable Total Factor Productivity in Advanced Economies

This paper investigates the role played by total factor productivity (TFP) in the tradable and nontradable sectors of the United States, the euro area, and Japan in the emergence and evolution of today's global trade imbalances. Simulation results based on a dynamic general equilibrium model of the world economy, and using the new EU KLEMS database, indicate that TFP developments in these economies can account for a significant fraction of the deterioration in the U.S. trade balance since 1998, as well as for some of the surpluses in the euro area and Japan. Differences in TFP developments across sectors can also partially explain the evolution of the real effective value of the U.S. dollar during this period. These results highlight the importance of focusing on productivity developments in the nontradable sector of these large, relatively closed economies to understand the evolution of their trade balance and real exchange rate.

A biological cosmos of parallel universes: Does protein structural plasticity facilitate evolution?

While Darwin pictured organismal evolution as "descent with modification" more than 150 years ago, a detailed reconstruction of the basic evolutionary transitions at the molecular level is only emerging now. In particular, the evolution of today's protein structures and their concurrent functions has remained largely mysterious, as the destruction of these structures by mutation seems far easier than their construction. While the accumulation of genomic and structural data has indicated that proteins are related via common ancestors, naturally occurring protein structures are often considered to be evolutionarily robust, thus leaving open the question of how protein structures can be remodelled while selective pressure forces them to function. New information on the proteome, however, increasingly explains the nature of local and global conformational diversity in protein evolution, which allows the acquisition of novel functions via molecular transition forms containing ancestral and novel structures in dynamic equilibrium. Such structural plasticity may permit the evolution of new protein folds and help account for both the origins of new biological functions and the nature of molecular defects.

Resurrecting ancient genes: experimental analysis of extinct molecules.

There are few molecular fossils: with the rare exception of DNA fragments preserved in amber, ice or peat, no physical remnants preserve the intermediate forms that existed during the evolution of today's genes. But ancient genes can now be reconstructed, expressed and functionally characterized, thanks to improved techniques for inferring and synthesizing ancestral sequences. This approach, known as 'ancestral gene resurrection', offers a powerful new way to empirically test hypotheses about the function of genes from the deep evolutionary past.

Are engineers unsung heroes of medical progress?: the historic bond between physics, engineering, and medicine.

This review traces the heretofore unsung hero role of engineering in the evolution of today's healthcare and the growing bond between physics, engineering, and medicine. It recognizes the debt owed to the various specialties of healthcare engineering, especially the bioengineers who contribute not only to a better understanding of basic physiologic and pathologic processes but also to the development and application of technology and the adaptation of new engineering discoveries to medicine. In the past half-millennium, the fields of physics, engineering, and medicine have made a large number of seminal contributions to each other, resulting in ever-advancing healthcare methodologies, although only a precious few remain identified by the originators' names. In this review, 3 engineers are cited in detail for their milestone contributions to medical progress: Roentgen in radiology, Bovie in electrosurgery, and, more recently, Greatbatch in implantable cardiac pacemakers. Future horizons in medicine appear to be ever more attainable because of the synergism between the physical and biological sciences.

Report on the VLDB workshop on technologies for e-services (TES)

1 Aims and scope The Web is changing every aspect of our lives, but no area is undergoing as rapid and significant changes as the way businesses operate. Today, large and small companies are using the Web to communicate with their partners, to connect with their back-end systems, and to perform electronic commerce transactions. The next chapter of the Internet story is the evolution of today's e-business and e-commerce systems into e-services, such as order procurement, on-line trading, customer relationship management, product promotion, or real-time car navigation and traffic information services. In order to make e-services available to customers, service providers need to address several issues, such as: • e-service description: which are the attributes of an e-service that should be made visible to customers or applications, and how they should be described. • e-service advertisement: how service providers can publish service description so that they can be discovered and accessed by customers and applications. • e-service discovery and selection: how customers and applications can discover and select the e-service (or the combination of e-services) that best fulfill their requirements. • e-service composition: how basic e-services (possibly offered by different companies) can be combined to form value-added, reliable services. Which architectures, models, and languages can achieve zero latency service integration and cross-organizational business process automation. • e-service delivery: how e-services are delivered to businesses and to customers • e-service monitoring and analysis: how service executions can be monitored and how service execution data can be analyzed in order to improve the service quality or efficiency • e-service contracts: how to agree on and perform legal contracts between service providers and clients electronically. • e-service ratings: how to validate service claims and evaluate the quality of the different service providers.

