Leap Of Faith Research Articles

To screen or not to screen

To screen or not to screen

A Leap of Faith: Innovative Changes in Problem-based Learning Delivery on a Malaysian Campus

Monash University Sunway Campus usually conducts Problem-Based Learning (PBL) twice a week for both Year One and Year Two medical students. However, in 2009 PBL session was reduced from a two-day PBL session to a single day. The main objective of this action research paper is to compare and evaluate the single day session and the two-day session in terms of strengths and weaknesses and to propose possible solutions to the school and other campuses to improve the current practice. A qualitative approach, using focus group interviews were used to collect data from the medical students. Questionnaires were distributed to tutors facilitating the PBL sessions. The results showed that the new approach in PBL delivery was favorably accepted both by students and tutors. This approach, which was initiated by the Malaysian campus, was adopted by both campuses in Australia and Malaysia.

Entrepreneurship as a leap of faith

Entrepreneurial start-ups require a “leap of faith”. Since a person’s faith represents a belief in something for which there is limited information and considerable uncertainty, this suggests that the entrepreneur’s faith orientation may influence the start-up process for some entrepreneurs. Due to the paucity of research in this area and the need to better understand the start-up process, this study utilized an inductive, longitudinal research design. Specifically, we studied the new venture creation process for four entrepreneurs operating throughout the USA over a five-year period from 2005 to 2009. As a result of this study, new theoretical insights are generated on entrepreneurial motivations, creativity, expectations, and emotions for those entrepreneurs who seek to integrate their faith journey with a new entrepreneurial start-up.

The Leap of Faith from Disease Treatment to Lifestyle Prevention: The Genealogy of a Policy Idea

Since the 1970s public health policy has attempted to counter the rise of chronic diseases by getting individuals to make healthy choices about smoking, alcohol, diet, and physical exercise. Inspired by the so-called new perspective of the 1974 Lalonde report, this shift from disease treatment to prevention has been a key focus of public health policy to this day. Every generation of public health reports presents prevention as the answer to past failures, but the continuous experience of failure is strangely coexistent with a fundamental belief in the ability of lifestyle prevention to produce large health improvements. The article tracks the genealogy of lifestyle prevention as policy idea across three generations of U.S. and Danish public health reports and finds a systematic interpretation of lifestyle prevention as being more successful and promising than acute medical treatment.

How Can Institutional Review Boards Best Interpret Preclinical Data?

Among the many challenges facing institutional review boards (IRBs) is to predict whether the activities and interventions proposed in a clinical trial protocol are likely to yield net harm or net benefit for trial participants. IRBs take these questions very seriously, and never more so than in the review of first-in-human (FIH) trials, where interpreting findings about risks to humans from animal data requires a leap of faith, regardless of the quality of the available data. In their paper published this week in PLoS Medicine [1], “Predicting harms and benefits in translational trials: Ethics, evidence, and uncertainty,” Jonathan Kimmelman and Alex London argue that decision-makers (which, from the context of their paper, I assume to mean IRB members) pay insufficient attention to threats to validity in preclinical studies and consult too narrow a set of evidence, thereby unnecessarily limiting predictions about risks and potential benefits for humans that they might otherwise be able to make. They advocate greater attention to the quality of preclinical evidence and to research on related agents. These strategies are meant to reduce what they call the “misestimation” of risks or anticipated benefits, which they argue “threatens the integrity of the scientific enterprise, because it frustrates prudent allocation of research resources”[1]. Kimmelman and London's proposal is likely to stimulate a great deal of constructive debate among clinical trialists, regulators, and other members of the research ethics community. In my brief comments here, I will attempt to open this debate by identifying a key aspect of their proposal that is likely to generate particular interest and perhaps even some controversy—that is, their framing of the problem in terms of how effectively decision-makers utilize evidence from preclinical or animal studies. Although IRB members often do not have deep grounding in the subtleties of research design and inferential statistics, it would be wrong to suggest that “misestimation” of risk and potential benefit arises solely from errors by IRB members (or other decision-makers).

Careful calculation or a leap of faith? A field study of the translation of CBCA ratings to final credibility judgements

This field experiment investigated the influence of Criteria-Based Content Analysis (CBCA) ratings on ultimate decision accuracy regarding the credibility of children's statements of sexual abuse. Following a selection procedure, based on case facts independent of statement quality, 21 truthful accounts and 10 fabricated accounts of 6- to 17-year olds were analysed. Two experts rated the presence of the CBCA criteria and made overall credibility judgements for each statement. Rater one achieved an overall hit rate of 84% (95% for truthful statements and 60% for fabricated statements) and rater two a hit rate of 81% (81% for both truthful and fabricated statements) but the raters did not always agree. The CBCA criteria appeared more often in the truthful statements compared to the fabricated statements. Additional factors that influenced raters' credibility judgements, besides CBCA scores, are discussed.

