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Qualitative perspectives (on incoming medical teams during conflict) from surgeons in the Middle East and North Africa
Get PDFBackground The international community has, for many years, offered support and medical services at times of conflict, crisis, or disaster, but their ability to do so effectively has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years. The aim of this study was to examine the perceptions of local surgeons to incoming medical teams and international non-governmental organizations (iNGOs) during times of conflict. Non-resident diaspora surgeons who returned during conflict were analysed as a subgroup. Methods A cross-sectional study using qualitative methods was performed. Study participants were in-country-based medically qualified personnel performing surgery during conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa, who had worked in these settings before the onset or escalation of conflict. Participants were identified through a pre-interview questionnaire distributed via the Royal College of Surgeons of England and other targeted networks. A structured guide was used to conduct in-depth interviews with 21 surgeons from eight countries and a thematic analysis was undertaken. Results Local surgeons generally had positive working relationships with incoming medical teams, but not universally. Some experienced frustration with inexperienced incoming surgeons and others were limited in interaction due to the nature of the conflict. A need for coordination, timely intervention, and less ‘playing the hero’ was noted in relation to iNGOs. Diaspora surgeons often played a significant role in supporting local surgeons clinically and via equipment procurement and training. Conclusion Incoming medical teams travelling to conflict areas should be experts in their field and work collaboratively with local surgeons. Increased communication and collaboration between iNGOs and local surgeons is necessary to reduce duplication of effort and improve services
Headwinds and structural constraints: mapping forces challenging just transition finance
Get PDFThis Policy Insight presents the just transition as sitting at a decisive crossroads, where, after a decade of growing prominence, including in the Paris Agreement, rhetoric has outpaced reality. As geopolitical fragmentation, fiscal strain and political polarisation grow, the space for transformative and durable policies for the just transition and its financing is narrowing. Just transition finance refers to the climate finance flows that shift economies away from carbon-intensive systems built on extractive industries while redistributing power and resources, and protecting communities’ sovereignty over development pathways. Rather than proposing any new financial instrument, in this Policy Insight the author offers a provocation: interrogating how finance mechanisms shape justice narratives, who gets to decide and access funding, what transparency regimes actually serve, and ultimately, what kinds of transitions current finance enables or prevents. The author identifies four near-term headwinds that impede just transition finance, and five deeper structural challenges from which the headwinds emerge. While it may be possible to address headwinds in the near-term, structural challenges are more embedded and systemic, making the headwinds persistent. These headwinds and structural challenges are not entirely new: but they have not yet been grounded in the locus of just transition finance. New institutional arrangements are emerging in response to these challenges but to avoid replicating past problems, we will need to approach these innovations with clear eyes and better interpret existing challenges before directly jumping into searching for solutions
Decolonizing development studies: rejecting or repurposing the master’s tools?
No full textFocusing on the project of decolonizing Development Studies, this thought piece reflects on tensions between Decolonial Studies and the critical political-economy of Development, known as Critical Development Studies. It highlights the divergent approaches to addressing epistemic inequalities between these two streams of Development thinking, demonstrating that Critical Development Studies has a longer history of valorising development knowledge from the Global South, and a focus on the need to address structural as well as epistemic inequalities. The analysis challenges the palliative cultural focus of Decolonial Studies and exposes its vulnerability to neoliberal capture at the epistemic and the political levels in ways that risk perpetuating colonial subordination. With examples from the African context, this thought piece argues that Critical Development Studies advances a more transformative approach to decolonizing Development Studies through its emphasis on the role of epistemic recognition as part of the wider objective of material redistribution
Validating the use of large language models for psychological text classification
No full textLarge language models (LLMs) are being used to classify texts into categories informed by psychological theory (“psychological text classification”). However, the use of LLMs in psychological text classification requires validation, and it remains unclear exactly how psychologists should prompt and validate LLMs for this purpose. To address this gap, we examined the potential of using LLMs for psychological text classification, focusing on ways to ensure validity. We employed OpenAI's GPT-4o to classify (1) reported speech in online diaries, (2) other-initiations of conversational repair in Reddit dialogues, and (3) harm reported in healthcare complaints submitted to NHS hospitals and trusts. Employing a two-stage methodology, we developed and tested the validity of the prompts used to instruct GPT-4o using manually labeled data (N = 1,500 for each task). First, we iteratively developed three types of prompts using one-third of each manually coded dataset, examining their semantic validity, exploratory predictive validity, and content validity. Second, we performed a confirmatory predictive validity test on the final prompts using the remaining two-thirds of each dataset. Our findings contribute to the literature by demonstrating that LLMs can serve as valid coders of psychological phenomena in text, on the condition that researchers work with the LLM to secure semantic, predictive, and content validity. They also demonstrate the potential of using LLMs in rapid and cost-effective iterations over big qualitative datasets, enabling psychologists to explore and iteratively refine their concepts and operationalizations during manual coding and classifier development. Accordingly, as a secondary contribution, we demonstrate that LLMs enable an intellectual partnership with the researcher, defined by a synergistic and recursive text classification process where the LLM's generative nature facilitates validity checks. We argue that using LLMs for psychological text classification may signify a paradigm shift toward a novel, iterative approach that may improve the validity of psychological concepts and operationalizations
