Explaining life

Explaining life. Synthetic biology and non-scientific understandings of life.

The question ‘what is life?’ has puzzled people for millennia. Although the term ‘life’ is used daily as if it were clearly and unequivocally defined, there are many scientific and non-scientific understandings of life. Journalists have been using the effect that can be produced by combining the enigmatic word ‘life’ with technical terms such as ‘engineering’ or ‘artificiality’ [1,2] in their c...

Explaining Life: Microorganisms in Science Museums

Tablepresenter: a Life-like Agent Explaining Tables

This paper proposes a life-like presentation agent system called TablePresenter. In the TablePresenter, a user edits a table on Microsoft Excel, and also specifies the presentation contents for explaining the table in the form of tree structure, called presentation tree. The system then generates animated presentation by an agent. Presentation trees have intermediate nodes labeled as “contrast”...

More Life vs. More Goods: Explaining Rising Health Expenditures

ture of U.S. public policy discussions for at least the last 20 years. One trigger of these debates is the statistical evidence on the rising cost of health care. For example, according to a survey conducted by the Kaiser Family Foundation (2004), health insurance premiums for employer-sponsored plans increased by 11.2% between the spring of 2003 and the spring of 2004, the fourth consecutive y...

Explaining Late Life Urban vs. Rural Health Discrepancies in Beijing.

Social characteristics that differ by place of residence are consequential for health. To study implications of this among older adults in rural vs. urban China, this study employs data from the Beijing municipality, a region that has witnessed growth and gaps in development. Life and active life expectancy is assessed using a multistate life table technique that estimates hazard rates and subs...