Search

Multiple-choice testing with dichotomous scoring is one of the most common assessment methods utilized in undergraduate education. Determining students’ perceptions toward different types of multiple-choice testing formats is important for effective assessment. The present study compared two alternative multiple-choice testing formats used in a second-year required chemistry course: (i) Immediate Feedback Assessment Technique (IFAT®) and (ii) Personal Point Allocation (PPA). Both testing methods allow for partial credit, but only the IFAT® provides immediate feedback on students’ responses. Both survey and interview data indicated that, overall, most students preferred IFAT® to the PPA testing method. These positive ratings were related to potential increase in reward, ease of use, and confidence. IFAT® was also perceived to be less stress producing and anxiety provoking than PPA. Interview data not only supported these findings, but also indicated individual differences in preference for each of these two methods. Additionally, students’ feedback on strategies used for either testing method and suggestions on how to improve the methods are discussed.

The rise of the radical Right over the last decade has created a situation that demands engagement with the intellectual origins, achievements, and changing worldviews of radical conservative forces. Yet, conservative thought seems to have no distinct place in the theoretical field that has structured debates within the discipline of IR since 1945. This article seeks to explain some of the reasons for this absence. In the first part, we argue that there was in fact a clear strand of radical conservative thought in the early years of the field's development and recover some of these forgotten positions. In the second part, we argue that the near disappearance of those ideas can be traced in part to a process of ‘conceptual innovation’ through which postwar realist thinkers sought to craft a ‘conservative liberalism’ that defined the emerging field's theoretical alternatives in ways that excluded radical right-wing positions. Recovering this history challenges some of IR's most enduring narratives about its development, identity, and commitments – particularly the continuing tendency to find its origins in a defining battle between realism and liberalism. It also draws attention to overlooked resources to reflect upon the challenge of the radical Right in contemporary world politics.

Genia Schönbaumsfeld argues that Cartesian skepticism is an illusion induced by the “Cartesian Picture” of perceptual knowledge, in which knowledge of the “external world” depends on an inference from how things subjectively seem to one to how they actually are. To show its incoherence, she draws on the work of John McDowell, which she sees as elaborating a central theme from Wittgenstein’s On Certainty. I argue that Cartesian skepticism is not an illusion, as Schönbaumsfeld understands ‘illusion’, and that McDowell’s account of perceptual knowledge is both untenable and incompatible with Wittgenstein’s ideas about knowledge. Schönbaumsfeld thinks that, to understand how perception can engender knowledge of the world, we need a non-Cartesian account of perceptual reasons. Wittgenstein offers a much more radical break with the Cartesian Picture: an account of knowledge without ‘experience’.

In higher education, espoused commitments to equity, diversity, and inclusion far outpace the allocation of dedicated resources necessary to enact those commitments. Moving beyond the status quo in...

One Touch of Venus is a musical comedy starring Ava Gardner as an ancient statue of Venus brought to life in a department store. The film’s release coincided with the rising late-1940s press discourse of the screen ‘goddess’ and ‘Venus’, as well as that of the ‘war goddess’, a figure closely aligned with the femme fatale of film noir. This article discusses how Universal-International’s campaign exploited Gardner’s rising profile, including the Bakelite figurine of the star distributed to exhibitors, and beauty contest tie-ins where fans could measure themselves up against star and sculpture alike. This Bakelite Venus mediates between the marble fantasy of Gardner’s screen Venus, the authorship of the star, and the enveloping myth of screen stardom. But Hollywood pedestals are built to crumble, and the constructed ideals of classical beauty are here also exposed as a commodified travesty in marble, flesh and Bakelite. While Gardner was ‘built-up’ as a goddess, like her peers Rita Hayworth and Maureen O’Hara, this patriarchal construct of female beauty was also repressive, disempowering and de-humanising. This article uses the Bakelite Venus as a case study into the still-resonant divinising, and desecrating, connotations of such publicity.

Much of the recent work in the field of smart manufacturing is dependent on a data-driven approach, with an increasing number of data-hungry techniques being introduced to improve the adaptability and productivity of manufacturing systems.\ud\udMore recently, the collection and use of data generated by employees and individuals has become the source of controversy at both a corporate and societal level. This work presents an analysis of current thoughts and considerations on the use and misuse of data from a number of standpoints and discusses a methodology that enables appropriate parameterization of human performance for use in modelling and simulation for smart manufacturing.

Nuno Venturinha holds that the contextualist epistemology adumbrated in Wittgenstein’s On Certainty--the most powerful response to philosophical skepticism yet developed-- falls short of providing a complete answer to Cartesian radical skepticism about knowledge of the external world. I argue that Venturinha underestimates the range and complexity of Wittgenstein’s epistemological. He does so because he reads Wittgenstein along the lines of so-called ‘hinge epistemology’. Hinge epistemology indeed fails as a diagnosis of skepticism. But it also fails as a reading of Wittgenstein. A more adequate understanding of Wittgenstein suggests that Venturinha’s pessimistic conclusion can be avoided.

This article provides an engagement with American paleoconservatism at the level of its intellectual foundations. Although relatively unknown in the mainstream media, this anti-establishment strain...

Challenges to the liberal international order have tended to focus on the politics of populism most often traced to reactions against economic dislocation and mass migration. Parts of this portrait are undoubtedly true, but it also risks being deeply misleading. To fully understand the nature and depth of contemporary far-right movements, we need to examine more closely the distinctive ideological movements that inform and animate them. This article explores one specific articulation of these movements: US paleoconservatism. Although relatively unknown in the mainstream media, this anti-establishment strain of radical conservatism has provided intellectual ammunition to a wide range of agents and ideological forces challenging the prevailing liberal order nationally and internationally, including important parts of the anti-liberal politics of foreign policy under President Donald Trump.

