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A framing effect in the judgment of discrimination
Get PDFDiscrimination is not only an objective fact but also a subjective judgment. While extensive research has studied discrimination as an objective fact, we study the judgment of discrimination and show that it is malleable while holding objective discrimination constant. We focus on a common situation in real life: the constituent groups in a candidate pool are unequal (e.g., fewer female candidates than male candidates for tech jobs), and observers (e.g., the public) see only one side of the decision outcome (e.g., only the hired applicants, not the rejected ones). Ten experiments reveal a framing effect: people judge the decision-maker (e.g., the tech firm) as more discriminatory against the minority in the candidate pool if people see the composition of the accepted candidates than if they see the composition of the rejected candidates, even though the information in the two frames is equivalent (i.e., knowing the information in one frame is sufficient to infer the information in the other). The framing effect occurs regardless of whether the decision-maker is objectively discriminatory, replicates across diverse samples (Americans, Asians, and Europeans) and types of discrimination (e.g., gender, race, political orientation), and has significant behavioral consequences. We theorize and show that the framing effect arises because, when judging discrimination, people overlook information that they could infer but is not explicitly given, and they expect equality in the composition of the constituent groups in their given frame. This research highlights the fallibility of judged discrimination and suggests interventions to reduce biases and increase accuracy
Enhancing the speed of DNA walkers through soft confinement
Get PDFOver the past two decades, dynamic DNA origami structures have emerged as promising candidates for nanoscale signal and cargo transport. DNA walkers, programmable nanostructures that traverse tracks made of DNA, represent a key innovation in this field, enabling controlled and directional movement at the nanoscale. Despite relatively fast diffusion rates, the speed of DNA walkers remains constrained by the reaction-limited nature of strand exchange mechanisms, which depend both on the foothold-walker affinity and on the probability of the molecules being found close enough to bind. In this study, we explore how spatial confinement can expedite walker motion and evaluate two strategies to achieve this: the introduction of tailed DNA footholds, promoting pseudo-rotational dynamics, and the addition of walls along the DNA track, promoting pseudo-curvilinear dynamics. Using simulations and stochastic theories, we demonstrate that, by reducing the sampling of conformations far from the binding sites, tailed footholds provide the best speed enhancement, achieving a fourfold increase in speed. Trench-like confinement yields a more modest threefold increase, what, while significant, requires extensive structural modifications to the DNA track, limiting design flexibility and reducing cost-efficiency in comparison to the tailed footholds. The combination of tailed footholds and trench-like confinement turns the walker-foothold system bistable, with two distinct stable states separated by an energy barrier. By focusing on the properties of the DNA track, this study offers novel insights into leveraging soft structural motifs to optimize signal propagation rates, with implications for sensing, robotics and molecular computing in reaction-diffusion systems
COVID-19 Biopharmaceutical Innovation and Industry Appropriation
Get PDFThe rapid emergence of vaccines and therapeutics in response to the onset of the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic demonstrated the value of medical innovation. These advances not only led to enhanced patient welfare by reducing the disease’s mortality and morbidity but also reduced the need for costly prevention measures, such as cuts in economic activity. This paper offers the first estimate of the portion of economic value generated by these medical innovations that was appropriated as earnings by the innovating companies, measured by the ratio of company earnings to the overall societal value generated by the innovations. To estimate the value and appropriation of COVID-19 innovations, one must necessarily make assumptions about what disease-specific and preventive activity would have been in the absence of these new innovations. To obtain robustness in our findings across such scenarios, we estimate industry appropriation across a wide range of counterfactual scenarios that would occur under no innovation. These scenarios include previous assessments of the contributing subparts of the value generated by the innovations. Our primary finding is that, within the large range of these counterfactual scenarios, upper-bound measures of the proportion of value appropriated by the industry ranged from 0.2 % to 4.6 % of the value generated by the vaccine and treatment innovations. Even though these are upper bound appropriation rates, they are significantly lower than those documented for other significant health sciences innovations. This suggests that COVID-19 vaccines and treatments were remarkable, not only in their swift development but also in the considerable societal value they provided, which extended far beyond the rewards to the innovating companies
Temperature-dependent fold-switching mechanism of the circadian clock protein KaiB
Get PDFThe oscillator of the cyanobacterial circadian clock relies on the ability of the KaiB protein to switch reversibly between a stable ground-state fold (gsKaiB) and an unstable fold-switched fold (fsKaiB). Rare fold-switching events by KaiB provide a critical delay in the negative feedback loop of this posttranslational oscillator. In this study, we experimentally and computationally investigate the temperature dependence of fold switching and its mechanism. We demonstrate that the stability of gsKaiB increases with temperature compared to fsKaiB and that the Q10 value for the gsKaiB → fsKaiB transition is nearly three times smaller than that for the reverse transition in a construct optimized for NMR studies. Simulations and native-state hydrogen-deuterium exchange NMR experiments suggest that fold switching can involve both partially and completely unfolded intermediates. The simulations predict that the transition state for fold switching coincides with isomerization of conserved prolines in the most rapidly exchanging region, and we confirm experimentally that proline isomerization is a rate-limiting step for fold switching. We explore the implications of our results for temperature compensation, a hallmark of circadian clocks, through a kinetic model
200 Years of Research on Himalayan Biodiversity: Trends, Gaps, and Policy Implications
