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Accountability and learning with motivated agents
Get PDFShould accountability be introduced to organizations that are learning about the right policies to achieve their goals? I develop an agency model focusing on the interactions between accountability and an agent’s intrinsic motivation. More effort by the agent leads to more informative policy outcomes and thereby better policy learning. Holding the agent accountable for the policy outcomes motivates the agent and thus improves policy learning. However, by removing the agent from office upon policy failure and thereby taking away his benefit from learning through failure, accountability also discourages the agent. This negative effect is
more substantial when the intrinsic motivation is higher. The principal, therefore, refrains from using accountability on the agent who is more intrinsically motivated
Toward a feminist ethics of nonviolence
No full textBook synopsis: Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence brings together major feminist thinkers to debate Cavarero’s call for a postural ethics of nonviolence and a sociality rooted in bodily interdependence.
Toward a Feminist Ethics of Nonviolence brings together three major feminist thinkers—Adriana Cavarero, Judith Butler, and Bonnie Honig—to debate Cavarero’s call for a postural ethics of nonviolence. The book consists of three longer essays by Cavarero, Butler, and Honig, followed by shorter responses by a range of scholars that widen the dialogue, drawing on post-Marxism, Italian feminism, queer theory, and lesbian and gay politics. Together, the authors contest the boundaries of their common project for a pluralistic, heterogeneous, but urgent feminist ethics of nonviolence
Transnational narratives and regulation of GMO risks
Get PDFBook synopsis: This book provides an innovative insight into the regulatory conundrum of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), deploying transnational legal analysis as a methodological framework to explore the most controversial area of risk governance.
The book deconstructs hegemonic and counter-hegemonic transnational narratives on the governance of GMO risks, cutting across US law, EU law, the WTO Agreement on Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures, and hybrid standard-setting regimes. Should uncertain risks be run unless adverse effects have been conclusively established, and should regulators only act where this is cost-benefit effective? Should risk managers make a convincing case that a product or process is safe enough for the relevant uncertain risks to be socially acceptable? How can intractable transnational regulatory conflicts be solved?
The book complements a close analysis of regulatory frameworks and case law with a more encompassing perspective on the political, socio-economic and distributional implications of different approaches to the regulation of health and environmental risks at times of globalisation.
The GMO deadlock thus becomes a lens through which to investigate the underlying value systems, goals, and impacts of transnational discourses on risk governance. Against this backdrop, the normative strand of analysis points to the limited ability of science and procedural deliberation to generate authentic agreement and to identify normatively legitimate solutions, in the absence of pre-existing shared perspectives
Colorectal cancer
Get PDFPsychological issues around colorectal cancer (CRC) can emerge from the point CRC is suspected, through treatment, to living with or beyond cancer. A third of patients report high levels of anxiety while undergoing investigations for suspected cancer, and emotional difficulties, particularly anxiety and fear of recurrence, can persist for years following a confirmed diagnosis. Treatments for CRC can result in problems with bowel, urinary or sexual function; and issues with body image following major surgery and/ or the presence of a stoma. Such problems can impact both the patient’s social life and ability to work, and result in financial difficulties. Fatigue and difficulty sleeping remain common problems among patients with chronic cancer. Evidence suggests that patients with screen-detected disease experience better quality of life and are more satisfied with their cancer care. Enhancing screening provision and uptake is probably the most effective way of reducing the psychological impact of a CRC diagnosis. However, there are marked differences across countries in screening provision. A substantial proportion of patients living with cancer, and of people cancer-free following curative treatment, report unmet needs around living with anxiety, uncertainty and fear of dying as well as the need for medical support and information. Interventions to reduce unmet needs in cancer patients have had little success to date, and more effective interventions are required to help CRC patients with the challenges they face before and after a cancer diagnosis
Reading survivor narratives: literary criticism as feminist solidarity
Get PDFBook synopsis: Literature has always been a history of patriarchy, sexual violence, and resistance. Academics have been using literature to expose and critique this violence and domination for half a century. But the continued potency of #MeToo after its 2017 explosion adds new urgency and wider awareness of these issues, while revealing new ways in which rape culture shapes our everyday lives. This intersectional guide helps readers, students, teachers, and scholars face and challenge our culture of sexual violence by confronting it through the study of literature.