Well-managed legume-based food systems are uniquely positioned to curtail theexistential challenge posed by climatechangethrough the significant contributionthat legumes can make toward limiting Green House Gas (GHG) emissions. Thispotential is enabled by the specific functional attributes offered only by legumes,which deliver multiple co-benefits through improved ecosystem functions, includingreduced farmland biodiversity loss, and better human-health and -nutrition provisioning.These three critical societal challenges are referred to collectively here as the“climate-biodiversity-nutrition nexus.” Despite the unparalleled potential of the provisionsoffered by legumes, this diverse crop group remains characterized as underutilizedthroughout Europe, and in many regions world-wide. This commentary highlightsthat integrated, diverse, legume-based, regenerative agricultural practices shouldbe allied with more-concerted action on ex-farm gate factors at appropriatebioregional scales.Also,thatthiscanbeachievedwhilstoptimizing production, safeguarding food-security, and minimizing additional land-use requirements. To helpavoid forfeiting the benefits of legume cultivation for system function, a specificand practical methodological and decision-aid framework is offered. This is basedupon the identification and management of sustainable-development indicators forlegume-based value chains, to help manage the key facilitative capacities anddependencies. Solving the wicked problems of the climate-biodiversity-nutrition nexus demands complex solutions and multiple benefits and this legume-focus must beallied with more-concerted policy action, including improved facilitation of the catalyticprovisions provided by collaborative capacity builders—to ensure that the knowledgenetworks are established, that there is unhindered information flow, and that newtransformative value-chain capacities and business models are established.

A search for CP violation in the Λb0→pπ-π+π- decay is performed using LHCb data corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 6.6 fb-1 collected in pp collisions at center-of-mass energies of 7, 8 and 13 TeV. The analysis uses both triple product asymmetries and the unbinned energy test method. The highest significances of CP asymmetry are 2.9 standard deviations from triple product asymmetries and 3.0 standard deviations for the energy test method. Once the global p-value is considered, all results are consistent with no CP violation. Parity violation is observed at a significance of 5.5 standard deviations for the triple product asymmetry method and 5.3 standard deviations for the energy test method. The reported deviations are given in regions of phase space.

Several decades of development in the fields of robotics and automation have resulted in human–robot interaction is commonplace, and the subject of intense study. These interactions are particularly prevalent in manufacturing, where human operators (HOs) have been employed in numerous robotics and automation tasks. The presence of HOs continues to be a source of uncertainty in such systems, despite the study of human factors, in an attempt to better understand these variations in performance. Concurrent developments in intelligent manufacturing present opportunities for adaptability within robotic control. This article examines relevant human factors and develops a framework for integrating the necessary elements of intelligent control and data processing to provide appropriate adaptability to robotic elements, consequently improving collaborative interaction with human colleagues. A neural network-based learning approach is used to predict the influence on human task performance and use these predictions to make informed changes to programed behavior, and a methodology developed to explore the application of learning techniques to this area further. This article is supported by an example case study, in which a simulation model is used to explore the application of the developed system, and its performance in a real-world production scenario. The simulation results reveal that adaptability can be realized with some relatively simple techniques and models if applied in the right manner and that such adaptability is helpful to tackle the issue of performance disparity in manufacturing operations. Note to Practitioners —This article presents research into the application of intelligent methodologies to this problem and builds a framework to describe how this information can be captured, generated, and used within manufacturing production processes. This framework helps identify which areas require further research and serves as a basis for the development of a methodology, by which a control system may enable adaptable behavior to reduce the impact of human performance variation and improve human–machine interaction (HMI). This article also presents a simulation-based case study to support the development and evaluate the presented control system on a representative real-world problem. The methodology makes use of a machine-learning approach to identify the complex influence of several identified human factors on human performance. This knowledge can be used to adjust the robotic behavior to match the predicted performance of multiple different operators over different scenarios. This adaptability reduces performance disparity by reducing idle times and enabling leaner production through workpiece-in-progress reduction. Future work will focus on expanding the intelligent capabilities of the proposed system to deal with uncertainty and improve decision-making ability.

For many contemporary manufacturing processes, autonomous robotic operators have become ubiquitous. Despite this, the number of human operators within these processes remains high, and as a consequence, the number of interactions between humans and robots has increased in this context. This is a problem, as human beings introduce a source of disturbance and unpredictability into these processes in the form of performance variation. Despite the natural human aptitude for flexibility, their presence remains a source of disturbance within the system and make modelling and optimization of these systems considerably more challenging, and in many cases impossible. Improving the ability of robotic operators to adapt their behaviour to variations in human task performance is, therefore, a significant challenge to be overcome to enable many ideas in the larger intelligent manufacturing paradigm to be realised. This work presents the development of a methodology to effectively model these systems and a reinforcement learning agent capable of autonomous decision-making. This decision-making provides the robotic operators with greater adaptability, by enabling its behaviour to change based on observed information, both of its environment and human colleagues. The work extends theoretical knowledge on how learning methods can be implemented for robotic control, and how the capabilities that they enable may be leveraged to improve the interaction between robots and their human counterparts. The work further presents a novel methodology for the implementation of a reinforcement learning-based intelligent agent which enables a change in behavioural policy in robotic operators in response to performance variation in their human colleagues. The development and evaluation are supported by a generalized simulation model, which is parameterized to enable appropriate variation in human performance. The evaluation demonstrates that the reinforcement agent can effectively learn to make adjustments to its behaviour based on the knowledge extracted from observed information, and balance the task demands to optimise these adjustments.

