I’m Debra Satz, the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and co-host of the Philosophy Talk radio program. I grew up in the Bronx, and was the first of my family to go to college. From there, I graduated from City College of New York and received my PhD from M.I.T. where – after toying with the idea of writing on the philosophy of logic – I wrote a dissertation focusing on Marx’s theory of social progress. Although I have traveled far from where I began, my experiences growing up in the Bronx continue to influence my work and thought. My philosophical work has been broadly concerned with the economic preconditions for a democratic society of equals. But rather than approaching this question at a very high level of abstraction, I have focused on the ethics behind the creation and operation of particular markets. Markets in the abstract are models of freedom and equality. Freedom because each has the choice to enter into, or refrain from entering, any particular exchange. Moreover, because each of us is linked through countless others, no one is under the thumb of any particular person. This latter point also underwrites our equality. In theory, neither is dependent on the other and each has the right to refuse a deal which we view as unfair. But, in reality, many markets depart very far from that theory. Some markets involve agents who are asymmetrically situated: One person desperately needs a good that only the other has (think of credit markets in the developing world); or, one person has relevant knowledge that another person lacks (think of the market for used cars). Moreover, some markets involve risks that fall on others besides the transacting agent (think of exchanges that generate pollution); or markets where others are transacting on our behalf (think of child labor markets where parents transact on behalf of their children, or governments where dictators transact debt on behalf of their populations). My book, Why Some Things Should Not be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets develops a theory that distinguishes between ordinary markets that resemble abstract markets and what I call noxious markets. Noxious markets are characterized along four parameters: weak agency, background vulnerability and inequality of the transacting agents, harms to individuals, and harms to society. My book examines markets in body parts, commercial surrogacy, child labor and prostitution. Importantly, I argue that the fact that a market is noxious does not entail the conclusion that we should ban it. It may be possible to increase agency (by giving parties better information) or address third party harms through regulation. But a message of my work, which resonates with a long tradition of political economy (where figures such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx and RH Tawney are central) is that not all markets are the same. I also have interests in the distribution of educational opportunities, where I have argued that the sharp divide policy makers and philosophers draw between adequacy approaches and equality approaches is overdrawn. A theory of distributing educational opportunity that is adequate for a democratic society will have strong egalitarian elements. In addition to pursuing my interests in education (which was my path out of poverty), I am writing a paper which examines the role of the state’s distribution of in kind goods (such as health care) for a democratic society of equals. I look forward to discussing my work with you on reddit! Links of Interest: My book: Why Some Things Should Not be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. Thanks to OUP can purchase it 30% off from their site with promocode AAFLYG6. A newer co-authored book dealing with the relations between ethics and economics: Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy, Third Edition My Stanford Encyclopedia Article on Feminist Perspectives on Reproduction and the Family My Ethics article “Equality, Adequacy and Education for Citizenship” My class day speech at Stanford University on the Moral Limits of Markets The Philosophy Talk radio program which I co-host

Hello, we are Professor Tim Lenton and Dr Damien Mansell, climate scientists from the University of Exeter. Together, our research looks into the science of Climate Change. We’re also passionate educators and have, for the last 5 years, produced free online courses that look at the Challenges and Solutions of climate change. It can be easy to feel disillusioned by climate change and as if there is nothing we can do, but that’s not true and there are many ways we can take action into our own hands. Tim: My research has looked at the evolution of the Earth System and, in particular, tipping points in the climate system. I’ve recently begun focussing on detecting early warning signals for these tipping points. If we are able to detect when a system is close to tipping, we can better assess the solutions that can prevent catastrophic climate change or reduce the impacts. Damien: I study the contemporary cryosphere (the world’s ice) and how this is changing with recent climate warming. My research uses satellite data and the development of new remote sensing techniques to study cryosphere instabilities. I’m also interested in the use of technology in teaching and education, from developing virtual field trips to these online courses. Our new course ‘Climate Change: Solutions’ discusses and applies the theme of Climate Action to the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We look at a range of solutions, from changing the way we produce energy to the way we farm, and explore where different options might be viable around the world. In particular, we’ll be focussing on the SDGs of Life below Water, Life on Land and Sustainable Cities and Communities. In this AMA, we will be joined by our facilitator team from the University of Exeter to help answer your burning questions about all things solutions! Ask us anything! We’ll be back at 11:00 am ET to answer your questions, Ask us anything!

