Slaves to the machine

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...

How Saqaliba slaves were transferred to Andalusia in the Umayyad period

Slave bargain that was common in the West of Europe for a long time continued after the conquer of Andalusia by Muslims in the last decade of the first century A.H. Meanwhile, slaves from the northern regions of Spain, especially Slavic lands, entered the Andalusian markets. These slaves, known in medieval Islamic sources as Saqaliba, were often bought by Jewish merchants and transferred to And...

Slaves to the bottle: Smith's Civil Damage Liquor Law.

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...