The purpose of this research is to experimentally test whether counter-narratives are effective to reduce people's support and willingness to join Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Integrating psychological reactance theory (Brehm, 1966) and need for closure (NFC; Kruglanski, 2004), we predicted that exposing people to counter-narratives when they are at greater risk of radicalization (high NFC individuals) would be counterproductive and enhance their support for ISIS. Participants (N = 886 American Muslims) were randomly assigned to a 3 × 3 factorial experimental design varying the source (United States Government, Imam, ISIS defector), and the content (social, political, and religious) of the counter-narrative while comparing these groups to a control message. Results show an overall small positive effect of counter-narratives (β = -0.107, p = 0.043), but also evidence for greater support for ISIS in individuals at greater risk of radicalization (β = 0.154, p = 0.005). Results also show that the content was more important than the source: A political narrative was the most effective, and this result is consistent across different sources although an ISIS defector is the most effective messenger. These findings challenge the widespread assumption that counter-narratives are effective against violent extremism. In fact, they accelerate the very phenomenon that governments and policy makers are trying to undermine. Therefore, policy makers should avoid including them in their armamentarium to tackle violent extremism.

Aim/Purpose: Persistence rates among Black and Latinx students continue to fall behind those of their White peers. One way to address this issue is to promote a stronger college sense of belonging. While student involvement has been linked to sense of belonging, postsecondary institutions need to seriously reflect on, and recommit to, their own role in engaging Black and Latinx students to promote their sense of belonging, a strong correlate of persistence and college completion. Background: A sense of belonging has been linked to college success, including student persistence. One potential way to promote a sense of belonging among Black and Latinx students is through student engagement. This paper examines the relationship between student engagement and college sense of belonging among a national sample of 10,475 Black and Latinx students. Guided by student engagement theory, we parse out the role of student involvement and institutional engagement to examine the unique and net impact of each facet of engagement as it relates to college sense of belonging among Black and Latinx students. Methodology: This study employs hierarchical linear regression modeling to examine the unique and net impact of two facets of student engagement: (a) student involvement, and (b) institutional engagement, as each relates to college sense of belonging among a national sample of 10,475 Black and Latinx students. Contribution: This paper contributes to scholarship on persistence, engagement, and belonging among Black and Latinx students. Guided by engagement theory, the study takes a nuanced view of student engagement that acknowledges the role of student involvement, and critically, examines the role of institutional engagement in terms of variance explained in sense of belonging among Black and Latinx students. Consistent with calls from the literature, this study provides an empirical examination that recognizes institutional responsibility for promoting a sense of belonging among Black and Latinx students, who are often marginalized in higher education, rather than placing the onus on the students alone. Findings: Overall, student engagement explains 18% of variance in sense of belonging among Black and Latinx students, controlling for a range of student characteristics. Student involvement explains a significant amount of variance above and beyond student background characteristics alone. Institutional engagement explains unique variance in belonging above and beyond student involvement alone, and it has the largest impact on sense of belonging of any variable in our models. Recommendations for Practitioners: Administrators, practitioners, and leadership at postsecondary institutions should acknowledge their central role in engaging Black and Latinx students. Institutions should seek out ways to communicate the resources, support, and involvement opportunities they offer through appropriate venues such as minority student and allied organizations, cultural events, and by working with existing networks of minorities on campus. Increased efforts on the part of institutions to have a broader and more inclusive reach to engage their students may communicate to students that they matter and the institution cares about their success—leading to a greater sense of belonging. Findings from this study suggest there may be ways for students and university staff to collaborate on student success to promote desirable student outcomes like sense of belonging. Recommendation for Researchers: The results provide evidence for the utility of a multidimensional conceptual or theoretical model in research that parses out involvement, engagement, and sense of belonging as independent constructs and specifies the relationship between each construct. It also calls attention to the important role of institutional support and engagement as a means of promoting sense of belonging among Black and Latinx students, and supports shifting the onus of engagement and belonging away from the student alone and toward institutions and their practices. Researchers should continue to explore how to promote belonging through different facets of engagement, and acknowledge the role of the institution in promoting belonging. Impact on Society: This paper contributes to addressing seemingly intractable gaps in college persistence rates among Black and Latinx students and their White counterparts. Specifically, it contributes to an understanding of practices and policies to promote sense of belonging through student engagement to reap associated benefits such as college persistence and completion. Closing the persistence and completion gaps among student racial/ethnic groups can contribute to greater educational equity and in turn greater societal equity. Future Research: Future research should continue to parse out student involvement, institutional engagement, and sense of belonging as distinct constructs when examining the relationship between student engagement and belonging. The present study demonstrates the merit to this approach, permitting the researcher to determine the unique and combined influence of each element of engagement on belonging that would have otherwise been obscured if treated as a single construct. Adopting this approach also offered insight into the specific facets of engagement that appear to impact belonging for Black and Latinx students instead of a monolithic treatment of student involvement or engagement, allowing for a more nuanced understanding.

