ABSTRACT Returning to Isaiah Berlin’s “Two Concepts of Liberty” offers a defense of liberal democracy that can help us come to terms with its limits, as well as the implicit tradeoffs that are an inescapable feature of politics in a liberal democracy. While critics of Berlin are right to note his neglect of Enlightenment constitutionalism, his skeptical liberalism is illuminated by comparative constitutional law, where we see how different constitutional regimes balance different values—such as democracy, liberty, and equality—in different ways (...) that are attuned to the particulars of place and history that both Berlin and critics of liberalism insist are so important. (shrink)

Critical analysis of fifteen major figures from Plato to Tillich, with an exposition of the religious philosophy of each thinker.

Joseph Schumpeter’s Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy captures the unique blend of politics and economics, along with a particular culture and civil society, that are characteristic of liberal democracy. Commercial and economic activity have been so crucial to liberal democracy that it has often been characterized as “commercial republicanism,” and Schumpeter referred to it with justification as “bourgeois democracy.” Schumpeter’s view, which is too often characterized as simply elitist, can be situated in the realist tradition, offering a helpful corrective to simplistic (...) understandings of democracy, such as populist understandings, that are at odds with the promise of liberal democracy. Yet while Schumpeter thought that capitalism would collapse under its own contradictions, and wondered if democracy could survive without it, today global capitalism looks unstoppable. It is bourgeois democracy that looks fragile, not because of the collapse of capitalism, as Schumpeter predicted, but because of its success. Can liberal democracy surive if global capitalism undermines the middle class on which it depends? (shrink)

PurposeTo use the power of knowledge acquisition and machine learning in the development of a collaborative computer classification system based on the features of age-related macular degeneration (AMD).MethodsA vocabulary was acquired from four AMD experts who examined 100 ophthalmoscopic images. The vocabulary was analyzed, hierarchically structured, and incorporated into a collaborative computer classification system called IDOCS. Using this system, three of the experts examined images from a second set of digital images compiled from more than 1000 patients with AMD. Images (...) were annotated, and features were identified and defined. Decision trees, a machine learning method, were trained on the data collected and used to extract patterns. Interrelationships between the data from the different clinicians were investigated.ResultsSix drusen classes in the structured vocabulary were largely sufficient to describe all the identified features. The decision trees classified the data with 76.86% to 88.5% accuracy and distilled patterns in the form of hierarchical trees composed of 5 to 15 nodes. Experts were largely consistent in their characterization of soft, and to a lesser extent, hard drusen, but diverge in definition of other drusen. Size and crystalline morphology were the main determinants of drusen type across all experts.ConclusionsMachine learning is a powerful tool for the characterization of disease phenotypes. The creation of a defined feature set for AMD will facilitate the development of an IDOCS-based classification system. (shrink)

Samuel H. Pillsbury, Judging Evil: Rethinking the Law of Murder and Manslaughter New York: New York University Press, 1998, vii + 264pp.

This essay focuses on how more democratic processes and more democratic participation are not in themselves good measures for a successful democratic order. Rather, whether more democratic participation is good depends on the type of knowledge the people actually bring to the political order. Increases in democratic participation are, thus, a misleading measure of democratic success. The crucial point is what sort of knowledge the people bring to democratic discourse. Furthermore, political and civic institutions play a key role in fostering (...) and shaping public understandings. Here, I suggest that American institutions, while designed to help educate popular understandings by requiring the building of complex democratic majorities, have in many instances enabled the worst aspects of popular government, often empowering minority rule, rather than refining popular sentiment. Thus, American political institutions could engage in constitutional reform to recapture the balance between popular understandings and the constitutional institutions that help articulate, educate, and refine those understandings. (shrink)

It has generally been observed that cells grow to a certain size before they divide. In the last few years, the PI3K signal transduction pathway has emerged as one of the main signaling routes utilized by cells to control their increase in size. Here we focus on two components of this pathway, PKB and S6K, and briefly review the experiments that initially uncovered their roles in cell size control. In addition, we discuss a number of recent observations suggesting that the (...) generic models used to describe this pathway to date may have been oversimplified. Indeed, recent observations in Drosophila and mouse support a more complex interaction between these signaling components in development. Finally, we have utilized two contemporary studies involving PKB‐ and S6K‐deficient mice as a paradigm to underscore the importance of cell size and to accurately delineate the connections between signaling pathways for human disease, such as diabetes mellitus. BioEssays 24:65–71, 2002. © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Inc. (shrink)