Book review: Fragments of home
No full textBased on: Scott-Smith Tom. 2024. Fragments of Home: Refugee Housing and the Politics of Shelter. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. 250 pages. Soft cover 110.0
Evolving cognitive models: a novel approach to verbal learning
No full textA common goal in cognitive science involves explaining/predicting human performance in experimental settings. This study proposes a single GEMS computational scientific discovery framework that automatically generates multiple models for verbal learning simulations. GEMS achieves this by combining simple and complex cognitive mechanisms with genetic programming. This approach evolves populations of interpretable cognitive agents, with each agent learning by chunking and incorporating long-term memory (LTM) and short-term memory (STM) stores, as well as attention and perceptual mechanisms. The models simulate two different verbal learning tasks: the first investigates the effect of prior knowledge on the learning rate of stimulus-response (S-R) pairs and the second examines how backward recall is affected by the similarity of the stimuli. The models produced by GEMS are compared to both human data and EPAM – a different verbal learning model that utilises hand-crafted task-specific strategies. The models automatically evolved by GEMS produced good fit to the human data in both studies, improving on EPAM’s measures of fit by almost a factor of three on some of the pattern recall conditions. These findings offer further support to the mechanisms proposed by chunking theory (Simon, 1974), connect them to the evolutionary approach, and make further inroads towards a Unified Theory of Cognition (Newell, 1990)
Funding options for long-term care services in Latin America and the Caribbean
No full textDemographic and social changes Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) have called the traditional system of long-term care service provision into question, prompting many countries to prioritize long-term care reform on their social policy and fiscal agendas. A central policy issue under consideration involves assessing the demand and the costs of various long-term care options while evaluating its financial sustainability. To date, estimating the demand for care in Latin American countries is limited due to the underdeveloped and fragmented systems in place. This paper estimates the potential cost of various long-term care service packages that differ in the extent and type of government funding. Second, we investigate the financing sustainability of different coverage scenarios across seventeen countries in the LAC region. Finally, we assess the feasibility of alternative funding mechanisms and discuss the main benefits and drawbacks considering each country's unique institutional constraints. Our estimates indicate that, while all seventeen LAC countries have the potential to implement a system funded through general taxation, a social insurance system is only feasible in a handful set of LAC countries
Climate emergency and the future of civic space: lessons from the war on terror
No full textAs the climate crisis escalates, so are efforts to securitize climate change. Climate emergency declarations and discourse are proliferating globally. Climate scientists are raising alarm about the existential threat to humanity and life on earth posed by the climate crisis. At the same time, climate security is becoming an increasingly popular frame among sections of the climate movement and a growing number of governments, militaries and corporate actors. The impetus for securitizing climate change is often about prioritizing the issue and galvanizing transformative action for mitigation and adaptation. The reality of securitizing an issue, however, is that it tends to promote and legitimate militarized and authoritarian responses. Drawing on insights and evidence from the war on terror and the spread of global counterterrorism in the past two decades, this report identifies three pathways to securitizing climate change – prioritization, militarization and authoritarianization. It explores the distinctive risks they create for the future of civic space and human rights, highlights opportunities to address these risks, and offers a set of recommendations. The report identifies six key lessons from the war on terror and considers their relevance and implications for securitizing the climate crisis and the future of civic space. It highlights inflection points in the pathways to securitizing climate change where disruption of militarized and authoritarian responses is possible and innovation can help develop and elevate alternatives. Our findings and recommendations are important beyond the defense of human rights and civic space. Militarized and authoritarian responses may divert attention and resources away from climate mitigation and climate justice, and in that process prioritization narratives and efforts may be co-opted and subverted. In other words, the risk is that securitizing the climate crisis may become a substitute rather than a catalyst for addressing it. There is a real window of opportunity right now to prevent that from happening and to advance viable alternatives
The network of injustice: a novel approach to inequality of opportunity
No full textRestoring the theoretical foundation of John Roemer’s conceptualization of inequality of opportunity (IOp), we introduce an innovative empirical approach to measure unfair inequalities through Bayesian networks. This methodology enhances our understanding of income inequality through structural learning algorithms, generating an IOp index and, most importantly, shedding light on the underlying income formation process. We demonstrate how this proposal relates to established measurement methods through simulated data, and provide an application to five European countries to illustrate the potential of Bayesian networks in the context of measuring inequality of opportunity
Trading ahead of barbarians’ arrival at the gate: insider trading on noninside information
No full textPrivately informed about firm fundamentals, corporate insiders detect activism-motivated trades better than other traders. This paper solves the model of this novel form of insider trading motivated by non-insider information and presents empirical evidence. Corporate insiders preserve their ownership (restraining from selling or buying more) before activist interventions go public to benefit from price appreciation and to defend their private benefits of control. Surveillance technology facilitates response to pre-disclosure activist trading, especially when positive information about firm fundamentals is absent, supporting the mechanism that insiders attribute order flows to activist interest when speculation on fundamentals can be ruled out