Religious conversion is the process by which a person commits to the beliefs of a new religious tradition and shifts away from their previously held religious beliefs (Stark and Finke 2000). Religious conversion and its mechanisms have been studied for millennia (Zinnbauer and Pargament in Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion, 37(1), 161–180, 1998) and were among the first phenomena to be studied by psychology (Paloutzian et al. in Journal of Personality, 67(6), 1047–1079, 1999). This review of conversion begins with a discussion of diverse conceptualizations, and hence multiple definitions, of conversion. Next, recurring components of major psychological and sociological conversion theories are explored—those consistently recognized as important for understanding and explaining the large amount of variance across conversions. Such components include the convert’s agency, the convert’s social integration, the temporal span of conversion, the nature of conversion’s consequences, and the roles that crisis, emotion, religion, and identity play in conversion. Identifying which components of conversion, and the issues that surround them, are consistently of significance to scholars provides future researchers practical starting points for accurately measuring the conversion process.

Many readers of International Affairs will be familiar with Tarak Barkawi’s frequent skewering of IR theories and debates, from his demolition of liberal peace and so-called “schools” of critical security studies to his elevation of empire and critical war studies. In each intervention, Barkawi engaged directly with core IR debates and ruthlessly exposed their flawed premises, establishing a new agenda for research in the process. In doing so, he has shaped at least two generations of IR scholarship. The influence of Soldiers of empire could be of a totally different order. It will come less from the book’s main arguments than the quality of the scholarship and style of intellectual engagement. This book, Soldiers of empire, delivers on something far more urgent than a new agenda for research. It is a yardstick for those in our field interested in producing scholarship that is critical, but also of real substance and originality. That is, work that is historically rich, theoretically engaged, well-written, multi-and inter-disciplinary, and pays no heed whatsoever to the debilitating distinctions between IR subfields. However, as one would expect of a book of real substance, there are problems that will limit its intellectual reach. In this review forum, I focus on two.

The “seismic resolution gap” has been an area of ambiguity ever since the results of 3D seismic interpretation have been used as inputs for modeling purposes because many important structural events such as fractures are at or below seismic resolution, which can impinge reservoir properties such as porosity and permeability. Having the means to accurately map these events with confidence has always been a challenge. More often than not, localized mapping of these features at borehole conditions can be achieved by core or image-log analysis. Seismic-derived attributes have assisted in improving the interwell geologic understanding in a lateral sense, but they are always hampered by vertical resolution. Enhanced imaging, such as cyan-magenta-yellow blending of attributes, has helped improve the lateral understanding of fracture patterns and networks, as shown in this workflow, but the challenge with vertical resolution still persists. However, by combining borehole and seismic data studies in a distinct workflow, it has become possible to identify overlaps and misalignments, which in turn has assisted in identification of discrete structural patterns not previously identified because of the seismic resolution gap. These results will then be used to improve the confidence of structural interpretation and static fracture models, which all go toward improving reservoir simulation models and geologic understanding.

The articles in this issue of The English Academy Review are all, in one way or another, concerned with reactions to oppression and conflict. In all cases, the primary focus is on texts that come f...

Observations are reported of different sources of CP violation from an amplitude analysis of B^{+}→π^{+}π^{+}π^{-} decays, based on a data sample corresponding to an integrated luminosity of 3 fb^{-1} of pp collisions recorded with the LHCb detector. A large CP asymmetry is observed in the decay amplitude involving the tensor f_{2}(1270) resonance, and in addition significant CP violation is found in the π^{+}π^{-}S wave at low invariant mass. The presence of CP violation related to interference between the π^{+}π^{-}S wave and the P wave B^{+}→ρ(770)^{0}π^{+} amplitude is also established; this causes large local asymmetries but cancels when integrated over the phase space of the decay. The results provide both qualitative and quantitative new insights into CP -violation effects in hadronic B decays.

Early in Gods and Monsters (Condon, 1998), the viewer shares the gaze of Ian McKellen’s James Whale as he surveys the arrival of his muscular new yardman, Clayton Boone (Brendan Fraser), through a window frame. We cut to the interior of the director’s Hollywood home, the most prominent aspect of which is the copy of a marble relief from the Parthenon frieze depicting two semi-nude youths on horseback. This establishing moment indicates how the film constantly shifts between personal and historical perspectives and desires: the cross-generational desire of the ageing gay director for the young man, the idealised nudes of antiquity and queer culture of the twentieth century later seen in the film, as well as Whale’s flashbacks to the WWI battlefield, and the 1990s’ cinephile audience’s cultural memory of cinema history as channelled through Whale.

When used in educational settings, simulations utilizing virtual reality (VR) technologies can reduce training costs while providing a safe and effective learning environment. Tasks can be easily modified to maximize learning objectives of different levels of trainees (e.g., novice, intermediate, expert), and can be repeated for the development of psychomotor skills. VR offers a multisensory experience, providing visual, auditory, and haptic sensations with varying levels of fidelity. While simulating visual and auditory stimuli is relatively easy and cost-effective, similar representations of haptic sensation still require further development. Evidence suggests that mixing high- and low-fidelity realistic sensations (e.g., audition and haptic) can improve the overall perception of realism, however, whether this also leads to improved performance has not been examined. The current study examined whether audiohaptic stimuli presented in a virtual drilling task can lead to improved motor performance and subjective realism, compared to auditory stimuli alone. Right-handed participants (n = 16) completed 100 drilling trials of each stimulus type. Performance measures indicated that participants overshot the target during auditory trials, and undershot the target during audiohaptic trials. Undershooting is thought to be indicative of improved performance, optimizing both time and energy requirements.

