Explicit Acknowledgement Research Articles

Tackling treatment uncertainties together: the evolution of the James Lind Initiative, 2003–2013

Summary The James Lind Initiative (JLI) was established in 2003 in response to a call by the Medical Research Council, endorsed by the Department of Health (DH), for the creation of 'a communications and discussion forum on randomized controlled trials, involving patients, practitioners, research- ers, and others'. This brief was approached indirectly by encouraging more explicit acknowledgement of uncertainties about the effects of treatments. Between 2003 and 2013, the JLI developed the UK Database of Uncertainties about the Effects of Treatments (UK DUETs) to assemble and publish uncertainties (www.library.nhs.uk/duets/), and the James Lind Alliance (JLA) to provide a formal structure within which patients and clinicians could identify uncertainties and agree priorities for research (www.lindalliance.org). UK DUETs and the JLA have both now been mainstreamed, UK DUETs by incorporation within the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE), the JLA by designation as a partner organization of NIHR, managed by the NIHR Evaluation, Trials and Studies Coordinating Centre (NETSCC). Parallel to its development of methods for research prioritization, the Initiative has worked with others to produce printed and digital resources (www.jameslindlibrary.org; www.testingtreatments.org) to help enhance general knowledge about why it is important to address uncertainties about the effects of treat- ments; how to recognize rigorous tests of treatments; and how to reduce avoidable waste in research. The JLI will continue to work on these resources and themes over coming years.

Acknowledgment, Adaptation and Shakespeare in Ron Rash’s Serena

This essay examines the connections between Ron Rash’s novel, Serena , and William Shakespeare’s Macbeth . Rather than providing a comparative reading of these two works, this essay explores the relationship from a variety of perspectives, including the author, the publishers, critics and reviews as well as the narrative itself. It examines how the relationship between Serena and Macbeth is defined differently by these different groups, who defines the relationship and how well adaptation theory accounts or fails to account for these varied definitions. Adaptation theorists agree that in order to function as adaptations, the relationship between two works must be acknowledged. And, the author exists explicitly a source for this acknowledgement and implicitly as the primary authority for it. By examining the complicated and ambiguous links between Serena and Macbeth , this essay argues that we need to reconsider and problematize the role of authorial intentionality in how we define and construct adaptations and that Serena’s function as an adaptation lies outside of the author’s explicit acknowledgment and in the subjective realm of reception. Privileging authorial intentionality in adaptation limits our understanding of how adaptations work by overlooking the role of alternate sources of acknowledgment. We need to be able to escape explicit authorial acknowledgment without reverting to mere intertextuality and to focus more on how publishers, reviewers, readers, and the marketplace can acknowledge and construct adaptive relationships between texts.

Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West by Douwe Fokkema (review)

