The old ways worked

Old Ways of Searching Hay

Rare-event analysis (REA) is the art of finding a needle in a haystack, confirming that it is a needle, and making measurements to determine what kind of needle it is. A rare event is typically one occurring at a frequency of below 1 in 1,000 (0.1%) [1, 2]. Numerous measurements are needed to detect rare events, such as tumour cells in peripheral blood, and it was historically a long-winded pro...

“Waterloo of the Old Ways”: Women’s Rights

The title of this essay is a proud comment made by a character in Ismail Kadare’s novel The Wedding. The character is a writer who is commenting on the efforts of the Albanian government to eliminate the tradition of under-age betrothals, that is, arranged marriages for girls. The works of Kadare, a prolific Albanian writer born in 1936, highlight many of the social and political problems of wo...

New ways to keep old promises in health care.

Engineering cardiac muscle: new ways to refurbish old hearts?

Myocardial infarction leads to irreversible cell loss and scar formation, which result in impaired cardiac function, cardiac hypertrophy and, eventually, heart failure. As the intrinsic regenerative capacity of the human heart is very limited, organ transplantation or ventricular assist devices remain the only end-stage therapy options to date. For at least two decades, alternative therapeutic ...

New ways of looking at old issues: inequality and growth

Ž . The paper uses new cross-country data on income and asset land distribution to show Ž . that i there is a strong negative relationship between initial inequality in the asset Ž . distribution and long-term growth; ii inequality reduces income growth for the poor, but Ž . not for the rich; and iii available longitudinal data provide little support for the Kuznets hypothesis. Policies that in...