Are you on a first-name basis with Siri, Cortana, or your Google Assistant? If so, you’re both using AI and helping researchers like us make it better. Until recently, few people believed the field of artificial intelligence (AI) existed outside of science fiction. Today, AI-based technology pervades our work and personal lives, and companies large and small are pouring money into new AI research labs. The present success of AI did not, however, come out of nowhere. The applications we are seeing now are the direct outcome of 50 years of steady academic, government, and industry research. We are private industry leaders in AI research and development, and we want to discuss how AI has moved from the lab to the everyday world, whether the field has finally escaped its past boom and bust cycles, and what we can expect from AI in the coming years. Ask us anything! Yann LeCun, Facebook AI Research, New York, NY Eric Horvitz, Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA Peter Norvig, Google Inc., Mountain View, CA

As transportation emissions of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) have decreased due to stricter controls on air pollution, the relative importance of chemical products such as pesticides, coatings, printing inks, adhesives, cleaning agents, and personal care products has increased correspondingly. In a recent study we published in Science Magazine, we show that these volatile chemical products now contribute fully one half of emitted VOCs from petrochemical sources in Los Angeles. We hope these results will spur additional research and inform decisions about mitigating sources of ground-level ozone, fine particulate pollution, and air toxics. If you want to know more about how paints, pesticides, and perfumes contribute to pollution - ask us anything! Dr. Brian McDonald is an atmospheric scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder who works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and whose expertise is on air quality models and emission inventories Dr. Chris Cappa is a professor at the University of California, Davis in the Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, whose work centers on the sources, fate and impacts of small particles in the atmosphere Dr. Jessica Gilman is a Research Chemist at NOAA and specializes in the measurement and chemistry of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) in the atmosphere. Dr. Joost de Gouw is a senior research scientist at the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences at the University of Colorado Boulder. His expertise is in the sources and transformations of organic compounds in the atmosphere.

Discoveries of planets outside our solar system have burst from a trickle to a flood in recent years, transforming our understanding of the Universe. NASA’s Kepler exoplanet-hunting spacecraft and other missions have shown that the Milky Way Galaxy is teeming with at least tens of billions of planets. These exoplanets come in a variety of shapes and sizes, from smaller than Earth to larger than Jupiter, and include a small number of Earth-size planets in the “habitable zones” of their stars. Telescopes like the Hubble Space Telescope are carefully examining the atmospheric compositions of many of these alien worlds. However, the goals of imaging an Earth-size planet around another star and comprehensively understanding surface properties and atmospheric characteristics remain elusive. The launch of the James Webb Space Telescope in 2018 will help move comparative planetology forward, while astronomers are continuing to design and develop the next generation of observatories. As scientists deeply involved in this research, we welcome your questions about the current state of knowledge about the diversity of exoplanetary systems, and the challenges of direct imaging and atmospheric characterization in particular. We’re especially interested in telescope concepts under development to directly image exoplanets and search for water, ozone, oxygen, and other potential markers of habitability, and envision where these may take our understanding of exoplanets in the next decade. Ask us anything! Debra Fischer, Professor of Astronomy at Yale University. Jessie Christiansen, Astronomer at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena CA. Aki Roberge, Research Astrophysicist & Study Scientist for the LUVOIR space telescope concept, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, MD Jennifer Wiseman, Hubble Space Telescope Senior Project Scientist, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center Dr. Patricia Boyd Chief, Exoplanets and Stellar Astrophysics Laboratory & Director Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) Guest Investigator Program, NASA Goddard Space Flight Center