Reviewed by: Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West by Douwe Fokkema Andrea Bachner Douwe Fokkema , Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2011, 448 pp. Douwe Fokkema's book, Perfect Worlds: Utopian Fiction in China and the West, comes well recommended by such eminent scholars of Comparative Literature and Chinese studies as Zhang Longxi and Michel Hockx. Indeed, its 17 chapters and more than 400 pages deliver a kind of work whose scope and erudition—reminiscent of such early authorities of the field as Erich Auerbach or Robert Curtius—have become the exception rather than the rule for the field. Fokkema weaves a rich tapestry of utopian fiction as his text moves with facility and elegance from More to Houllebecq, from Plato to Confucius, from Zamyatin to Mao Zedong. Throughout, the book packages its arguments by providing thorough information about each work, its author, and its historical, political, and intellectual context. Because of its diachronic coverage, its intercultural range, its accessible prose, and its exhaustive discussion of some of the most important works and trends in the genre of utopian fiction, Perfect Worlds doubles as a handbook of the genre and a critical study of utopian writing. With few exceptions, work in Comparative Literature in Europe and the U.S. seems to move away from the format and scope of Perfect Worlds, for conceptual, as well as pragmatic reasons. How often do we come across a work so ambitious that [End Page 319] it tackles a whole genre not only across the centuries, but also across the cultures of Europe, the U.S., Russia, and China? How often does a scholar dare to take up the challenge to extend Comparative Literature to a truly intercultural scale, and thus to propose arguments about the state of literature and the world in general? Fokkema's choice of the genre of utopia with its hybrid character of fabulation and social dream constitutes a political as well as literary gesture: it aims to reflect on the interaction between politics and literature, ethics and fiction, the world and the text. Implicitly, it thus reasserts the right for literature and literary studies to speak in important ways to contemporary problems, rather than just being regarded as a pastime or an abstraction spun by specialists in their ivory towers. Utopian fiction, the literary attempt to craft perfect visions of social organization (eutopia) or worst-case scenarios of human interaction (dystopia), marks one of the privileged sites at which literature and reality interact in suggestive as well as profoundly problematic and complex ways. Throughout, Fokkema takes stock of the hybrid status of literary utopias. Not by chance are the key characteristics of the genre he discusses closely linked to the socio-political contexts of their emergence: utopias thrive there where secular worldviews return the human gaze from the world beyond to improvements of the here and now, especially whenever a society faces a profound crisis. However, Fokkema does not only situate each utopia within its historical moment and intellectual context, but espouses a doubly diachronic perspective. On the one hand, so Fokkema explains, the reception of a specific utopian fiction differs widely, not only across time, but also for individual readers: one's eutopia is another's dystopia, especially since one of the genre's main conceptual problems lies in the uneasy combination of control and individual free will. On the other hand, argues Fokkema, as a genre, utopian fiction emerges as and through intertextuality. Most utopian fictions contain strong intertextual references, both of positive emulation and negative rebuttal and rewriting—a sign of a sometimes implicit, sometimes explicit acknowledgment of belonging to a specific literary and generic tradition. The fact that such intertextual links rarely existed between the "West" and China, especially not before the nineteenth century, constitutes a conceptual crux for Perfect Worlds and, to a certain extent, for all comparative projects that eschew conventionally safe patterns of direct contact and literary influence. It forces the author to work with different strategies for comparison, as the texts under scrutiny are held together by different means. While relations of intertextuality link most of the European, U.S., and...

Facilitating learning spaces in forum theatre

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the extent to which forum theatre interventions can support non-hierarchical approaches to learning, development and change management initiatives in organisations. Design/methodology/approach – Semi-structured interviews were carried out with theatre consultancies, actors/facilitators, commissioners and participants in two forum theatre events. The data were analysed through thematic coding using template analysis. Findings – The findings show that the impact of forum theatre interventions was constrained by the need for practitioners to meet the requirements of their organizational clients. There was a lack of clarity by the facilitators about how they can carry out the role effectively and meet the expectations of their own managers, organizational clients and participants. The paper concludes that without explicit acknowledgement of these competing expectations or the facilitators ' beliefs and attitudes, the impact of such interventions may be reduce...

Authors' Response: Of Founding Fathers and History

Underlying Balazs and Reynolds's “Letter to the Editor” (2013) is a frustration with the lack of an explicit acknowledgment of Derek Richter as the “founder” of the Brain Research Association (BRA ...

NGOs, Pluralism and Advisory Services—Timor Leste

Purpose: This article analyses the role, approach, issues and opportunities faced by non-governmental organisations (NGOs) in the promotion of agriculture in Timor Leste from independence through to the countrywide roll out of a public extension service in 2009. Design/methodology/approach: The research draws on semi-structured interviews with NGO personnel, local, national and international, actively involved in agricultural development to ascertain how organisations engage with communities, their objectives, inputs, coverage and impacts. The analysis is based on the framework developed by Birner et al. (2009) for pluralistic advisory services, and the discussion is framed by contemporary NGO discourse. Findings:This article argues that NGOs have a central role in agricultural development, with particular advantages that can be built upon, however there must be explicit acknowledgement of the complex nature of the NGO and civil society, and a critical awareness of the need for strategic thinking, communication and coordination for effective aid. Practical implication: NGOs play a central role in agricultural development. There is a need for a more nuanced understanding of the opportunities and limitations of the NGO sector, both as service providers but also more broadly as part of civil society. Originality/value: Funding directed to the NGO sector for implementation of development projects is prolific. There is substantial discourse on partnerships between NGOs and other actors. However, little of the debate appears within discussions on agricultural service provision.

