Free the slaves

The Experience of Former Slaves and Free-Born Blacks in Liberia

This paper analyzes differences between the experiences of former slaves and freeborn blacks as colonists in Liberia. Mortality was extraordinarily high among Liberian colonists, and former slaves are found to have faced a significantly higher risk of mortality than freeborn colonists. Former slaves also had a significantly lower level of human capital. There are no observable differences in th...

Slaves to medicine.

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...

Masters change, slaves remain.

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...

Liberating Exotic Slaves 1

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...

slaves and households in the near east