Interconnecting objects via contracts

The evolution of today's markets and the high volatility of business requirements put an increasing emphasis on the flexibility of systems, i.e. on the ability for systems to accommodate the changes required by new or different organisational needs with a minimum impact on the implemented services. In this paper, we put forward an extension of UML with a semantic primitive-contract-for representing explicitly the rules that determine the way object interaction needs to be coordinated to satisfy business requirements, as well as the mechanisms that make it possible to reflect changes of the business requirements without having to modify the basic objects that compose the system. Contracts are proposed as extended forms of association classes whose semantics rely on principles that have been used in Software Architectures and Distributed System Design for supporting dynamic reconfiguration.

A family history of Honeywell's large-scale computer systems

Honeywell Information Systems marketed a broad line of large computer hardware and software, whose heritage goes back to the early 1960s. The authors of this article played key roles in the evolution of today's software (King) and hardware (Shelly).

The evolution of today's hospital emergency departments--current problems and challenges.

The announcement of the National Heart Attack Alert Program by the National Heart, Lung and Blood Institute in June of 1991 prompted leaders of the Florida Chapter of the American College of Cardiology to develop a statewide program to reduce the morbidity and mortality from acute myocardial infarctions within Florida. It became apparent that the success of such a program would require the prompt institution of thrombolytic agent or other revascularization procedures in appropriate patients. No longer could the decision regarding institution of therapy await discussion by telephone and/or the arrival at the emergency department (ED) of the patient's primary care physician or cardiologist. Efforts to establish appropriate protocols for therapy revealed that many of the 25,000 or more physicians currently staffing the 5,600 or so EDs in this country were moonlighting residents or practitioners from a variety of specialties or subspecialties with limited or no formal EM training. Furthermore, it was learned that there were in the entire country only about 800 postgraduate, year-one Council for Graduate Medical Education accredited training positions. There were only 21 such training positions in the entire state of Florida. The reasons for these deficiencies are discussed and a challenge to correct this person power crisis is issued, not principally to the leadership of EM, but to the entire medical profession.

L'évolution récente de la péri-urbanisation en Poitou-Charentes

The movement of city spreading in Poitou-Charentes, after a strong upsurge from 1975 to 1982, has been weakening since then, in a not so attractive area for migratory movements. La Charente-Maritime keeps a privileged rank thanks to its coastal area and a better balanced urban netword, whereas La Charente is slowly sinking in a worrying decline. Moreover, the issues connected to the dual aspect of this region (Poitou and Charente), and to the rivalry between La Rochelle and Poitiers have been confirmed, indeed even reinforced, by today's evolution - a situation that could only find a solution in the creation of strong intraregional synergies.

Photoimageable Thick Films for Multichip Modules

The evolution of today's high speed electronic systems has resulted in the need for modules which are able to provide all chip‐to‐chip interconnection with very fine top level and buried conductor traces, and a dielectric with a very dense via grid pattern. As standard thick film technology is capable of pitches only down to 250 µm, new photoimageable thick film pastes have been developed in order to achieve a higher resolution. These materials allow one to combine the advantages of screen printing as a deposition technique with photolithography for the patterning. The image is produced by exposing the printed paste through a photomask to define either lines or vias, so that a very high resolution (50 (µm pitch), similar to that available in MCM‐D or MCM‐L, can be achieved. This paper describes the processing of the photoimageable dielectric and conductor pastes. As an example of the capability of this technology, a module for electro‐optical interconnection is presented.