It has been known for 20 years that the ribosomal protein S6 is rapidly phosphorylated when cells are stimulated to grow or divide. Furthermore, numerous studies have documented that there is a strong correlation between increases in S6 phosphorylation and protein synthesis, leading to the idea that S6 phosphorylation is involved in up‐regulating translation. In an attempt to define a mechanism by which S6 phosphorylation exerts translational control, other studies have focused on characterizing the sites of phosphorylation of this protein (...) and its location within the ribosome. Recent data show that S6 is a protein which may have diverse cellular functions and is essential for normal development, and that it may be involved in the translational regulation of a specific class of messages. (shrink)

This edition of George Berkeley's Philosophical Commentaries, first published in 1989, provides an accurate transcription of Berkeley's manuscript, and introduction to set it in perspective, extensive notes to aid in interpreting it, and a full index to facilitate the use of it.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Criminal Law, Pain Relief, and Physician Aid in DyingFaye Girsh, Ed.D., Executive DirectorMadam:The article by Cantor and Thomas on “Pain Relief, Acceleration of Death, and Criminal Law” (KIEJ, June 1996) was a tortured attempt to develop criteria for the humane and compassionate physician who tries to serve the needs of a patient in unremitting pain. There are three areas that merit comment.The authors dealt with pain medications that (...) might have the undesirable side effect of causing death. They did not mention tolerance, which usually occurs in a patient with chronic pain and which would require exceedingly high doses to be effective. They did not mention barbiturates, which are preferable to opiates in causing death and which are used increasingly by compassionate physicians to answer the pleas of their suffering patients, but for which there is no excuse about alleviating pain. Would the criminal law just call the prescription of a lethal dose of barbiturates a reckless act and require conviction? Fortunately, juries, as the authors point out, do not balance these formulas on the head of a pin. When they see the circumstances under which these doctors do help their patients, they choose to nullify the law and would ignore the suggestions made in this article.The authors refer to the “consent” of the patient. They do not mention that these doctors are operating with more than consent; they are administering these medications because suffering patients are begging them to put them out of their pain and the indignities of the dying process. The article discusses the process as though it were the same as consent to elective surgery. These patients—with AIDS, cancer, and hopeless neurological degeneration—are not simply agreeing to a procedure; they are desperately seeking a way out. If the criminal law were to develop criteria for physician aid in dying, certainly one of them should be the active, witnessed, repeated request of such a patient for a certain, quick, painless, gentle death.The third point is that physicians do not face prosecution when administering no treatment to a patient whose life could be saved with treatment but who chooses not to receive it. This has been upheld by the U.S. Supreme Court; no criteria for suffering, alternatives, terminality, justifiability, or unbearability are required. The doctor can stand by while the patient dies what may be a protracted, difficult death, but it is within the law. What matters in this situation is the decision of the patient to refuse treatment, and that is absolute. How ironic that the patient who cannot refuse treatment must, with his or her doctor, jump through all these hoops to achieve a peaceful death.One worries that the physician who must balance the risk of “risky pain relief” against the accusation of recklessness will err in the direction of allowing [End Page 103] the patient to bear the pain rather than help with a dose of analgesics that might be considered beyond the stipulated “risk.”Why don’t we just be honest about it? Allow dying or hopelessly ill patients to make the decision about what they want by passing a carefully defined law allowing euthanasia rather than balancing the risk and trying to determine the “purpose” of the physician’s ministrations. We protect some patients from themselves while allowing others almost complete autonomy to make the choice of ending their lives. The authors were right in saying that proponents of rational laws consider this sheer hypocrisy.Faye Girsh, Executive DirectorHemlock Society U.S.A. Denver, COFaye Girsh misconceives our article’s objective as an “attempt to develop criteria” for the humane physician. Our goal in writing the paper was to analyze the current criminal law framework in the hope of sharpening debate and engendering normative critiques. We readily acknowledge tensions in the current legal framework and would support changes in that framework.Copyright © 1997 The Johns Hopkins University Press... (shrink)

We start with a simple proof of Leivant's normal form theorem for ∑11 formulas over finite successor structures. Then we use that normal form to prove the following:1. over all finite structures, every ∑21 formula is equivalent to a ∑21 formula whose first-order part is a Boolean combination of existential formulas, and2. over finite successor structures, the Kolaitis-Thakur hierarchy of minimization problems collapses completely and the Kolaitis-Thakur hierarchy of maximization problems collapses partially.The normal form theorem for ∑21 fails if ∑21 (...) is replaced with ∑11 or if infinite structures are allowed. (shrink)