Skip to main content

Home/ GAVNet Collaborative Curation/ Group items tagged oxford

Rss Feed Group items tagged

Bill Fulkerson

Quantum causal loops - 0 views

  •  
    Normally, causal influence is assumed to go only one way-from cause to effect-and never back from the effect to the cause-the ringing of a bell does not cause the pressing of the button that triggered it. Now, researchers from the University of Oxford and the Université libre de Bruxelles have developed a theory of causality in quantum theory, according to which cause-effect relations can sometimes form cycles. This theory offers a novel understanding of exotic processes in which events do not have a definite causal order. The study has been published in Nature Communications.
Steve Bosserman

Climate science gets precise enough for legal action - SciDev.Net - 0 views

  • Parallel to the IPCC process, scientific advances mean that models can now link individual weather events to climate change as the cause, said Friederike Otto, acting director of the Environmental Change institute at the University of Oxford in the UK. This is done through attribution science—much in the same way that smoking was linked to cancer decades ago—which is “very much in legal discussions at the moment”, said Otto. Attribution science has been a game changer in the past five years, added Yamin: in the case of an event such as flooding or a heat wave, for example, “you don’t talk about a vague sense of weather any more — you can link it to anthropogenic activities that are causing long-term global change”.
Steve Bosserman

He Jiankui defends 'world's first gene-edited babies' - BBC News - 0 views

  • "If true, this experiment is monstrous. Gene editing itself is experimental and is still associated with off-target mutations, capable of causing genetic problems early and later in life, including the development of cancer," Prof Julian Savulescu, an ethics expert at the University of Oxford, told the BBC.
Bill Fulkerson

Alignment with Market Forces: The "Re-Whithering" of Infectious Diseases | Open Forum I... - 0 views

  •  
    Given constant emergence of new infectious threats, Infectious Diseases (ID) should be one of the most attractive medical specialties to students and trainees. Yet, ID Fellowship programs continue to not fill in the match, and ID remains among the lowest paid specialties. Nearly 35 years after Dr. Petersdorf first asked the question, we find ourselves once again wondering, "Whither Infectious Diseases?" To answer this question, and align with predominant US market forces, ID experts should push for: 1) restrictions regarding utilization of ID diagnostics and antimicrobial agents; 2) pay-for-performance measures regarding antimicrobial prescribing rates; and 3) healthcare reform as called for by the American College of Physicians to move away from fee-for-service medicine. Einstein said, "Continuing to do the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity." We must move towards alignment with market forces, to benefit our patients, society, and our colleagues.
Bill Fulkerson

Is Peer Review a Good Idea? | The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science | Oxfor... - 0 views

  •  
    Prepublication peer review should be abolished. We consider the effects that such a change will have on the social structure of science, paying particular attention to the changed incentive structure and the likely effects on the behaviour of individual scientists. We evaluate these changes from the perspective of epistemic consequentialism. We find that where the effects of abolishing prepublication peer review can be evaluated with a reasonable level of confidence based on presently available evidence, they are either positive or neutral. We conclude that on present evidence abolishing peer review weakly dominates the status quo.
Bill Fulkerson

Asymmetric Information and the Pecking (Dis)Order* | Review of Finance | Oxford Academic - 0 views

  •  
    We study the classical problem of raising capital under asymmetric information. Following Myers and Majluf, we consider firms endowed with assets in place and riskier growth opportunities. When asymmetric information is concentrated on assets in place (rather than growth opportunities), equity-like securities are more likely to be optimal. In contrast, when asymmetric information falls on growth options, debt is optimal. Intuitively, this happens because when the asset with greater volatility is less affected by asymmetric information, issuing a security with greater exposure to upside potential (such as equity) can be less dilutive than issuing a security lacking such exposure (such as debt). Our results suggest that equity is more likely to dominate debt for younger firms with larger investment needs, endowed with riskier, more valuable growth opportunities. Thus, our model can explain why high-growth firms may prefer equity over debt, and then switch to debt financing as they mature.
1 - 13 of 13
Showing 20 items per page