PARMÉNIDES CIENTÍFICO Y LAS OPINIONES DE LOS MORTALES (APUNTES PARA UNA NUEVA INTERPRETACIÓN)

The aim of this paper is to suggest a possible way of understanding Parmenides' so-called doxa, starting from the clear and lucid formulation of the problem which is offered to us in some recent writings of N.-L. Cordero. We agree with Cordero (and some others) on the need to distinguish between the "opinions of mortals" and Parmenides' own physical theories, usually confused under the label of the doxa or "way of opinion" (I-II); not so with his proposal to insert the 'scientific' fragments into the discourse on Truth, which seems rather incompatible with the sources (III) and ultimately grounded on the confusion –shared by most interpreters– of the ordering of the parts of the Poem, enounced at the end of fr. 1 (IV), with the "ways of inquiry" of frs. 2 and 6-7 (V). This is followed by an outline of a tentative reconstruction of Parmenides' polemics against the beliefs of mortals (VI-VIII). The guiding principle of Parmenides' physics is the mixture and interpenetration of the apparent opposites separated by mortals (VI), beginning with the antithesis 'light' / 'darkness', i. e. 'life' / 'death', the dominions of Zeus and of Hades in the traditional world vision which is refuted by the new cosmology of Parmenides (VII). But even so, the new cosmos is in its own way a "deceptive order" as well: since what-is is continuous and homogeneous, the entities postulated by the physical theory have to be necessarily fictitious or conventional; only the explicit acknowledgement of this status prevents the theory from the error of mortals, which consists in taking linguistic convention for the true being of things (VIII).

The Ambiguity of a Transgression and the Type of Apology Influence Immediate Reactions

Apologies with explicit acknowledgements of wrongdoing are especially likely to be well received. An implication of Trope's (1986) dual process model of social information processing is that this may not be so when interpersonal transgressions are ambiguous. In such cases, full apologies primarily serve to identify behaviors as affronts. In Study 1, participants read vignettes involving clear or ambiguous transgressions for which 1 of 3 alternative forms of apology were received by the wronged person: no apology, a full apology, or an expression of sympathy offered as partial apology. For clear transgressions, participants expected full apologies to soothe the wronged person more than either partial apologies or no apologies, but when transgressions were ambiguous, full apologies were considered to be less likely to ameliorate the wronged person's bad feelings than were partial apologies. In Study 2 we replicated the effect for ambiguous transgressions even when participants had the vignette presented to them as if they were in the role of the wronged person, and the results of Study 3 indicate that these findings are not an artifact of differences in conclusions about whether a transgression had actually taken place. Reactions to apologies are an interactive effect of the nature of the apology and the nature of the transgression.

Effectiveness of Web-based Psychological Interventions for Depression: A Meta-analysis

Web-based psychological interventions aim to make psychological treatments more accessible and minimize clinician input, but their effectiveness requires further examination. The purposes of the present study are to evaluate the outcomes of web-based interventions for treating depressed adults using meta-analytic techniques, and to examine moderating effects on these interventions. A random-effects analysis yielded a medium effect of web-based interventions compared to controls, with a significant reduction in depression and improvement in well-being. Regression analysis revealed moderating effects of human support and inclusion of reminders in treatments for depression. Also, mean attrition rates were similar to face-to-face treatment, moderated by inclusion of human support. Future research on client suitability and clinical significance are needed. Trials on web-based interventions are encouraged to address quality constraints apparent in existing studies, namely the need for explicit acknowledgment of multiple publications, ensuring quality of control groups, and careful reporting of methods and results. It was concluded that web-based interventions are effective ways of treating depression and enhancing well-being, particularly if supplemented with personal engagement.