Creating LiDAR your life can depend on, Luminar Technologies uses advanced LiDAR sensors to measure millions of points per second, and put that resolution where it matters most. This allows Luminar sensors to see not just where objects are, but what they are — even at distance. Co-Founder and CTO, Jason Eichenholz is a serial entrepreneur and pioneer in laser, optics and photonics product development and commercialization. Over the past twenty-five years, he led the development of hundreds of millions of dollars of new photonics products. Before joining Luminar as CTO and Co-Founder, Eichenholz was the CEO and founder of Open Photonics, an open innovation company dedicated to the commercialization of optics and photonics technologies. Prior to that, he served as the Divisional Technology Director at Halma PLC. In that role he was responsible for supporting innovation, technology and strategic development for the Photonics and Health Optics Divisions. Before joining Halma, he was the CTO and Board Member of Ocean Optics Inc. as well as the Director of Strategic Marketing at Newport/Spectra-Physics. Eichenholz is a Fellow of The Optical Society (OSA) and SPIE. He has served as the principal investigator for Air Force and DARPA funded research and development programs and holds ten U.S. patents on new types of solid-state lasers, displays and photonic devices. Eichenholz has a M.S. and Ph.D in Optical Science and Engineering from CREOL – The College of Optics and Photonics at the University of Central Florida and a B.S. in Physics from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.

The United States is currently experiencing an opioid crisis. The CDC website has some chilling facts: The majority of drug overdose deaths (66%) involve an opioid. In 2016, the number of overdose deaths involving opioids was 5 times higher than in 1999. From 2000 to 2016, more than 600,000 people died from drug overdoses. On average, 115 Americans die every day from an opioid overdose. Despite all this, opioids remain an effective treatment for post-operative pain. Surgeons struggle with adequately treating their patients’ pain needs while being mindful of the risks of opioids. Not enough is known about the risks of treating patients with longer durations and stronger doses of opioids. In our paper published in the BMJ, we quantified the association between the amount of opioids patients received directly after surgery and the rate of misusing opioids (including overdose, abuse, and dependence) in more than 500,000 surgery patients enrolled in commercial medical insurance who received opioids. We found that each additional refill a patient received was associated with a more than 40% increase in the rate of misuse and each additional week of opioids with a 20% increase. The dose of opioids had a much smaller impact and only seemed to become important among patients who used opioids for an extended period. Those numbers are based on statistical models that take into many factors about the patients, including their surgery type, age, sex, and certain diagnoses that they might have received before surgery like tobacco use disorder or depression. To give you a sense of some related unadjusted data, 0.18% of patients with no refills experienced a misuse event within one year after surgery. That number doubles to 0.37% among those who filled just one additional opioid prescription after surgery. And it jumps all the way to 1.1% among those with more than 5 refills. Our main analysis included all misuse events (not just those that happened within one year after surgery) and showed very similar results. AMA! We are: Gabriel Brat, instructor in surgery and in biomedical informatics at Harvard Medical School and a trauma surgeon at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Denis Agniel, associate statistician at the RAND Corporation and part-time lecturer at Harvard Medical School Postsurgical prescriptions for opioid naive patients and association with overdose and misuse: retrospective cohort study BMJ 2018; 360 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j5790 Edit: Thanks everyone for all the questions. We are signing off now, but we will check in later to participate in further discussion.

