Law is too often perceived solely as state-based rules and institutions that provide a rational alternative to religious rites and ancestral customs. The Spirit of Hindu Law uses the Hindu legal ...tradition as a heuristic tool to question this view and reveal the close linkage between law and religion. Emphasizing the household, the family, and everyday relationships as additional social locations of law, it contends that law itself can be understood as a theology of ordinary life. An introduction to traditional Hindu law and jurisprudence, this book is structured around key legal concepts such as the sources of law and authority, the laws of persons and things, procedure, punishment and legal practice. It combines investigation of key themes from Sanskrit legal texts with discussion of Hindu theology and ethics, as well as thorough examination of broader comparative issues in law and religion.
The appropriate selection of lung transplant recipients is an important determinant of outcomes. This consensus document is an update of the recipient selection guidelines published in 2006. The ...Pulmonary Council of the International Society for Heart and Lung Transplantation (ISHLT) organized a Writing Committee of international experts to provide consensus opinion regarding the appropriate timing of referral and listing of candidates for lung transplantation. A comprehensive search of the medical literature was conducted with the assistance of a medical librarian. Writing Committee members were assigned specific topics to research and discuss. The Chairs of the Writing Committee were responsible for evaluating the completeness of the literature search, providing editorial support for the manuscript, and organizing group discussions regarding its content. The consensus document makes specific recommendations regarding the timing of referral and of listing for lung transplantation. These recommendations include discussions not present in previous ISHLT guidelines, including lung allocation scores, bridging to transplant with mechanical circulatory and ventilator support, and expanded indications for lung transplantation. In the absence of high-grade evidence to support decision making, these consensus guidelines remain part of a continuum of expert opinion based on available studies and personal experience. Some positions are immutable. Although transplant is rightly a treatment of last resort for end-stage lung disease, early referral allows proper evaluation and thorough patient education. Subsequent waiting list activation implies a tacit agreement that transplant offers a significant individual survival advantage. It is both the challenge and the responsibility of the transplant community globally to ensure organ allocation maximizes the potential benefits of a scarce resource, thereby achieving that advantage.
Autologous chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapies targeting CD19 have high efficacy in large B cell lymphomas (LBCLs), but long-term remissions are observed in less than half of patients, ...and treatment-associated adverse events, such as immune effector cell-associated neurotoxicity syndrome (ICANS), are a clinical challenge. We performed single-cell RNA sequencing with capture-based cell identification on autologous axicabtagene ciloleucel (axi-cel) anti-CD19 CAR T cell infusion products to identify transcriptomic features associated with efficacy and toxicity in 24 patients with LBCL. Patients who achieved a complete response by positron emission tomography/computed tomography at their 3-month follow-up had three-fold higher frequencies of CD8 T cells expressing memory signatures than patients with partial response or progressive disease. Molecular response measured by cell-free DNA sequencing at day 7 after infusion was significantly associated with clinical response (P = 0.008), and a signature of CD8 T cell exhaustion was associated (q = 2.8 × 10
) with a poor molecular response. Furthermore, a rare cell population with monocyte-like transcriptional features was associated (P = 0.0002) with high-grade ICANS. Our results suggest that heterogeneity in the cellular and molecular features of CAR T cell infusion products contributes to variation in efficacy and toxicity after axi-cel therapy in LBCL, and that day 7 molecular response might serve as an early predictor of CAR T cell efficacy.
Trade, Firms, and Wages: Theory and Evidence AMITI, MARY; DAVIS, DONALD R.
Review of economic studies/The review of economic studies,
01/2012, Volume:
79, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
How does trade liberalization affect wages? This is the first paper to consider in theory and data how the impact of final and intermediate input tariff cuts on workers' wages varies with the global ...engagement of their firm. Our model predicts that a fall in output tariffs lowers wages at import-competing firms but boosts wages at exporting firms. Similarly, a fall in input tariffs raises wages at import-using firms relative to those at firms that only source inputs locally. Using highly detailed Indonesian manufacturing census data for the period 1991-2000, we find considerable support for the model's predictions.
A Spatial Knowledge Economy Davis, Donald R.; Dingel, Jonathan I.
The American economic review,
01/2019, Volume:
109, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Leading empiricists and theorists of cities have recently argued that the generation and exchange of ideas must play a more central role in the analysis of cities. This paper develops the first ...system of cities model with costly idea exchange as the agglomeration force. The model replicates a broad set of established facts about the cross section of cities. It provides the first spatial equilibrium theory of why skill premia are higher in larger cities and how variation in these premia emerges from symmetric fundamentals.
•Theoretical and experimental study of a new triboelectric energy harvester via vibro-impact.•Experimentally identified coefficient of restitution to model velocity-dependent impact.•The ...electrostatic force is weak and thus neglected, leading to decoupled equations.•A new numerical scheme for stiff electrical and non-smooth mechanical systems.•Good agreement between numerical and experimental results.
