In a provocative new book, 1 George Beauchamp, MD, claims that physicians are “slaves to medicine.” He explains that this is partly because “when most people go to see a doctor, both the services the doctor provides and the fees that insurance companies allow him to charge are largely predetermined by parties other than the patients and doctors.” Most patients, in turn, feel completely powerles...

Sex determination offers an opportunity to address many classic questions of developmental biology. In addition, because sex determination evolves rapidly, it offers an opportunity to investigate the evolution of genetic hierarchies. Sex determination in Drosophila melanogaster is controlled by the master regulatory gene, Sex lethal (Sxl). DmSxl controls the alternative splicing of a downstream...

Abstract In this article I explain a nexus between slavery and state formation in Africa, proceeding from initial demographic institutional conditions to an external demand shift, individual responses, their collective systemic consequences. Historically, African rulers faced distinctive challenges: low population density prioritized control of people more than territory, internal disintegratio...

The introduction of confined, “slave” fields is frequently useful as a formal device in models of condensed matter physics; it becomes a conceptual necessity for describing possible phases of matter where the slaves are liberated. Here I discuss some aspects of the fractional quantum Hall effect from this point of view, emphasizing analogies with phenomena in other areas of physics, particularl...

Bluetooth is a universal radio interface in the 2.45Ghz frequency band, which will enable users to connect a range of small electronic devices. Any two or more Bluetooth-enabled devices that come within range of each other can set up an ad hoc connection, called a piconet. Within a piconet, the unit that establishes the piconet becomes the master and the rest of the units act as slaves. The mas...

Bluetooth is expected to be an important basic constructing component of smart homes. In a smart home environment, many devices will be portable and battery-operated, making power saving an essential issue. In this article we study the problem of managing the low-power sniff mode in Bluetooth, where a slave is allowed to be awake only periodically. One challenging problem is how to schedule eac...

Scholars have frequently observed that Dionysus is a god who breaks down barriers (of gender, class, social norms, et cetera). This is true in Euripides's Bacchae to a certain extent, and the play's breakdown of the divide between male/female and Greek/foreign has been well examined in scholarship. However, the limitations of this questioning of boundaries are much less discussed. For instance,...