The Asia -Pacific Bone Academy (APBA) Fracture Liaison Service (FLS) Focus Group educational initiative has stimulated activity across the Asia -Pacific region with the intention of supporting widespread implementation of new FLS. In 2017, the APBA FLS Focus Group developed a suite of tools to support implementation of FLS across the Asia-Pacific region as a component of a multi-faceted educational initiative. This article puts this initiative into context with a narrative review describing the burden of fragility fractures in the region, the current secondary fracture prevention care gap and a summary of emerging best practice. The results of a survey to evaluate the impact of the APBA educational initiative is presented, in addition to commentary on recent activities intended to improve the care of individuals who sustain fragility fractures across the Asia -Pacific. A FLS Toolbox for Asia-Pacific was developed which included the following sections:1. The burden of fragility fractures in the Asia-Pacific region.2. A summary of evidence for FLS in the Asia-Pacific.3. A generic, fully referenced FLS business plan template.4. Potential cost savings accrued by each country, based on a country-specific FLS Benefits Calculator.5. How to start and expand FLS programmes in the Asia-Pacific context.6. A step-by-step guide to setting up FLS in countries in the Asia-Pacific region.7. Other practical tools to support FLS establishment.8. FLS online resources and publications.The FLS Toolbox was provided as a resource to support FLS workshops immediately following the 5th Scientific Meeting of the Asian Federation of Osteoporosis Societies (AFOS) held in Kuala Lumpur in October 2017. The FLS workshops addressed three key themes:• The FLS business case.• Planning the FLS patient pathway.• The role of the FLS coordinator in fragility fracture care management.A follow-up survey of 142 FLS workshop participants was conducted in August-September 2018. The survey included questions regarding how FLS were developed, funded, the scope of service provision and the support provided by the educational initiative. Almost one-third (30.3%) of FLS workshop participants completed the survey. Survey responses were reported for those who had established a FLS at the time the survey was conducted and, separately, for those who had not established a FLS. Findings for those who had established a FLS included:• 78.3% of respondents established a multidisciplinary team to develop the business case for their FLS.• 87.0% of respondents stated that a multidisciplinary team was established to design the patient pathway for their FLS.• 26.1% of respondents stated that their FLS has sustainable funding.• The primary source of funding for FLS was from public hospitals (83.3%) as compared with private hospitals (16.7%).Most hospitals that had not established a FLS at the time the survey was conducted were either in the process of setting-up a FLS (47%) or had plans in place to establish a FLS for which approval is being sought (29%). The primary barrier to establishing a new FLS was lack of sustainable funding. The APBA FLS Focus Group educational initiative has stimulated activity across the Asia-Pacific region with the intention of supporting widespread implementation of new FLS. A second edition of the FLS Toolbox is in development which is intended to complement ongoing efforts throughout the region to expedite widespread implementation of FLS.

Geoffrey Burnstock, the founder of the field of purinergic signaling research passed away in Melbourne, Australia on June 3rd, 2020, at the age of 91. With his death, the world of biomedical research lost one of its most passionate, creative and unconventional thought leaders. He was an inspiration to the many researchers he interacted with for more than 50 years and a frequent irritation to those in the administrative establishment. Geoff never considered himself a pharmacologist having being trained as a zoologist and becoming an autonomic neurophysiologist based on his evolving interests in systems and disease-related research. By the end of his life he had: published some 1550 papers; been cited more than 125,000 times; had an h-index of 156 and had supervised over 100 Ph.D. students. His indelible legacy, based on a holistic, data-based, multidisciplinary, unconventional “outside the box” approach to research was reflected in two of the seminal findings in late 20th century biomedical research: the purinergic neurotransmitter hypothesis and the concept of co-neurotransmission, both of which were initially received by his peers with considerable skepticism that at times verged on disdain. Nonetheless, while raising hackles and threatening the status quo, Geoff persevered and prevailed, becoming a mentor for several generations of biomedical researchers. In this review we provide a joint perspective on Geoff Burnstock’s legacy in research.

The history of the discipline of International Relations is usually narrated as a succession of theories that would pursue different ontologies and epistemologies and focus on different problems. This narrative provides some structure to a multifaceted field and its diverse discussions. However, it is also highly problematic as it ignores common problems, intersections and mutual inspirations and overemphasizes divides over eventual commonalities. Rather than such overemphasis, we suggest instead negotiating between ‘IR theories’ and elaborating their shared foci and philosophies of science in order to provide new perspectives on and approaches to international politics. We here negotiate between the two theoretical movements of classical realism and critical theories that are typically treated as opposites, yet which nonetheless are characterized by shared concerns about political and social crises, modernity and humanity.

Concerns regarding the reliability of biomedical research outcomes were precipitated by two independent reports from the pharmaceutical industry that documented a lack of reproducibility in preclinical research in the areas of oncology, endocrinology, and hematology. Given their potential impact on public health, these concerns have been extensively covered in the media. Assessing the magnitude and scope of irreproducibility is limited by the anecdotal nature of the initial reports and a lack of quantitative data on specific failures to reproduce published research. Nevertheless, remediation activities have focused on needed enhancements in transparency and consistency in the reporting of experimental methodologies and results. While such initiatives can effectively bridge knowledge gaps and facilitate best practices across established and emerging research disciplines and therapeutic areas, concerns remain on how these improve on the historical process of independent replication in validating research findings and their potential to inhibit scientific innovation.

Alzheimer’s disease (AD) was differentiated from senile dementia (SD) in 1910 due to its early onset and pathological severity. In 1976, this distinction was upended when SD was redesignated as AD to focus efforts and funding in dementia-related research. AD then became conflated with amyloid plaques and, to a lesser degree, neurofibrillary tangles complicating efforts in understanding dementia causality and its treatment. The resultant four-decade search for therapies-based almost exclusively on amyloid was an exercise in futility. While dementia is a complex, multifactorial syndrome, AD is viewed as a homogeneous, linear disease. An amyloid-agnostic approach is necessary to discover therapeutics for age-related dementias.

