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This paper describes the design and fabrication of electrically controlled paper actuators that operate based on the dimensional changes that occur in paper when the moisture absorbed on the surface of the cellulose fibers changes. These actuators are called “Hygroexpansive Electrothermal Paper Actuators” (HEPAs). The actuators are made from paper, conducting polymer, and adhesive tape. They are lightweight, inexpensive, and can be fabricated using simple printing techniques. The central element of the HEPAs is a porous conducting path (used to provide electrothermal heating) that changes the moisture content of the paper and causes actuation. This conducting path is made by embedding a conducting polymer (PEDOT:PSS) within the paper, and thus making a paper/polymer composite that retains the porosity and hydrophilicity of paper. Different types of HEPAs (straight, precurved, and creased) achieved different types of motions (e.g., bending motion, accordion type motion). A theoretical model for their behavior is proposed. These actuators have been used for the manipulation of liquids and for the fabrication of an optical shutter., Chemistry and Chemical Biology

The fields of paper microfluidics and printed electronics have developed independently, and are incompatible in many of their aspects (e.g. printed electronic thin films are not designed to tolerate the flows of liquids, and especially of water, nor are water filled-channels designed to conduct electrons). This work demonstrates monolithic integration of microfluidics and electronics on paper, by extending the use of paper microfluidics to the fabrication of electrical conductors by the wicking of aqueous conducting inks inside microfluidic channels. These conductors are unique in that they can act as wires, electrodes, and microfluidic channels at the same time. These techniques, make it possible to print both two- and three-dimensional fluidic, electrofluidic, and electrical components using simple methods, and thus to design new paper devices. This paper demonstrates the fabrication of three classes of devices: i) 3D paper “printed circuit boards”, ii) vertical-flow electroanalytical devices, and iii) foldable, all-organic paper batteries., Chemistry and Chemical Biology

Current methods of monitoring breathing require cumbersome, inconvenient, and often expensive devices; this requirement sets practical limitations on the frequency and duration of measurements. This article describes a paper-based moisture sensor that uses the hygroscopic character of paper (i.e. the ability of paper to adsorb water reversibly from the surrounding environment) to measure patterns and rate of respiration by converting the changes in humidity caused by cycles of inhalation and exhalation to electrical signals. The changing level of humidity that occurs in a cycle causes a corresponding change in the ionic conductivity of the sensor, which can be measured electrically. By combining the paper sensor with conventional electronics, data concerning respiration can be transmitted to a nearby smartphone or tablet computer for post-processing, and subsequently to a cloud server. This means of sensing provides a new, practical method of recording and analyzing patterns of breathing., Chemistry and Chemical Biology

A multilayered paper-based platform is used to investigate the interactions between human lung tumor cells and fibroblasts that are isolated from primary patient tumor samples., Chemistry and Chemical Biology

This paper contributes to the study of social change by considering boundary work as a dimension of cultural change. Drawing on the computer-assisted qualitative analysis of 73 formal speeches made by Donald Trump during the 2016 electoral campaign, we argue that his political rhetoric, which led to his presidential victory, addressed the white working classes’ concern with their declining position in the national pecking order. He addressed their concern by raising the moral status of this group, that is, by 1) emphatically describing them as hard working Americans who are victims of globalization; 2) voicing their concerns about ‘people above’ (professionals, the rich, and politicians); 3) drawing strong moral boundaries toward undocumented immigrants, refugees and Muslims; 4) presenting African American and (legal) Hispanic Americans as workers who also deserve jobs; 5) stressing the role of working class men as protectors of women and LGBTQ people. This particular case study of cultural resonance provides a novel, distinctively sociological approach for capturing dynamics of social change., African and African American Studies, History of Science, Sociology