#MeToo and Literary Studies gathers essays on literature from Ovid to Carmen Maria Machado, by academics working across the United States and around the world, that offer clear ways of using our reading, teaching, and critical practices to address rape culture and sexual violence, including rereading and revaluing the work of male writers. It also examines the promise and limitations of the #MeToo movement itself, speaking to the productive use of social media as well as to the voices that the movement has so far muted. In uniting diverse voices to enable the #MeToo movement to reshape literary studies, this book is also a commitment to the idea that the way we read and write about literature can make real change in the world
War and whiteness
No full textWar and ritualized violence might be intrinsic to certain dominant cultural formations of American whiteness, but to make that whiteness visible in war and its literature may mean having to adjust critical and historical approaches so that the racial frame shifts from (invisible) ground to (visible) figure. Many studies have attended to minorities’ participation in US wars, but this has not been able to displace the sense that the representative experience of the “universal” soldier or the traumatized veteran has been implicitly coded as white in American culture. With particular attention to Kevin Powers’s The Yellow Birds, this essay attends to whiteness and how it shapes representations of war and soldiers, particularly in their current, trauma-infused identity
Addressing societal challenges through the simultaneous generation of social and business values: a conceptual framework for science-based co-creation
Get PDFThe paper focuses on a key uniqueness of the simultaneous generation of social and business
value - across science, technology and society - involving academics, businesses, policy makers,
innovation intermediaries, NGOs and citizens that share and integrate assets in developing
solutions to address economic and societal challenges.
By contrasting with a broad literature using the term ‘co-creation’ to denote close working
relationship between actors, the paper outlines a conceptual framework explaining how the
diversity of agents involved, their motivations and goals, and incentive structures in which they
operate impact on science-based co-creation. This multidimensional perspective is discussed with
regard to the scope of innovation, reach and types of values that are generated, and the distinctive
features to be considered when both social and business value are at the core of collaboration.
Policy implications to support science-based co-creation are discussed with regard to the rationale
for public interventions and the critical dimensions of policy implementation and assessment. It
highlights that policy design aiming at supporting societal challenges through co-creation should
address mechanisms to integrate tangible and intangible inputs, define suitable operational models
and enhance specific capabilities and practices
Visual disengagement in young infants in relation to age, sex, SES, developmental level and adaptive functioning
Get PDFVisual attention plays a key role in infants’ interaction with the environment, and shapes their behavioral and brain development. As such, early problems with flexibly switching gaze from one stimulus to another (visual disengagement) have been hypothesized to lead to developmental difficulties (e.g. joint attention and social skills) over time. This study aimed to identify cross-sectional associations between performance in the Gap task (gaze shift latencies and visual attention disengagement) and measures of development and adaptive behavior in conjunction to any sex or socioeconomic status effects in infancy. We measured visual attention disengagement in 436 5-month-old infants and calculated its association with cognitive developmental level, adaptive behaviours, socioeconomic status (SES) and biological sex. In the Gap task, participants must redirect their gaze from a central stimulus to an appearing peripheral stimulus. The three experimental conditions of the task (Gap, Baseline and Overlap) differ on the timepoint when the central stimuli disappears in relation to the appearance of the peripheral stimulus: 200 ms before the peripheral stimulus appears (Gap), simultaneously to its appearance (Baseline), or with peripheral stimulus offset (Overlap). The data from the experimental conditions showed the expected pattern, with average latencies being the shortest in the Gap and longest in the Overlap condition. Females were faster (p = .004) than males in the Gap condition, which could indicate that arousal-related effects differ as a function of biological sex. Infants from higher SES were slower (p = .031) in the Overlap condition compared to lower SES infants. This suggests that basic visual attention may differ by socio-cultural background, and should be considered when studying visual attention and its developmental correlates. We observed no significant association to concurrent developmental level or adaptive function. Given its large sample size, this study provides a useful reference for future studies of visual disengagement in early infancy
Uncertainty of protein-ligand binding constants: asymmetric confidence intervals versus standard errors
Get PDFEquilibrium binding constants (Kb) between chemical compounds and target proteins or between interacting proteins provide a quantitative understanding of biological interaction mechanisms. Reporting uncertainties of measured experimental parameters are critical for decision making in many scientific areas, e.g., in lead compound discovery processes and in comparing computational predictions with experimental results. Uncertainties in measured Kb values are commonly represented by a symmetric normal distribution, often quoted in terms of the experimental value plus-minus the standard deviation. However, in general the distributions of measured Kb (and equivalent Kd) values and the corresponding free energy change DeltaGb are all asymmetric to varying degree. Here, using a simulation approach, we illustrate the effect of asymmetric Kb distributions within the realm of isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) experiments. Further we illustrate the known, but perhaps not widely appreciated, fact that when distributions of any of Kb, Kd and DeltaGb are transformed into each other their degree of asymmetry is changed. Consequently, we recommend that a more accurate way of expressing the uncertainties of Kb, Kd, and DeltaGb values is to consistently report 95% confidence intervals, in line with other author’s suggestions. The ways to obtain such error ranges are discussed in detail and exemplified for a binding reaction obtained by ITC
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