The first measurements of the forward-backward asymmetry of the dimuon pair (A_{FB}), the triple-product asymmetry (A_{2ϕ}), and the charge-parity-conjugation asymmetry (A_{CP}), in D^{0}→π^{+}π^{-}μ^{+}μ^{-} and D^{0}→K^{+}K^{-}μ^{+}μ^{-} decays are reported. They are performed using data from proton-proton collisions collected with the LHCb experiment from 2011 to 2016, corresponding to a total integrated luminosity of 5 fb^{-1}. The asymmetries are measured to be A_{FB}(D^{0}→π^{+}π^{-}μ^{+}μ^{-})=(3.3±3.7±0.6)%, A_{2ϕ}(D^{0}→π^{+}π^{-}μ^{+}μ^{-})=(-0.6±3.7±0.6)%, A_{CP}(D^{0}→π^{+}π^{-}μ^{+}μ^{-})=(4.9±3.8±0.7)%, A_{FB}(D^{0}→K^{+}K^{-}μ^{+}μ^{-})=(0±11±2)%, A_{2ϕ}(D^{0}→K^{+}K^{-}μ^{+}μ^{-})=(9±11±1)%, A_{CP}(D^{0}→K^{+}K^{-}μ^{+}μ^{-})=(0±11±2)%, where the first uncertainty is statistical and the second systematic. The asymmetries are also measured as a function of the dimuon invariant mass. The results are consistent with the standard model predictions.

The implementation of automation has become a common\ud occurrence in recent years, and automated robotic systems are\ud actively used in many manufacturing processes. However, fully\ud automated manufacturing systems are far less common, and\ud human operators remain prevalent. The resulting scenario is one\ud where human and robotic operators work in close proximity, and\ud directly affect the behavior of one another. Conversely to their\ud robotic counterparts, human beings do not share the same level\ud of repeatability or accuracy, and as such can be a source of\ud uncertainty in such processes.\ud Concurrently, the emergence of intelligent manufacturing\ud has presented opportunities for adaptability within robotic\ud control. This work examines relevant human factors and\ud develops a learning model to examine how to utilize this\ud knowledge and provide appropriate adaptability to robotic\ud elements, with the intention of improving collaborative\ud interaction with human colleagues, and optimized performance.\ud The work is supported by an example case-study, which explores\ud the application of such a control system, and its performance in\ud a real-world production scenario.

Many results reported in the biomedical research literature cannot be independently reproduced, undermining the basic foundations of science. This overview is intended for researchers who are committed to improving the quality and integrity of biomedical science by raising awareness of both the sources of irreproducibility, and activities specifically targeted to address the issue. The irreproducibility of biomedical research is due to a variety of factors, known and unknown, that markedly influence experimental outcomes. Among the known factors are inadequate training or mentoring, or experimenter incompetence. These may result in flawed experimental design and execution that reflect a lack of planning, leading to an underpowering of a study, an absence of appropriate controls, selective data analysis, inappropriate statistical analysis, and/or investigator bias or fraud. Another frequently overlooked source of irreproducibility is failure to ensure that the equipment used is performing up to manufacturer specifications. Failure to validate/authenticate the experimental reagents is another source of irreproducibility. These include compounds, cell lines, antibodies, and the animal models used in a study. This overview discusses how a lack of validation of research reagents negatively impact experimental reproducibility, and provides guidelines to avoid these pitfalls. © 2018 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

David Triggle's career as an educator, researcher, essayist and ethicist in many ways has paralleled the post WWII emergence of the "biomedical research ecosystem" that originated in the concept of the "Endless Frontier". In the ensuing 70 years biomedical research has irreparably changed the nature of society with vaccines, the birth control pill and new generations of drugs and biologics to treat infections, sexually transmitted diseases, psychiatric disorders and cardiovascular diseases. These have led to a shift in the population demographic to the elderly and the chronically sick leading to major issues in the provision of effective and affordable healthcare for much of the world's population. In the present article, in addition to providing a brief biography and an appreciation of David Triggle's contributions to science, the authors expand on three topics in which he has had a major interest: improving the quality, reproducibility and relevance of basic biomedical research; declining career opportunities for graduates in an era of decreased funding-the end of the "Endless Frontier"; and the dynamic between the provision for universal healthcare and the dysfunctional, wasteful and politicized systems of the current medical-industrial complex in delivering healthcare.

The credibility and consequent sustainability of the biomedical research “ecosystem” is in jeopardy, in part due to an inability to reproduce data from the peer-reviewed literature. Despite obvious and relatively inexpensive solutions to improve reproducibility—ensuring that experimental reagents, specifically cancer cell lines and antibodies, are authenticated/validated before use and that best practices in statistical usage are incorporated into the design, analysis, and reporting of experiments—these are routinely ignored, a reflection of hubris and a comfort with the status quo on the part of many investigators. New guidelines for the peer review of publications and grant applications introduced in the past year, while well-intended, lack the necessary consequences, e.g., denial of funding, that would result in sustained improvements when scientific rigor is lacking and/or transparency is, at best, opaque. An additional factor contributing to irreproducibility is a reductionist mindset that prioritizes certainty in research outcomes over the ambiguity intrinsic to biological systems that is often reflected in “unknown unknowns”. This has resulted in a tendency towards codifying “rules” that can provide “yes-no” outcomes that represent a poor substitute for the intellectual challenge and skepticism that leads to an awareness and consideration of “unknown unknowns”. When acknowledged as potential causes of unexpected experimental outcomes, these can often transition into the “knowns” that facilitate positive, disruptive innovation in biomedical research like the human microbiome. Changes in investigator mindset, both in terms of validating reagents and embracing ambiguity, are necessary to aid in reducing issues with reproducibility.