Get PDFGlobal mountains, including the Himalaya, are highly vulnerable ecosystems, especially given climate and land-use changes. Here, we compile the literature on Himalayan biodiversity in order to assess spatial and taxonomic trends in research during the past 200 years. We identified 35,316 research outputs, including 28,120 journal articles, 3,725 doctoral theses, and 3,471 books. Nepal contributes the largest volume of published literature, followed by west Himalayan Indian states, with relatively few studies on the most biodiverse region lying to the east of Nepal. Publications on Himalayan biodiversity research have increased annually, especially after 1970, with an acceleration since 2000. Among the major taxonomic groups, the largest number of publications is on seed plants (angiosperms), followed by invertebrates (especially arthropods) and vertebrates. Some groups of organisms, notably fungi, bacteria, algae, bryophytes, pteridophytes, etc., are clearly understudied. Among various research disciplines, ecology is the most dominant field followed by agriculture, ethnobiology, and paleontology. Some newer disciplines, including molecular biology and climate change, have contributed to the growth in the number of papers appearing during the last two decades. Despite an encouraging and rapid increase in research papers during this century, they are largely in low-impact-factor journals, likely to be subject to poor peer review, and many doctoral theses remain unpublished. The Government of India's development initiative emphasizes the importance of research in the Himalaya, which can be enhanced by improved quality of peer review and local journals registering in global indexing services
Poets and Translators at the End of a World
Get PDFThis dissertation proposes translation as a model for responding to the end of a human world. Not the end of the world that is, but of human worlds, in the plural, as we make and unmake them. Such making and unmaking is the matter of history. What agency we have in this process, I will argue, has to be theorized as historical agency. The question concerning historical agency was much debated in the late 18th century, when modern philosophy of history first came into its own. As a matter of practical philosophy, it has since been mostly forgotten. For a while now we have known that human historical agency is even wider in scope than originally thought, reaching deep into natural history but, at the same time, also highly precarious, even self-undermining in its consequences. In light of all this, I propose we re-open the question: who acts in history, and what would it mean to do this well? My primary goal is to put these questions back on the agenda of a contemporary philosophy of history. To this end, I look at the dominant answer given, which emerged when a late 18th century concept of poetic genius migrated from aesthetics into philosophy of history after the French Revolution. Few believe in either aesthetic or historical genius anymore, yet it tacitly structures our thinking on these matters even today. I propose an alternative to this poetic paradigm of human historical agency. It is grounded in historical translation practices, and I call it translational action. For centuries, an older concept of translatio had been the backbone of Latinate Western historical thought, until it was lost with the onset of modernity. This dissertation offers a re-statement of the salvageable core of this pre-modern idea for present times. Its appeal today, I argue, lies in that translational action allows us to think of creatively mourning the loss of a world as itself emancipatory: as realizing a revised, yet still distinctly modern form of historical freedom
Good transit versus good development: Evaluating the importance of transit service quality and Transit-Oriented Development on post-COVID-19 CTA ridership recovery
Get PDFTransit-Oriented Development (TOD), coordinating dense and diverse land uses and a walkable built environment around transit services, has been found to promote transit ridership. However, there is a lack of research into the effects of TOD on ridership recovery following a steep decline in the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in comparison to research on a variety of improvements in transit service itself (including frequency, span, and speed). This project aims to assess the impact of various land use factors associated with TOD, as well as measures of transit service quality, on the post-pandemic ridership recovery of Chicago Transit Authority (CTA) buses and trains. Utilizing granular internal CTA data on bus ridership, as well as publicly available data on rail ridership, transit schedules, population and employment density, housing types, and zoning, I build predictive models of ridership recovery from land use and transit service variables and determine the relative importance of these variables through statistical analysis of the models. The results of this analysis suggest that TOD does not have substantial bearing on post-pandemic ridership recovery, and that planners and policymakers should first and foremost focus on improving frequency of transit service to promote transit ridership in Chicago and across the country
Gendered Dynamic Choice Profiles: Costs of Transportation in Chicago for Women and Men
Get PDFThe aim of this study is to study gendered urban mobility through the framework of dynamic mode choice profiles. Women have historically faced differentiated conditions and expectations in the labor market, while conducting the majority of household labor. As a result, women face different costs of transportation for a number of reasons: their unpaid labor has traditionally been unaccounted for in the opportunity cost of time, they go to different destinations than men, have a lower on average income, and face a higher threat of public harassment and assault. This paper dives into transportation data modelling to empirically demonstrate how labor market factors and other gendered determinants lead to gendered differentiation in costs incurred across two modes of transportation: public transportation and rideshare. This paper calculates dynamic modal cost-distance trade-offs for specific times, routes, and geographic areas of interest in the Chicago region in order to estimate the transportation costs incurred by women and men by Chicago census tract. It finds that on average, women incur more costs for multiple modes of transportation than men. This paper draws upon literature discussing social exclusion and unpaid labor across genders and indices of opportunity cost. It models transportation cost outcomes while taking these indices into account; these indices have not been merged with cost outcomes in previous transportation literature. It finds that in general, public transportation is more costly for women than for men in Chicago
My Eyes Grow Dim from Grief: A Jewish Visual Ethic of Death and Memory
Get PDFIn my dissertation I demonstrate how a visual approach to the dead body and to the memory of loved ones can inform our understandings of Jewish obligations to the dead. I argue that a visual approach to religious ethics broadly, and Jewish ethics in particular, can help us better understand the moral lives of religious practitioners. Using the theory of visual ethics I develop in the beginning of the dissertation, I apply it to a significant question in moral philosophy: how can we be obligated to the dead? Using theorists including Josef Soloveitchik, Mara Benjamin, Emmanuel Levinas and Avishai Margalit, along with artworks from early modern Prague and contemporary America, I show that our obligations to the dead are based in an understanding of the dead as a morally demanding subject, which demands that we look away from the body. I conclude by arguing that this insight has implications for bioethical questions regarding the use of dead bodies in medical experimentation