A new system that harvests vibration energy through triboelectric and electrostatic effects from the vibro-impact of three parallel cantilevered beams is theoretically studied and experimentally validated. Two modelling methods of the mechanical vibration, which differ in the consideration of the eccentricity of the tip mass, are presented and compared with the experimental results for validation. An experimentally identified and numerically fitted relationship between the just-before-impact velocity and the coefficient of restitution is used to model the impact. The electrical model of the triboelectric energy harvester is then established. The ordinary differential equation (ODE) modelling the electrical output of the triboelectric energy harvester is found to be stiff. Two schemes, which are based on the TR (the trapezoidal rule) and TR-BDF2 (the composite of the trapezoidal rule and the second order backward differentiation formula) methods, are proposed to solve the non-smooth mechanical system and the stiff electrical system.
The experimental investigations of the effects of electrostatic force and air damping between cantilever tips suggest that their effects are negligible. This enables the mechanical and electrical systems to be modelled as uncoupled. Good agreement between numerical and experimental results is found, especially for vibration responses. The modelling method, not involving the eccentricity of the tip mass, offers better agreement with experiments. A new numerical scheme combining the TR and TR-BDF2 methods is found to be superior because it is the only method that can solve the electrical system and produce stable results around the impacts. Larger amplitude vibration associated with smaller tip mass ratios does not guarantee higher electricity generation while larger mass ratios perform better at higher frequencies and have a wider effective bandwidth over which their electricity generation performance is superior. Both the responses of vibration and electrical output increases linearly with the excitation level while the relationship between the tribo-charge surface density and the excitation amplitude is found to be quadratic.
Phylogeny and Evolution of Lepidoptera Mitter, Charles; Davis, Donald R; Cummings, Michael P
Annual review of entomology,
01/2017, Volume:
62, Issue:
1
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
Until recently, deep-level phylogeny in Lepidoptera, the largest single radiation of plant-feeding insects, was very poorly understood. Over the past two decades, building on a preceding era of ...morphological cladistic studies, molecular data have yielded robust initial estimates of relationships both within and among the ∼43 superfamilies, with unsolved problems now yielding to much larger data sets from high-throughput sequencing. Here we summarize progress on lepidopteran phylogeny since 1975, emphasizing the superfamily level, and discuss some resulting advances in our understanding of lepidopteran evolution.
Pathogenesis is strongly dependent on microbial context, but development of probiotic therapies has neglected the impact of ecological interactions. Dynamics among microbial communities, host immune ...responses, and environmental conditions may alter the effect of probiotics in human and veterinary medicine, agriculture and aquaculture, and the proposed treatment of emerging wildlife and zoonotic diseases such as those occurring on amphibians or vectored by mosquitoes. Here we use a holistic measure of amphibian mucosal defenses to test the effects of probiotic treatments and to assess disease risk under different ecological contexts. We developed a non-invasive assay for antifungal function of the skin mucosal ecosystem (mucosome function) integrating host immune factors and the microbial community as an alternative to pathogen exposure experiments. From approximately 8500 amphibians sampled across Europe, we compared field infection prevalence with mucosome function against the emerging fungal pathogen Batrachochytrium dendrobatidis. Four species were tested with laboratory exposure experiments, and a highly susceptible species, Alytes obstetricans, was treated with a variety of temperature and microbial conditions to test the effects of probiotic therapies and environmental conditions on mucosome function. We found that antifungal function of the amphibian skin mucosome predicts the prevalence of infection with the fungal pathogen in natural populations, and is linked to survival in laboratory exposure experiments. When altered by probiotic therapy, the mucosome increased antifungal capacity, while previous exposure to the pathogen was suppressive. In culture, antifungal properties of probiotics depended strongly on immunological and environmental context including temperature, competition, and pathogen presence. Functional changes in microbiota with shifts in temperature provide an alternative mechanistic explanation for patterns of disease susceptibility related to climate beyond direct impact on host or pathogen. This nonlethal management tool can be used to optimize and quickly assess the relative benefits of probiotic therapies under different climatic, microbial, or host conditions.
Deep networks are now able to achieve human-level performance on a broad spectrum of recognition tasks. Independently, neuromorphic computing has now demonstrated unprecedented energy-efficiency ...through a new chip architecture based on spiking neurons, low precision synapses, and a scalable communication network. Here, we demonstrate that neuromorphic computing, despite its novel architectural primitives, can implement deep convolution networks that (i) approach state-of-the-art classification accuracy across eight standard datasets encompassing vision and speech, (ii) perform inference while preserving the hardware’s underlying energy-efficiency and high throughput, running on the aforementioned datasets at between 1,200 and 2,600 frames/s and using between 25 and 275 mW (effectively >6,000 frames/s per Watt), and (iii) can be specified and trained using backpropagation with the same ease-of-use as contemporary deep learning. This approach allows the algorithmic power of deep learning to be merged with the efficiency of neuromorphic processors, bringing the promise of embedded, intelligent, brain-inspired computing one step closer.
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