Unlike animal knowledge, mature human knowledge is not a natural phenomenon. This claim is defended by examining the concept of such knowledge and showing that it is best analysed in deontic terms. To be knowledgeable is to possess epistemic authority. Such authority is assessable in two dimensions. The first is contextually appropriate truth-reliability. The second is epistemic responsibility in three senses of “responsibility”: accountability, due diligence and liability to sanction. The fact that knowledge can be impugned by non-culpable unreliability shows that, with respect to loss of authority, liability is strict. This entails that mature human knowledge requires some degree of epistemic self-consciousness: in particular, the conceptual capacities for critically examining one's beliefs. Arguments advanced by Kornblith for the claim that there is a vicious regress involved in this requirement are shown to depend on under-described examples. When the examples are fleshed out, we see that the “critical reflection” requirement does not demand constant self-monitoring but only the capacity to recognize and respond to appropriate epistemic queries. Recognizing that the practice of justifying one's beliefs conforms to a default and query structure also dispels the illusion that insisting that epistemic subjects have some sense of their own epistemic powers involves an unpalatable form of epistemic circularity.

This study explores communications experienced by Aboriginal people in health care encounters about pain. It examines barriers that can impact upon effective pain management for Aboriginal patients. (This article refers to Aboriginal people, as these were the study participants. It is not intended to exclude Torres Strait Islander people.) A qualitative study using focus groups. Two Aboriginal communities in South East Queensland. The participants were 20 men and 20 women who identified a health condition with associated pain for which they had sought health care, including pain relief. Their conditions included arthritis, orthopaedic injuries, back pain and coronary artery disease. Physical pains associated with participants' health conditions were accorded a second place to deep emotional pain attributed to dispossession, dislocation and loss. At health facilities, prominent perceptions were that health professionals held a negative attitude towards them, and lacked respect and caring. Participants experienced that the language used by health professionals in consultations was complex. Aboriginal people often do not report pain, on the basis of previous negative encounters with the health system. Other perceived barriers to effective pain management included discriminatory attitudes of health professionals and communication problems.

Skeptical arguments (or problems) fall into two categories: “Agrippan” and “Cartesian.” The former revolve around what is commonly thought of today as the problem of the regress of justification; the latter make essential use of skeptical hypotheses. Cartesian arguments have no place in Pyrrhonian skepticism. By contrast, the Agrippan Problem seems to play a vital role. Nevertheless, there are reasons to think that Sextus and contemporary epistemologists understand the problem in very different ways. Whereas, in contemporary discussions, the Agrippan argument is taken to lie at the heart of a fully general “problem of knowledge,” it is questionable whether Sextus even considers such a problem. In explaining and defending this claim, I bring out some vital limitations and shortcomings of the Pyrrhonian stance—in particular, Sextus’s radical epistemic quietism—and their implications for the tenability of the Pyrrhonian stance in both Sextus’s time and ours.

Recent developments in the field of intelligent manufacturing have led to increased levels of automation and robotic operators becoming commonplace within manufacturing processes. However, the human component of such systems remains prevalent, resulting in significant disturbance and uncertainty. Consequently, semi-automated processes are difficult to optimise. This paper studies the relationships between robotic and human operators to develop the understanding of how the human influence affects these production processes, and proposes a framework to integrate and implement knowledge of such factors, with the aim of improving Human-Machine-Interaction, facilitating bi-directional collaboration, and increasing productivity and quality, supported by an example case-study.

Preparing a manuscript for peer review is the culmination of the activities of a research project and provides an appropriate forum to present the findings of the project to an appropriate peer group. The manuscript should typically follow the IMRAD (introduction, methods, results, and discussion) format used by a majority of biomedical research journals. The passage of a submitted manuscript through the peer review process can be greatly facilitated by following the preparation guidelines and checklists provided by the target journal and by also ensuring that the manuscript communicates the findings and conclusions in a logical and transparent manner and does not overstate the findings. Additionally, by negotiating the peer review process in a collegial, proactive manner, authors can expedite the process while often improving their manuscript as the result of reviewer and editorial feedback.

The biomedical research community has identified several approaches to address concerns regarding the lack of reproducibility in research. These include: improving the classical peer review (CPR) process via alternatives that can improve transparency and replace/supplement CPR stakeholder biases; open access publishing forums; alternatives to the Journal Impact Factor as improved metrics for researcher productivity; guidelines and checklists to improve the quality, transparency and reporting of data; and formal Reproducibility Initiatives (RIs) to replace the seminal process of scientific self- correction. While well intended, many of these initiatives have added to the existing problems while creating new ones. Furthermore, the outcomes from the RIs reported to date have been uniformly disappointing. Measures to improve reproducibility must focus on: improving training in best practices in experimental design, execution, and analysis that will aid in avoiding the persistence of behaviors detrimental to reproducibility while encouraging responsible research conduct.

The documented lack of reproducibility in biomedical research directly impacts the value and output of drug discovery disciplines like pharmacology that are integral for understanding disease pathophysiology, the discovery of drug targets, and the development of new drug candidates. This chapter discusses the reproducibility issue in the context of the challenges facing the biopharmaceutical industry in the 21st century. These include drug costs and productivity; the perceived impact of the biotechnology revolution and newer disruptive technology initiatives from Silicon Valley companies. These issues are placed in the context of the systemic flaws and perverse career incentives that characterize the current biomedical research culture, the unintended consequences from which appear to sufficient consequences to change behaviors that result in bad science. This emphasizes the need for the biomedical research community to proactively improve reproducibility via initiatives like the recent AAM Framework for Improving the Quality of Research.