To investigate the phenomenon of patient–physician mistrust in China, a qualitative study involving 107 physicians, nurses and health officials in Guangdong Province, southern China, was conducted through semi-structured interviews and focus groups. In this paper we report the key findings of the empirical study and argue for the essential role of medical professionalism in rebuilding patient-physician trust. Health professionals are trapped in a vicious circle of mistrust. Mistrust (particularly physicians’ distrust of patients and their relatives) leads to increased levels of fear and self-protection by doctors which exacerbate difficulties in communication; in turn, this increases physician workloads, adding to a strong sense of injustice and victimization. These factors produce poorer healthcare outcomes and increasingly discontented and angry patients, escalate conflicts and disputes, and result in negative media coverage, all these ultimately contributing to even greater levels of mistrust. The vicious circle indicates not only the crisis of patient-physician relationship but the crisis of medicine as a profession and institution. Underlying the circle is the inherent conflict of interest in the healthcare system by which health professionals and hospitals have become profit-driven. This institutional conflict of interest seriously compromises the fundamental principle of medical professionalism—the primacy of patient welfare—as well as the traditional Chinese ideal of “medicine as the art of humanity”. Patient trust can be restored through rectifying this institutional conflict of interest and promoting medical professionalism via a series of recommended practical measures.

Trust is indispensable not only for interpersonal relationships and social life, but for good quality healthcare. As manifested in the increasing violence and tension in patient-physician relationships, China has been experiencing a widespread and profound crisis of patient–physician trust. And globally, the crisis of trust is an issue that every society, either developing or developed, has to face in one way or another. Yet, in spite of some pioneering works, the subject of patient-physician trust and mistrust – a crucial matter in healthcare especially because there are numerous ethical implications – has largely been marginalized in bioethics as a global discourse. Drawing lessons as well as inspirations from China, this paper demonstrates the necessity of a trust-oriented bioethics and presents some key theoretical, methodological and philosophical elements of such a bioethics. A trust-oriented bioethics moves beyond the current dominant bioethical paradigms through putting the subject of trust and mistrust in the central agenda of the field, learning from the social sciences, and reviving indigenous moral resources. In order for global bioethics to claim its relevance to the things that truly matter in social life and healthcare, trust should be as vital as such central norms like autonomy and justice and can serve as a potent theoretical framework.

Laws can be written along a spectrum of specificity, ranging from vague standards to more detailed rules with particular examples. Behavioral and legal scholarship each present conflicting views about the optimal degree of specificity with which laws should be designed. From a behavioral standpoint, specificity is important to help people understand their goals and use their cognitive resources in a focused manner. At the same time, ambiguity in the law can even encourage good people to engage in creative interpretations of legal requirements, allowing them to justify unethical behavior, with limited awareness of the meaning of that behavior. By contrast, theories of crowding out, trust, and cooperation suggest that specificity can create resentment and lead to under-compliance and under-performance. These conflicting views about the effects of specificity serve as the background for this experimental project. This paper studies the effects of specificity on behavior in response to a directive that shares important features with the law. First, we examine the effect of specificity on compliance (following a directive) versus performance (beyond a minimum threshold). Second, we compare the controlling, limiting effects of specificity with its instructive, informative effects by comparing the interaction between specificity and monitoring with the interaction between specificity and good faith. We hypothesized that the combination of specificity and monitoring enhances the effect of specificity on compliance but harms performance and trust, whereas the combination of specificity and good faith enhances both the informative goal-setting aspects of specificity and people’s sense of commitment. The study employs an experimental design in which subjects edit a document after being exposed to detailed (vague) instructions, with (without) a reference to good faith, and with (without) monitoring (through sanctioning). The assignments were designed in such a way that people could engage in various levels of editing (both required and not required, reasonable and more than reasonable), allowing us to measure distinctly both compliance and performance. Our results suggest that when participants require information and guidance, as in the case of editing a document, specificity increases performance even beyond what is required relative to a vague standard condition.

Abating climate change is an enormous international public goods problem with a classical "free rider" structure. But it is also a global "free driver" problem because geoengineering the stratosphere with reflective particles to block incoming solar radiation is so cheap that it could essentially be undertaken unilaterally by one state perceiving itself to be in peril. This exploratory paper develops the main features of a "free driver" externality in a simple model motivated by the asymmetric consequences of type-I and type-II errors. I propose a social-choice decision architecture embodying the solution concept of a supermajority voting rule and derive its basic properties., Economics

We study optimal government debt maturity in a model where investors derive monetary services from holding riskless short-term securities. In a setting where the government is the only issuer of such riskless paper, it trades off the monetary premium associated with short-term debt against the refinancing risk implied by the need to roll over its debt more often. We then extend the model to allow private financial intermediaries to compete with the government in the provision of short-term, money-like claims. We argue that if there are negative externalities associated with private money creation, the government should tilt its issuance more towards short maturities. The idea is that the government may have a comparative advantage relative to the private sector in bearing refinancing risk and, hence, should aim to partially crowd out the private sector's use of short-term debt.