The moderators of /r/philosophy are pleased to announce an upcoming AMA by Professor Debra Satz, Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and co-host of the Philosophy Talk radio program. This AMA is the fourth in our Spring 2018 AMA Series; you can find more details on all of this semester’s AMAs with philosophers by going to the AMA Hub Post. You can find all of our previous AMAs over the years by going to the AMA wiki. Professor Satz will be joining us on Monday February 19th at 12PM ET to discuss issues in political science, public policy, the ethical limits of markets and more. Hear it from her: Debra Satz I’m Debra Satz, the Marta Sutton Weeks Professor of Philosophy at Stanford University and co-host of the Philosophy Talk radio program. I grew up in the Bronx, and was the first of my family to go to college. From there, I graduated from City College of New York and received my PhD from M.I.T. where – after toying with the idea of writing on the philosophy of logic – I wrote a dissertation focusing on Marx’s theory of social progress. Although I have traveled far from where I began, my experiences growing up in the Bronx continue to influence my work and thought. My philosophical work has been broadly concerned with the economic preconditions for a democratic society of equals. But rather than approaching this question at a very high level of abstraction, I have focused on the ethics behind the creation and operation of particular markets. Markets in the abstract are models of freedom and equality. Freedom because each has the choice to enter into, or refrain from entering, any particular exchange. Moreover, because each of us is linked through countless others, no one is under the thumb of any particular person. This latter point also underwrites our equality. In theory, neither is dependent on the other and each has the right to refuse a deal which we view as unfair. But, in reality, many markets depart very far from that theory. Some markets involve agents who are asymmetrically situated: One person desperately needs a good that only the other has (think of credit markets in the developing world); or, one person has relevant knowledge that another person lacks (think of the market for used cars). Moreover, some markets involve risks that fall on others besides the transacting agent (think of exchanges that generate pollution); or markets where others are transacting on our behalf (think of child labor markets where parents transact on behalf of their children, or governments where dictators transact debt on behalf of their populations). My book, Why Some Things Should Not be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets develops a theory that distinguishes between ordinary markets that resemble abstract markets and what I call noxious markets. Noxious markets are characterized along four parameters: weak agency, background vulnerability and inequality of the transacting agents, harms to individuals, and harms to society. My book examines markets in body parts, commercial surrogacy, child labor and prostitution. Importantly, I argue that the fact that a market is noxious does not entail the conclusion that we should ban it. It may be possible to increase agency (by giving parties better information) or address third party harms through regulation. But a message of my work, which resonates with a long tradition of political economy (where figures such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Karl Marx and RH Tawney are central) is that not all markets are the same. I also have interests in the distribution of educational opportunities, where I have argued that the sharp divide policy makers and philosophers draw between adequacy approaches and equality approaches is overdrawn. A theory of distributing educational opportunity that is adequate for a democratic society will have strong egalitarian elements. In addition to pursuing my interests in education (which was my path out of poverty), I am writing a paper which examines the role of the state’s distribution of in kind goods (such as health care) for a democratic society of equals. I look forward to discussing my work with you on reddit! Links of Interest: My book: Why Some Things Should Not be For Sale: The Moral Limits of Markets. Thanks to OUP can purchase it 30% off from their site with promocode AAFLYG6. A newer co-authored book dealing with the relations between ethics and economics: Economic Analysis, Moral Philosophy and Public Policy, Third Edition My Stanford Encyclopedia Article on Feminist Perspectives on Reproduction and the Family My Ethics article “Equality, Adequacy and Education for Citizenship” My class day speech at Stanford University on the Moral Limits of Markets The Philosophy Talk radio program which I co-host AMA Please feel free to post questions for Professor Satz here. She will look at this thread before she starts and begin with some questions from here while the initial questions in the new thread come in. Please join me in welcoming Professor Debra Satz to our community!

Hi reddit, I’m a physicist at the University of Bath, UK, working on microscopy and automated instrumentation. I’m very interested in using and developing open source hardware for scientific applications – particularly microscopes. Two projects I’m working on at the moment are developing high-precision positioning mechanisms that can be 3D printed, and creating automated microscopes for analysing blood smears to diagnose malaria. The project teams include scientists and engineers from the Universities of Bath and Cambridge, and Ifakara Health Institute and STICLab in Tanzania. All the hardware we’ve developed so far on these projects is open-source, available on GitHub, for example: https://github.com/rwb27/openflexure_microscope/ I hope that, by sharing our designs, we can enable small maker spaces and engineers like STICLab (https://www.sticlab.co.tz/) to produce, and indeed customise, sophisticated products with less reliance on expensive imported goods. It also makes it much easier for people to get involved with the research project, by hacking, tweaking, or replicating our hardware for their own use. Science relies on experiments being repeatable, but often University labs are full of black boxes (metaphorically – they’re usually beige) which are expensive, hard to customise, and sealed up so you can’t see how they work. Even worse, this proprietary hardware often won’t talk to open software, making it difficult to integrate into complicated, automated experiments. There’s a growing movement of people trying to open up scientific hardware – because this is good for science, even without the cost savings that can come from 3D printing many components in your lab. This is all explained much more eloquently in the GOSH manifesto and roadmap: http://openhardware.science/gosh-manifesto/ http://openhardware.science/global-open-science-hardware-roadmap/ I’m quite new to reddit, but I guess this is the part where I stop and let you take over – I’ll be back at 10 am ET to answer your questions, ask me anything! Thanks everyone for the questions - it’s been fun! I’m signing off now, though I’ll try to keep an eye out in case there are any follow-up questions. I should also take a moment to thank my sponsors - I have the privilege of being funded to work on this project, by the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EP/P029426/1), the Royal Commission for the Exhibition of 1851, and the University of Bath.

