Robert Owen did so well under capitalism that he had the money to reject it, so the wealthy Scottish textile magnate devised a financial system around labor itself and "justice."
The National Equitable Labour Exchange sought to use prices based on the time it took workers to produce it.
As you might imagine, it didn't take off. How do you measure the labor it takes to grow an ear of corn? And that is why it failed. The Exchange allowed workers to trade products using notes representing hours of work, but disputes over the value of products occurred quickly. If food takes months to grow and is…
Technology
Sustainability has become a popular buzzword since the turn of the century, and with it came tools to classify and measure urban performance (rankings, indexes, etc.) across public and private institutions. Those tools were used to create the policies implemented by authorities and are used to assess their success.
Yet the tools themselves suffer from a lack of transparency, the very transparency that sustainability advocates claim is vital. There is a lack of knowledge about the actual methodological base underpinning them and which is supposed to legitimize their use.
Lucía Sáez-Vegas, Ph.D…
An artificial nose helps neurosurgeons to identify cancerous tissue during surgery and enables the more precise excision of tumours.
Electrosurgical resection using devices such as an electric knife or diathermy blade is currently a widely used technique in neurosurgery. When tissue is burned, tissue molecules are dispersed in the form of surgical smoke. In the method developed by researchers at Tampere University, the surgical smoke is fed into a new type of measuring system that can identify malignant tissue and distinguish it from healthy tissue.
An article on using surgical smoke to…
A new blood test that will reduce the need for a liver biopsy in the management of paediatric Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease (NAFLD) could be ready within five years, finds international paediatric liver registry collaboration early results presented at the 52nd Annual Meeting of the European Society of Paediatric Gastroenterology, Hepatology and Nutrition in Glasgow.(1)
Non-Alcoholic Fatty Liver Disease affects around one in 10 children (2) and is the most common paediatric liver disorder.(3) It can progress to advanced scarring (cirrhosis), liver failure, and liver cancer. Despite this,…