In this paper, we solve a dynamic model of households' mortgage decisions incorporating labor income, house price, inflation, and interest rate risk. Using a zero-profit condition for mortgage lenders, we solve for equilibrium mortgage rates given borrower characteristics and optimal decisions. The model quantifies the effects of adjustable versus fixed mortgage rates, loan-to-value ratios, and mortgage affordability measures on mortgage premia and default. Mortgage selection by heterogeneous borrowers helps explain the higher default rates on adjustable-rate mortgages during the recent U.S. housing downturn, and the variation in mortgage premia with the level of interest rates., Economics

In this paper, we propose an extension of the productivity decomposition method developed by Olley & Pakes (1996). This extension provides an accounting for the contributions of both firm entry and exit to aggregate productivity changes. It breaks down the contribution of surviving firms into a component accounting for changes in the firm-level distribution of productivity and another accounting for market share reallocations among those firms - following the same methodology as the one proposed by Olley & Pakes (1996). We argue that the other decompositions that break-down aggregate productivity changes into these same four components introduce some biases in the measurement of the contributions of entry and exit. We apply our proposed decomposition to the large measured increases of productivity in Slovenian manufacturing during the 1995-2000 period and contrast our results with those of other decompositions. We find that, over a 5-year period, the measurement bias associated with entry and exit is substantial, accounting for up to 10 percentage points of aggregate productivity growth. We also find that market share reallocations among surviving firms played a much more important role in driving aggregate productivity changes., Economics

Despite the growth of research in universities on point-of-care (POC) diagnostics for global health, most devices never leave the laboratory. The processes that move diagnostic technology from the laboratory to the field—the processes intended to evaluate operation and performance under realistic conditions—are more complicated than they might seem. Two case studies illustrate this process: the development of a paper-based device to measure liver function, and the development of a device to identify sickle cell disease based on aqueous multiphase systems (AMPS) and differences in the densities of normal and sickled cells. Details of developing these devices provide strategies for forming partnerships, prototyping devices, designing studies, and evaluating POC diagnostics. Technical and procedural lessons drawn from these experiences may be useful to those designing diagnostic tests for developing countries, and more generally, technologies for use in resource-limited environments., Chemistry and Chemical Biology

Jean Tirole was awarded the 2014 Sveriges Riksbank Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel for his analysis of market power and regulation. This paper provides an overview of some of that work, and of his related contributions to game theory., Economics

This paper investigates whether individual venture capitalists have repeatable investment skill and to what extent their skill is impacted by the VC firm where they work. We examine a unique dataset that tracks the performance of individual venture capitalists' investments across time and as they move between firms. We find evidence of skill and exit style differences even among venture partners investing at the same VC firm at the same time. Furthermore, our estimates suggest the partner's human capital is two to five times more important than the VC firm's organizational capital in explaining performance.

This paper makes the case that when wishful thinking ill-founds belief, the belief depends on the desire in ways can be recapitulated at the level of perceptual experience. The relevant kinds of desires include motivations, hopes, preferences, and goals. I distinguish between two modes of dependence of belief on desire in wishful thinking: selective or inquiry-related, and responsive or evidence-related. I offers a theory of basing on which beliefs are badly-based on desires, due to patterns of dependence that can found in the relationship between experiences and desires as well. This conclusion brings us a large part of the way to the conclusion that like beliefs, experiences can be ill-founded by depending on a desire., Philosophy

This paper uses a series of experiments with commercial bank loan officers to test the effect of performance incentives on risk assessment and lending decisions. We first show that while high-powered incentives lead to greater screening effort and more profitable lending, their power is muted by both deferred compensation and the limited liability typically enjoyed by credit officers. Second, we present direct evidence that incentive contracts distort judgment and beliefs, even among trained professionals with many years of experience. Loans evaluated under more permissive incentive schemes are rated significantly less risky than the same loans evaluated under pay-for-performance.