Leap of faith: Voluntary emersion behaviour and physiological adaptations to aerial exposure in a non-aestivating freshwater fish in response to aquatic hypoxia

Lowland stream fauna in areas of intensive agriculture are increasingly under threat from anthropogenic activities leading to eutrophication and subsequent hypoxia. Survival of hypoxic episodes depends upon a combination of behavioural and physiological adaptations. Responses of inanga (Galaxias maculatus: Galaxiidae) to aquatic hypoxia were investigated in the laboratory. Contrary to expectation inanga did not display behaviour that might reduce energy expenditure during oxygen limitation, with swimming activity slightly, but significantly elevated relative to normoxia. Instead, as dissolved oxygen concentrations decreased, the fish moved higher in the water column, increased their swimming speed and exhibited aquatic surface respiration. Physiological changes such as enhanced opercular frequency were also noted. As hypoxia deepened inanga started to leap out of the water, emersing themselves on a floating platform. Once emersed, fish exhibited an enhanced oxygen consumption rate compared to hypoxic fish. Thus inanga appear better adapted to escape hypoxia (a behavioural adaptation) rather than tolerate it (physiological adaptation). The emersion strategy used for inanga in response to severe hypoxia is in agreement with their ability to take up more oxygen from the air than from hypoxic water and therefore may justify the potentially increased risks of desiccation and predation associated with leaving the water.

Genotypic tropism testing: evidence-based or leap of faith?

Genotypic tropism testing: evidence-based or leap of faith?

Connecting the dots: role of standardization and technology sharing in biological simulation

The role of biological modeling and simulation in enhancing productivity across the drug discovery pipeline has been increasingly appreciated over the past decade by the pharmaceutical industry. However, adoption of in silico modeling and simulation techniques has been sparse due to skepticism in the associated pay-offs and knowledge gap in research. While biological simulations have been successfully applied in specific projects, a standardized, community-wide platform is imperative for making the final leap of faith across the domain. This review outlines the issues and challenges involved in fostering a private-public collaborative effort for the development of standard modeling and biosimulation platforms and concludes with insights into possible mechanisms for integrating an in silico pipeline into the drug discovery and development process.

Auto-immunity of TrustwithoutTrust

Trust has been widely investigated both theoretically and empirically. Whether thought of as the result of a calculation of costs/benefits, a shared identity, or a leap of faith, there always seems...

Breaking the Mold

Breaking the Mold

How Do Corporations Embed Sustainability Across the Organization?

Company action to implement sustainable management solutions implicitly assumes that managers and employees are aware of and implement corporate sustainability policies and procedures. However this assumption can be a leap of faith—many employees may be unaware of sustainability issues beyond their immediate work responsibilities. We explore how technical, action, and social learning are used by large corporations to embed sustainability across the organization. We illustrate eight training and development tools with examples drawn from global companies and complement these with deeper insights from companies within the Indian business conglomerate, Tata Group.

Gravity is Your Friend but Every Turn is a Leap of Faith: Design and Testing a Schematic Map for Ski Resort Trails

title/>Trail maps for winter sports often take the form of highly illustrative landscape paintings, or panoramas, overprinted with trails and lifts to allow winter sports enthusiasts a mechanism for on-mountain navigation. The character of mountain environments lends itself particularly well to the panoramic representation which creates aesthetically pleasing representations that have become the de facto standard for trail mapping in ski resorts. Using them for navigating on mountain is not always easy since conditions, map perspective, orientation and the illustrative form often make reading the map awkward. Here, an alternative to the traditional trail map is designed by reducing a mountain and its trails to topological primitives. Harry Beck's famous London Underground provided inspiration to depict ski trails as a schematic network for the primary purpose of navigation. The schematic map illustrates the 176 trails in Breckenridge, CO, USA, derived from GPS tracklogs and incorporates a range of other datasets and a panoramic inset to provide context. The map has been tested at Breckenridge ski resort and results of this usability study are reported showing that there is value in this alternative way of depicting ski resorts though the panoramic style is well established, trusted and unlikely to face serious competition from alternative approaches.