Comments on the Ghost of the RAF

The essay takes up the question of “radicality” in art in the context of the events of the so-called German Autumn. The author tries to show that it is the “claim to leadership of art,” and the fear of becoming caught up in the trivial, that pushes artists to align themselves with radical politics. He demonstrates that at the same time the most radical gestures – radical because they are based on an explicit acknowledgment of one’s own position in the given historical situation – are more likely to go unnoticed.

Structured Methodological Pluralism in Sustainability Science

Investigating and solving complex sustainability issues requires a reconsideration of the way scientific knowledge is produced and the way it interacts with policy-making and the broader social environment. This engages both the intellectual and the social organization of research. In particular, we focus on the role of problem framing and of the socio-normative background of research (assumptions, values, norms, institutional and technological context) in shaping scientific methodology.The prevalent explanatory frameworks in sustainability research are largely guided by descriptive-analytical goals and pay relatively little attention to the transformational dimension of science (Wiek et al. 2012). Integrating this transformational level into scientific practice can potentially have a normative benefit (by way of a critical deliberation on what values and aims should guide research), but also an epistemic benefit (insofar as the implicit normative commitments and social constraints guiding research are brought into the open, and thus their methodological contributions are clarified). Through a critical-reflexive approach, based on explicit acknowledgement and critical deliberation on the values, assumptions and social context of scientific practice, sustainability research can be carried out on a more solid epistemological and normative foundation. We illustrate the normative and epistemic potential of this approach by focusing on environmental valuation methods and the assumptions and values underlying them.

A bereavement group for parents whose son or daughter died from cancer: how shared experience can lessen isolation

This article analyses the content of a session of a bereavement support group for parents whose teenage or young adult son or daughter had died from cancer. It considers how the group works, how people come to believe that they share a similar grief and how they ‘co-write’ a narrative about what they perceive as their shared grief. The analysis suggests strongly that this is a forum where ways of managing grief and loss can be supported through sharing with others who have not only been through a similar experience but one which may not be well understood by others. The bereaved parents felt that others who had not endured the loss of a child would find some of the manifestations of their grief and how they commemorated their child difficult to understand. There was both an explicit and implicit acknowledgment amongst group members that the group provided a safe place where what might be perceived as dysfunctional grief could be recognised and validated as ‘normal’ by other members. The conclusion is that the loss of a child sets bereaved parents apart from other bereaved people, their ‘normality’ has to be reconfigured and membership of such a group, if it is well facilitated, can assist in the grieving process and lessen isolation.

Revisiting the Trust-performance Link in Strategic Alliances

We extend research on the trust-performance link in strategic alliances (SAs) by arguing that the traditional focus of research on the influence of trust on performance of SAs needs to be complemented with a more explicit acknowledgment and analysis of the role that SA performance plays in the development of trust. Drawing on existing theoretical arguments and empirical findings related to the consequences and determinants of trust we argue for the existence of a bidirectional causal relationship between trust and performance in SAs. We empirically test this bilateral relationship using 3-stage least square regression models on data from 110 strategic alliances. Our results support the positive effect of SA performance on trust, but not the commonly stressed positive effect of trust on SA performance. We discuss the relevance of this finding for the theory of inter-firm collaboration. We conclude by discussing the implications of our findings for practitioners and scholars interested in SAs.

Methods for handling uncertainty within pharmaceutical funding decisions

This article provides a position statement regarding decision making under uncertainty within the economic evaluation of pharmaceuticals, with a particular focus upon the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence context within England and Wales. This area is of importance as funding agencies have a finite budget from which to purchase a selection of competing health care interventions. The objective function generally used is that of maximising societal health with an explicit acknowledgement that there will be opportunity costs associated with purchasing a particular intervention. Three components of uncertainty are discussed within a pharmaceutical funding perspective: methodological uncertainty, parameter uncertainty and structural uncertainty, alongside a discussion of challenges that are particularly pertinent to health economic evaluation. The discipline has focused primarily on handling methodological and parameter uncertainty and a clear reference case has been developed for consistency across evaluations. However, uncertainties still remain. Less attention has been given to methods for handling structural uncertainty. The lack of adequate methods to explicitly incorporate this aspect of model development may result in the true uncertainty surrounding health care investment decisions being underestimated. Research in this area is ongoing as we review.

