Join the club

Join the Club: Enabling Self-Organizing Groups on the Net

The goal of this project is to establish how social agents can help humans form groups and achieve beneficial outcomes in their task-oriented use of cyberspace. To achieve this goal, the social challenges faced by humans trying to form groups, and the design problems of creating agents that can operate effectively in a mixed human-agent context, must both be addressed. The approach in the propo...

Why you should join the Elks Club rather than go to the Health Club

Smart Taxes: An Open Invitation to Join the Pigou Club

Many economists favor higher taxes on energy-related products such as gasoline, while the general public is more skeptical. This essay, based on a talk given at the March 2008 meeting of the Eastern Economic Association, discusses various aspects of this policy debate. It focuses, in particular, on the use of these taxes to correct for various externalities — an idea advocated long ago by Briti...

Upper urinary tract pacemaker cells join the GLI club.

Mutations in GLI3, a component of the Sonic Hedgehog (Shh) signaling pathway, cause a variety of human developmental syndromes. In this issue of the JCI, Cain and colleagues show that tightly regulated GLI3 repressor activity is essential for Shh-dependent differentiation of upper urinary tract pacemaker cells and the efficient flow of urine from the kidney to the bladder. These results link de...

Join the club: a modest proposal to increase availability of donor organs.

The shortage of suitable donor organs is the most significant single limiting factor in transplant programmes. More lives could be saved or immeasurably improved if more organs were available. I look at two traditional solutions to the shortfall, and suggest that they are ineffective and/or offensive, and consider the features common to any answer to the problem. I then suggest a third solution...