Unsettling disciplinary frontiers

Unsettling the Centralized Mindset

Researchers in the field of adaptive behavior are quite familiar with the idea of higher-order complex global patterns emerging from the lower-level simple local interactions of components in a distributed system. Our artificial ants form colonies and self-organized foraging expeditions; our robots and simulated birds flock and cooperate on tasks; our genetic algorithm populations form species ...

Unsettling standards: the biological age controversy

One key debate within the sociology of aging and the life-course in the past decade has been focused on understanding the extent to which life course processes have become de-standardised. However, little attention has been devoted to the infrastructural processes that would support such a transition. This paper focuses on one of such standards, ‘biological age’, and the 40 year controversy aro...

Unsettling Bodies: Frida Khalo’s portraits and in/dividuality

Unsettling drug patent settlements: a framework for presumptive illegality.

A tidal wave of high drug prices has recently crashed across the U.S. economy. One of the primary culprits has been the increase in agreements by which brand-name drug manufacturers and generic firms have settled patent litigation. The framework for such agreements has been the Hatch-Waxman Act, which Congress enacted in 1984. One of the Act's goals was to provide incentives for generics to cha...

Impossible Frontiers

A key result of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM) is that the market portfolio— the portfolio of all assets in which each asset’s weight is proportional to its total market capitalization—lies on the mean-variance-efficient frontier, the set of portfolios having mean-variance characteristics that cannot be improved upon. Therefore, the CAPM cannot be consistent with efficient frontiers for...