Just call it "treatment".

Although many in the addiction treatment field use the term “medication-assisted treatment” to describe a combination of pharmacotherapy and counseling to address substance dependence, research has demonstrated that opioid agonist treatment alone is effective in patients with opioid dependence, regardless of whether they receive counseling. The time has come to call pharmacotherapy for such patients just “treatment”. An explicit acknowledgment that medication is an essential first-line component in the successful management of opioid dependence.

Michael Fried and Beholding Video Art

In this article, I consider Michael Fried’s recent contribution to the debate about the experience of video art, made in relation to the work of Douglas Gordon. Fried speculates that issues of antitheatricality may in fact be key to specifying the medium of video installation. While Fried’s position on awork’s to-be-seenness offers a useful way of framing the relation with the beholder in video art, I question his notion of ‘overcoming’ theatricality – preferring to see the theatrical/antitheatrical dichotomy as a dynamic at play within individual works. I welcome what seems to be an explicit acknowledgment from Fried that the position of the spectator is a contributory factor in what he terms empathic projection, but relate this to the notion of a figural presence. I argue that video art, as a spatial practice, offers a distinct mode of reception by problematizing the position of the spectator in relation to two-dimensional figurative space to which she is excluded.

A low latency path diversity mechanism for sender-oriented broadcast protocols in VANETs

In vehicular ad hoc networks, many applications require a low latency and high reliability especially the safety applications. Reliable multi-hop broadcast protocols have been widely discussed recently. However, most of them use explicit acknowledgments and timeout retransmissions to provide reliability. The retransmission method incurs delays when a packet loss cannot be detected on time. Acknowledgment messages also increase the MAC layer contention time at each node. In order to provide a high reliability and low latency with a low overhead, we propose a mechanism which utilizes path diversity. In the proposed mechanism, a message is delivered through two different paths. By cooperation of these different paths, broadcast messages can be disseminated with a short delay and a high reliability compared with the acknowledgment based retransmission approach. Since the proposed mechanism does not use any explicit acknowledgment message, the message overhead is low. We evaluate the proposed mechanism using both theoretical analysis and computer simulations.

Designing trials of complex interventions for efficacy and mechanisms evaluation

Objectives There have been recent developments in statistical methods for assessing the mechanisms through which a complex intervention acts, with particular applications in mental health trials. This literature has focused on causal mediation analysis, which differs from statistical mediation analysis by its explicit acknowledgement and exposition of the necessary assumptions, particularly that of no unmeasured confounding between the putative mediators or mechanisms and outcomes. Instrumental variable estimation procedures can produce valid causal estimates even in the presence of this unmeasured confounding, but the problem then becomes finding valid instruments to identify the statistical models. So far, however, little attention has been given to the issue of designing trials of complex interventions with this analysis in mind.

Desiring Conversion: Hermas, Thecla, Aseneth (review)