Overview of emerging broadband technologies

A broadband network provides a high transmission bitrate enabling fast response times. The network aspects are determined by the transmission medium. The requirements for different types of traffic are conflicting. The solution is given by a new technology: ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode). The status and evolution of today's networks into broadband networks is addressed.

A Broad Path for Network Migration: BISDN Products and Services from AT&T

The ultimate goal of AT&Ts strategy for broadband products and services — an integrated communications infrastructure that will make multimedia communications as ubiquitous and easy to use as traditional telephone service — may be revolutionary in its effects on commerce, education, health care, entertainment, and many aspects of everyday life. But evolution, not revolution, is the path to that goal. Together with its leadership in asynchronous transfer mode (ATM) technology, the cornerstone of multimedia networking, AT&T offers realistic, flexible options for the evolution of today's heterogeneous networks — whether private or public, optimized for data, voice, or video — toward a future technology infrastructure of broadband integrated services digital networks (BISDNs) based on ATM. In surveying some of the major product and service plans of AT&T Network Systems Group (NSG) and AT&T Communications Services Group (CSG), this paper presents a broad evolutionary path for migration to BISDN.

Historical Perspective on the Evolution of Today's Military Field Anesthesia Machine

Historical Perspective on the Evolution of Today's Military Field Anesthesia Machine

Magnetic resonance: boundless possibilities … or possible boundaries

Silvanus Thompson was a cultivated and learned man in the sense recognized by the Victorians, but, sadly, largely a thing of the past. He touched many things, improving them all, including translating Gilbert's De Magnete. When he was active, the use of electricity and magnetism in medicine were matters of keen interest, but one can only guess at what a world adapting to Röntgen's wonderful discovery would make of today's evolution of a magnet-based method of observation and measurement into, possibly, the most powerful in vivo diagnostic tool yet discovered. However, it is a reasonable guess that a mind as flexible and receptive as that of Silvanus Thompson would have embraced it with euphoric excitement. Perhaps the single most exciting thing about whole-body magnetic resonance (MR) is its scope. It is possible to design procedures for an almost indefinite repertoire of different studies, each more elaborate than the last and capable of more refined interpretation. The only snag—often mentioned with a sense of resignation—is that the process may take a long time. This reflects the fact that the sensitivity of the technique is limited, and that signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) considerations affect everything that is attempted. Nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) aficionados are inclined to cloak their activities with a miasma of acronyms and jargon, leading to in vivo spectroscopy, in particular, being viewed as almost impenetrable in its mystique, though imaging can often seem little less opaque.

The information age in concept and practice at the National Library of Medicine.

The evolution of today's information age is mirrored in the growth of the National Library of Medicine's bibliographic services: from the pioneering work of the Library in the last century to develop Index Medicus, to developing the innovative computerized MEDLARS system in the early 1960s, to the easily searchable on-line data bases now available to health professionals. The evolution has not come about without controversy, however, as tension developed between the public sector, where the information was viewed as a social benefit, and the private sector, where it was viewed as a source of profit. The Library has fostered research and development in biomedical communications in the laboratories of its Lister Hill Center and through grants to assist in establishing the field of medical informatics. The future of biomedical communications will be profoundly affected by work now being carried out by the Library: in fields such as biotechnology, through integrative methodologies such as the Unified Medical Language System now under development, and by a grant program to improve the infrastructure for information within academic health science centers.

The role of standards in network evolution

As the network evolves in the post divestiture environment, a smoothly functioning standards process will be essential to providing end users with high quality telecommunications services. The major factors supporting the need for standards in today's telecommunications industry structure are examined. Emphasis is placed on interface and performance standards as the key elements needed to provide a framework which assure compatibility and foster innovation. The challenge of the standardization process is that standards need to be implemented to meet today's demands yet be flexible enough to allow for tomorrow's advanced technology and services. The evolution of today's network to Integrated Services Digital Networks (ISDN) with intelligent network capabilities, is supported by the work of a number of national and international standards forums.