Hi Reddit About us: Dr. Cheryl Stucky: Hi! I am a Marvin Wagner Endowed Professor in the department of Cell Biology, Neurobiology and Anatomy, and the Neuroscience Doctoral Program Director, at the Medical College of Wisconsin. I am broadly interested in understanding touch and pain mechanisms. I have run a research laboratory for about 18 years at the Medical College of Wisconsin, where we use rodent models to study the mechanism of pain in diseases such as sickle cell disease, Fabry disease, arthritis and postsurgical pain. My lab also focuses on understanding how we sense touch, and we recently found out that our skin plays a large role in this. Building upon this knowledge, we are now investigating what role damaged skin plays in chronic pain conditions. The ultimate goal of our research is to identify new targets for which topical drugs can be developed in order to treat these pain conditions and avoid the negative side effects of many current treatments that are already out there. Francie Moehring: I am the senior graduate student in Cheryl’s laboratory. Many skin disorders such as dermatitis and psoriasis share a common hallmark: increased sensitivity or even pain to touch or normally unpainful stimuli. My project in the Stucky lab focuses on laying the foundation for understanding dysfunctional signaling processes during these disorders to potentially reveal new drug targets for topical treatments that directly target the site of pain. In order to study these processes, we are trying to understand how our skin, and the specific cells that form it, can interact with neurons and nerves within the skin that are typically involved in sensing mechanical stimuli from the environment. We’re here to answer questions about a recent paper we published in the journal eLife (https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.31684?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=AMAFeb18; plain-language summary: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.31684.002?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=forum&utm_campaign=AMAFeb18) – where we studied how our skin communicates with the nervous system – or queries related to our research more broadly. Please note that we are unable to provide any medical advice, as this goes beyond the scope of our research. We’ll start answering questions at 1pm EST. AMA!

Hi Reddit, we are Xingde Li (https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/profiles/results/directory/profile/0800034/xingde-li), professor of Biomedical Engineering and Wenxuan Liang, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins Medicine majoring in biophotonics. Our lab works to improve endomicroscopy in the hopes of someday diminishing our dependencies on biopsies. We have recently developed two new endoscopic probes that have a potential to significantly improve imaging diagnostics. Our first probe uses the same basics from the two-photon microscope but in a much smaller footprint. Our prototype probe, 2mm in diameter, takes advantage of the cell’s own ability to glow and eliminates the need for traditional fluorophores – usually harmful to the human body. This allow us to directly visualize fine structural changes and monitor cell activity in vivo and in real time at histology level but without the need for tissue removal. (https://www.nature.com/articles/lsa201782) Our second probe is even smaller (approximately 500 µm in diameter) but offers us about four times higher resolution than other currently used devices. The small probe size eases the delivery of endoscope to small areas of the body. This can greatly reduce patient’s discomfort during the endoscopy procedure while also providing a high resolution and clear visualization of tissue microstructures. This is very important for detecting disease at early stages when tissue microstructural changes are subtle and the disease is still at a manageable stage. (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-017-01494-4 ) We will be back at 1pm ET today to answer your questions.

Hello Reddit, I am Brenda Moore, Ph.D., a neuroscientist in Dr. Todd Golde’s lab at the University of Florida. We conduct disease-oriented research with a focus on Alzheimer’s and other neurodegenerative diseases. And I am Todd Golde, M.D., Ph.D., director of the Evelyn F. and William L. McKnight Brain Institute at UF, where I oversee, champion and facilitate neuroscience and neuromedicine research programs across our campus. I am also director of the 1Florida Alzheimer’s Disease Research Center consortium of institutions. We recently published a study featured on the cover of the Journal of Experimental Medicine titled Short Aβ peptides attenuate Aβ42 toxicity in vivo. Our research shows that short Abeta peptides were not toxic in two animal models — a mouse and a fruit fly — and in fact were protective from the toxic effects of Abeta 42. The accumulation of Abeta 42 in the brain is widely recognized as key in promoting Alzheimer’s disease. Our findings hold the potential for a drug therapy that could go beyond treating the symptoms of Alzheimer’s and target the disease’s progression. To read our paper and news release, visit http://bit.ly/2nocJPI. We will answer your questions at 1 pm EST ­— Ask Us Anything! Thank you everyone for your great questions, we enjoyed answering them!