Reviewed by: Desiring Conversion: Hermas, Thecla, Aseneth Ross S. Kraemer B. Diane Lipsett Desiring Conversion: Hermas, Thecla, Aseneth Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. Diane Lipsett and I have clearly been traversing for some time the same textual territory, with intersecting interests (even more than her generous acknowledgments of my work on Aseneth would suggest). Part of my 1976 dissertation was [End Page 613] an initial foray into the thorny issues of women, gender, and erotic attachments in the Acts of Thecla and other apocryphal Acts. Unreliable Witnesses: Religion, Gender and History in the Greco-Roman Mediterranean (Oxford, 2011) sets forth my current positions on these issues, and its appearance dovetailed with Lipsett's study (something, regrettably, neither of us knew). Desiring Conversion, a revision of her 2005 dissertation, brings the perspectives and training of a literary scholar with different questions, theories, and methods to illuminate "the place of desire in the salvific transformation of three literary characters" (15): Hermas, Thecla and Aseneth. To do this, Lipsett reads Hermas alongside Michel Foucault's analysis of ancient technologies of the self, Thecla alongside feminist psychoanalytic theory drawn especially from the work of Lacan, and Aseneth alongside a treatise On the Sublime by the ancient rhetorician, Longinus. Lipsett hopes by this procedure to see otherwise obscured connections and relations in the texts, particularly those of erotics, self-restraint, gender, and conversion. Lipsett's method admirably illuminates textual elements that might easily escape the notice even of readers who have been scrutinizing these texts for many years. Particularly commendable are the concise overviews she provides of the scholarly thickets in which these texts are enmeshed. Prudently, she attends primarily to those issues that matter for her project while acknowledging yet sidestepping those that do not. Rich, subtle, eloquent, and careful as Lipsett's readings are, the question of whose readings these are looms large. Lipsett never explains how or why she chose these particular comparators. Their apparent "explanatory power" (language she regularly uses) is sufficient justification after the fact: they illuminate, therefore they are appropriate, whether or not they speak to intentions ancient authors would have had, self-consciously or otherwise. This is, perhaps, consistent with her use of psychoanalytic theories of desire to illuminate Thecla, for it implies that texts may operate in particular ways without their authors or readers' explicit awareness and acknowledgement. How these theories intersect, or more ominously, conflict, goes unexamined. Foucault rests his analysis of technologies of the self on the supposition that cultural differences are heavily historical and situational, if not arbitrary, under-girded by a universal human desire for power (for which one might read, rather, a universal male desire for power). Similarly, if perhaps somewhat differently, the appeal to Longinus is grounded in contingent cultural specificity: aspects of the representation of desire and conversion in Aseneth are due to awareness, directly or otherwise, of the conventions Longinus delineates. The appeal to Lacanian psychoanalysis, on the other hand, is an appeal to a modern, essentialist model of human desire that differs from ancient theories of desire, and that seemingly cannot be envisioned as the deliberate rhetorical strategy of an ancient author. Lipsett, of course, does not claim that it is such, any more than she claims that the author of Aseneth must have known Longinus. Hypothetically, a larger theory of human desire is not inherently in conflict with claims that a "right" theory (in this case, of desire) goes unrecognized in most cultures, which formulate and promote their own particular theories of desire, and their own conventions for its literary representation. Yet it seems deeply problematic to suggest, even indirectly, [End Page 614] that psychoanalysis, whether Freudian or Lacanian, is, in fact, the "right" theory, given that it has been generally, if not altogether, refuted and rejected by contemporary psychological research, and its use is favored now primarily by literary theorists. For many readers, Lipsett's readings will enhance a history of ideas about desire, transformation, or conversion, and gender in the ancient Mediterranean. Some historians and scholars of ancient religions may be less enamored of the tenuous moorings of these readings to actual ancient persons and to practices that are thereby somewhat obscured. One...

Relations between Professions and Organizations: More Fully Considering the Role of the Client

In much of the literature exploring the relations between professions and organizations, the relationship tends to be depicted as, or otherwise assumed to be in opposition. What this depiction conceals is a more complex and sometimes symbiotic relationship that can exist between professions and organizations. Still lacking in this more nuanced perspective, however, is an explicit acknowledgement of the influential role that clients of professions and organizations play in this relationship. In this paper we make the case for a more explicit and dynamic conceptualisation of the relationship between professions, organizations and clients based on a review of the classic and contemporary literature. Part of our goal is to more adequately address the inter-relationship between professionals and organizations by unpacking organizations, by highlighting the unique position of professions within organizations, and the different influences that clients can have on the orientation of professions within organizations.