From sense perception to natural affection: Paolo Sarpi's leap of faith

This article explores two different tendencies in the thought of Paolo Sarpi (1552-1623): the first of these is his rational stoicism, which considered passions false opinions and something that was best to subjugate to reason. The second is Sarpi's Christianity, which embraced natural affection for god and the government of Venice. The author sets out to establish which of the two tendencies was predominant in Sarpi: aloof Stoicism or passionate Christianity. In doing so, he analyses Sarpi's treatment of reason and passions in his philosophical notes, Pensieri, and his general attitude towards god, religion, and sovereign political power. He also points out the important influence of Aristotle, Stoicism and Epicureanism on the one hand, and Michel de Montaigne and Pierre Charron on the other on the development of Sarpi's thought.

The Negation of Nonsense Is Nonsense: Hilary Putnam on Science and Religion

While the influential analytical philosopher Hilary Putnam has made significant contributions to philosophy of mind, philosophy of language and philosophy of science, he isn't generally regarded as a philosopher of religion or a theologian. Nonetheless, I argue that his work should be of great interest to philosophers of religion and theologians. Focusing on the relationship between science and religion, this paper explores the importance of Putnam's attempt to reconcile his anti-metaphysical stance and his commitment to a religious form of life for theology. I first demonstrate why an anti-metaphysical stance and a commitment to Judaism can be deemed contradictory, and then characterize Putnam's anti-metaphysical stance as a modus vivendi to avoid both of what I call analytic and scientistic metaphysics. In a third step I offer my interpretation of Putnam's way of relating science and religion without metaphysics in the qualified sense, and subsequently spell out some important consequences of the emerging picture for theology. In my conclusion I give an account of Putnam as a transitional thinker, and draw a parallel between some of his work and Kierkegaard's leap of faith.

Differentiating Trust in Rural Decision-making, Drawing on an English Case Study

Within the context of rural civic participation, three different types of trust are described, based on Simmelian-related constructs: personal trust, system trust and instrumental trust. Each has two components, a justification and a leap of faith. These vary in proportion according to degrees of knowledge held. Shifts in public domain decision-making have changed the emphasis of different types of trust. In using constructs of social capital to explore rural decision-making, bonding social capital is seen to cohere around notions of personal trust, bridging social capital around system trust and contested social capital around instrumental trust. In rural decision-making it is suggested, drawing from case study evidence in Gloucestershire, that personal trust is becoming increasingly important because of the localisation of decision-making and ambiguities in representation. A greater reliance is also being placed on system trust because of increasingly complex decision-making structures. While in principle instrumental trust can be ameliorated through access to knowledge and information, increasingly, the volume of information is problematic, and decision-makers are relinquishing their knowledge to ‘experts’.

Roses are Red: Taking a Leap of Faith: The High School Connection

Roses are Red: Taking a Leap of Faith: The High School Connection

Blaming God for Our Pain: Human Suffering and the Divine Mind

Believing in God requires not only a leap of faith but also an extension of people’s normal capacity to perceive the minds of others. Usually, people perceive minds of all kinds by trying to understand their conscious experience (what it is like to be them) and their agency (what they can do). Although humans are perceived to have both agency and experience, humans appear to see God as possessing agency, but not experience. God’s unique mind is due, the authors suggest, to the uniquely moral role He occupies. In this article, the authors propose that God is seen as the ultimate moral agent, the entity people blame and praise when they receive anomalous harm and help. Support for this proposition comes from research on mind perception, morality, and moral typecasting. Interestingly, although people perceive God as the author of salvation, suffering seems to evoke even more attributions to the divine.

Fearless Trembling: A Leap of Faith into the Devil's Frying Pan

ABSTRACTPhenomenologically and reflexively influenced, this paper investigates an experiential conception of the imagination through an exploration of an extreme bodily act. Foremost, it sets the scene for a conceptual consideration of dangerous practices such as cliff jumping. This potentially pushes the level in which we can reflect upon such a thing as an existential or embodied imagination. Here modernity's leveling of the docile body is challenged. Hence, in focusing on those sub-cultural practices that involve the extreme use of landscape, I propose an alternative scenario in which to consider the creativity of the body. Such a framework situates hazardous activities beyond the level of much contemporary thinking within the anthropology of sport or the sociology of risk, to a more far-reaching—perhaps “extremist” position—where they come across as existentially poignant, performative acts of the social imagination.

Free Nitric Oxide in Spent Capd Fluid: A Leap of Faith?

Free Nitric Oxide in Spent Capd Fluid: A Leap of Faith?