The Attitudes of State Legislators and State Medicaid Policies Related to AIDS

As the Medicaid programs become increasingly important payers of AIDS-related care, state governments will face difficult policy choices in allocating limited Medicaid resources among many competing health needs. The state legislatures will play a critical role in these allocation decisions. This research presents the results of an analysis of attitudes concerning Medicaid coverage of AIDS-related care among state legislators serving on health-related committees in all 50 states. The model employed includes characteristics of the state legislators, their districts, and their states to explain the legislators' allocation choices and attitudes relating to Medicaid coverage of AIDS-related care. The relationship of these factors to the actualization of AIDS-related state policy also is examined. The model identified political ideology, party affiliation, and sex of the state legislator as the most important predictors of attitudes about AIDS-related Medicaid policies. AIDS prevalence, constituency characteristics, and legislator attitudes are the most important predictors of actual state policies.     

The accumulation of stochastic copying errors causes drift in culturally transmitted technologies: Quantifying Clovis evolutionary dynamics

The archaeological record is the empirical record of human cultural evolution. By measuring rates of change in archaeological data through time and space it is possible to estimate both the various evolutionary mechanisms that contribute to the generation of archaeological variation, and the social learning rules involved in the transmission of cultural information. Here we show that the recently proposed accumulated copying error model [Eerkens, J.W., Lipo, C.P., 2005. Cultural transmission, copying errors, and the generation of variation in material culture and the archaeological record. Journal of Anthropology archaeology 24, 316–334.] provides a rich, quantitative framework with which to model the cultural transmission of quantitative data. Using analytical arguments, we find that the accumulated copying error model predicts negative drift in quantitative data due to the proportional nature of compounded copying errors (i.e., neutral mutations), and the multiplicative process of cultural transmission. Further, we find that the theoretically predicted rate of drift in long-lived technologies is remarkably close to the observed reduction of Clovis projectile point size through time and space across North America.     

Existentialist manifesto or conservative political science? Problems in interpreting Raymond Aron's Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire

Raymond Aron's Introduction à la philosophie de l'histoire is often held to be a paradigmatic book because of either its rejection of positivism in the social sciences, or its anticipation of existentialism in philosophy. The common denominator in these paradigmatic interpretations of the work is its use of various German philosophical influences that, though relatively obscure in France at the time of its first publication in 1938, became prominent features of the postwar Parisian intellectual landscape. During the Cold War, however, Aron was not only a peripheral figure within the Parisian intelligentsia, but also one of its harshest critics. The apparent mismatch between the paradigmatic status claimed for the Introduction as the first French existentialist book and Aron's subsequent critical position towards the leading figures of existentialism in France forms the starting point for a critical re-examination of the book and its paradigmatic interpretations. After seeking an explanation for these interpretations of the Introduction in deeper trends of generational thought, this article suggests that the history of the idea of intellectual engagement offers a more useful angle from which to approach this challenging book.     

Lost writing uncovered by laser two-photon fluorescence provides a terminus post quem for Roman colonization of Hispania Citerior

In this work, two-photon absorption fluorescence is used as a non-destructive method to detect the presence of paint upon an archaeological sample. The objective was to recover writing that, due to the discoloration caused by the passage of the time, was barely readable. The technique has been successfully applied to determine the consular date painted upon the neck of a Dressel 1A amphora found in the Roman village of Iesso (Guissona), in Catalonia. The identification of the consular date provides a terminus post quem for the foundation date for the city as well as a starting date for the Roman colonization of Hispania Citerior.