The biomedical research ecosystem—academic, federal, and industrial—is dedicated to understanding human disease causality and developing effective therapeutics. The successes of this system over the past century have resulted in many effective drugs leading society to expect an endless supply of new therapeutics, particularly for chronic diseases that lack effective treatments (e.g., Alzheimer’s, diabetes). An increased recognition that the quality, relevance, reliability, and reproducibility of biomedical research cannot be guaranteed despite self-correction and peer review, coupled with the incessant hyping of inconsequential data by authors and their institutions, has led to a situation that is incompatible with sustained success in drug discovery. This risks the loss of credibility with the public, which does not bode well for the future of biomedical research. This chapter outlines the reproducibility problem and its magnitude, setting the stage for potential solutions that are discussed elsewhere in this monograph.

The ‘gods and goddesses’ of the screen were framed by apparently casual references to classical art and mythology in their publicity working to divinise them in popular discourse to increase their desirability as well as differentiate them as particular mythic types. Illuminating a number of striking case-studies through textual analysis of films, advertising images, and film fan-magazines, this chapter explores how these classical echoes have shaped Hollywood stardom from the early twentieth century to the digital age and stars such as Colin Farrell, Matthew McConnaughey, and Anne Hathaway. This chapter thus pursues the echoes, and afterimages, of antiquity that continue to resonate in film stardom.

In both disciplinary history and contemporary methodology, realism is conventionally cast as the antithesis of rhetoric. Born in reaction against the empty liberal rhetoric of interwar liberalism a...

Efforts to address reproducibility concerns in biomedical research include: initiatives to improve journal publication standards and peer review; increased attention to publishing methodological details that enable experiments to be reconstructed; guidelines on standards for study design, implementation, analysis and execution; meta-analyses of multiple studies within a field to synthesize a common conclusion and; the formation of consortia to adopt uniform protocols and internally reproduce data. Another approach to addressing reproducibility are Reproducibility Initiatives (RIs), well-intended, high-profile, systematically peer-vetted initiatives that are intended to replace the traditional process of scientific self-correction. Outcomes from the RIs reported to date have questioned the usefulness of this approach, particularly when the RI outcome differs from other independent self-correction studies that have reproduced the original finding. As a failed RI attempt is a single outcome distinct from the original study, it cannot provide any definitive conclusions necessitating additional studies that the RI approach has neither the ability nor intent of conducting making it a questionable replacement for self-correction. A failed RI attempt also has the potential to damage the reputation of the author of the original finding. Reproduction is frequently confused with replication, an issue that is more than semantic with the former denoting “similarity” and the latter an “exact copy” – an impossible outcome in research because of known and unknown technical, environmental and motivational differences between the original and reproduction studies. To date, the RI framework has negatively impacted efforts to improve reproducibility, confounding attempts to determine whether a research finding is real.

This article examines Byron's hostile treatment of the Duke of Wellington, and of the role he played in restoring eighteenth century structures and systems in nineteenth century Europe, and in preserving these structures and systems in England. There is a preliminary discussion of the accounts Byron provides of two battles in which Wellington took part, Talavera and Waterloo, in Childe Harold's Pilgrimage. Thereafter, the main focus is on Don Juan and, in particular, on the ‘English Cantos’, and on the interplay between the time of Juan's supposed visit to England (pre-1794) and the events of post-1794 European history. In particular, the emphasis will be on Byron's treatment of the conventional and often – in his view – misplaced pride expressed by the English in their institutions and practices. English strictures on Napoleon's imperial ambitions are set against the fact that England was, at this time, steadily amassing its own empire. By way of a context for aspects of Byron's thinking about England, a...

The receptor concept, now more than century old, remains the core concept in understanding the mechanisms of disease causality and drug action. Originally formulated in the early 1900s, receptor theory has evolved in both detail and complexity as the tools of molecular biology and increasingly sophisticated research technologies have facilitated the study of drug/ligand receptor interactions at the molecular level. The result has been a more detailed and nuanced understanding of the parameters of drug action that together with knowledge of the pleotropic nature of cellular targets and associated signaling pathways has reshaped the receptor concept. Added to the basic agonist/antagonist view of drug/ligand function, concepts like allosterism, inverse agonism, biased signaling and compound residence time have provided a broader understanding of compound-target interactions to better inform drug discovery efforts. The iteration of descriptive data from pharmacological experiments to provide generic indices of affinity and efficacy can now be used to predict expected drug/compound effects in other cell/organ systems where the sensitivity of the latter to drug effects (either via expression levels of cell surface receptors or variances in the efficiency with which those receptors are coupled to cytosolic metabolic processes) can be accommodated.

We examine the impact of changes in Greek sovereign yield spreads on abnormal returns of financial sector stocks for a sample of Eurozone countries, during the Greek debt crisis. We find that increases in yield spreads are associated with negative abnormal returns on financial stocks in the Portugal, Spain and Netherlands. These abnormal returns are driven in part by ratings downgrades and other unfavorable news announcements about Greece. We isolate the effects of known transmission channels–impairment of financial firms’ asset base due to cross-holdings of Greek bonds, from increases in domestic interest rates and higher funding costs. Our analysis indicates that news events lead to spillovers in excess of what can be explained by these channels of transmission.