Principal Author Research Articles

Generating a comprehensive set of standard operating procedures for a biorepository network-The CTRNet experience.

Despite the integral role of biorepositories in fueling translational research and the advancement of medicine, there are significant gaps in harmonization of biobanking practices, resulting in variable biospecimen collection, storage, and processing. This significantly impacts accurate downstream analysis and, in particular, creates a problem for biorepository networks or consortia. The Canadian Tumour Repository Network (CTRNet; www.ctrnet.ca ) is a consortium of Canadian tumor biorepositories that aims to enhance biobanking capacity and quality through standardization. To minimize the issue of variable biobanking practices throughout its network, CTRNet has developed and maintained a comprehensive set of 45 standard operating procedures (SOPs). There were four key elements to the CTRNet SOP development process: 1) an SOP development team was formed from members across CTRNet to co-produce each SOP; 2) a principal author was appointed with responsibility for overall coordination of the SOP development process; 3) the CTRNet Management Committee (composed of principal investigators for each member biorepository) reviewed/revised each SOP completed by the development team; and 4) external expert reviewers provided feedback and recommendations on each SOP. Once final Management Committee approval was obtained, the ratified SOP was published on the CTRNet website for public access. Since the SOPs were first published on the CTRNet website (June 2008), there have been approximately 15,000 downloads of one or more CTRNet SOPs/Policies by users from over 60 countries. In accordance with biobanking best practices, CTRNet performs an exhaustive review of its SOPs at set intervals, to coincide with each granting cycle. The last revision was completed in May 2012.

Greetings from the West: The people of Veneklasen Associates

Western Electro-Acoustic Laboratory (WEAL) was founded in 1947 by Paul S. Veneklasen, FASA, for the manufacture of precision acoustical instruments utilizing the Western Electric 640AA Precision Condenser Microphone. When asked in 1951 to provide acoustical consulting services on a jet engine test cell, the architect insisted on dealing with an individual, not a laboratory, and Paul S. Veneklasen & Associates (PSVA) was born. Renamed Veneklasen Associates (VA) after Paul Veneklasen’s death in 1996, VA and WEAL have had the privilege of employing excellent associates over 65 years of business. Many within this group have contributed to the science of acoustics, in several cases founding firms to continue the practice of acoustical consulting. Others like the principal author, employed since 1956, have remained at VA continuing to contribute and mentor others in the science of acoustics. All of us have benefited from Paul Veneklasen’s approach to consulting projects, his use of corroborating measurements, reporting style and the quest for solutions to acoustical problems. In addition, the firm carries on Paul Veneklasen’s tradition of in-house acoustical research to advance the field. The Poster traces this history in terms of its current and former employees and their careers with PSVA and VA.

Basic Education or School Going Education for South Africa : Privatization versus the Public Good

Good-quality state education is a basic right enshrined in the Constitution. We cannot entrust our schools to unaccountable and undemocratic corporate interests. Public education has developed over more than a century to become a core part of the work of governments, especially because it is very much a part of their democratising mandate in providing a basic human right to all members of society. Nowhere is there an example of a country with high educational outcomes where the provision of basic education has been in private hands. But there is now an increasingly insistent view suggesting that the privatisation of education, whether through high-cost or low-cost private schooling, charter schools or the voucher system, is the solution to the problems of education systems.This view is touted against the egregious weaknesses that face many public education systems and the prevailing view that education is not meeting the demands of the labour market and economy. This paper argues against this thesis and posits that, it is the responsibility of the South African government to provide basic or school – going education. It argues that given South Africa’s apartheid history, there is no case for the privatization of basic education. The authors primarily use the arguments used by Salim Vally and Enver Motala in an edited article on the same subject that appeared in the Mail and Guardian September 27 to October 2, 2013. (Permission was obtained by the principal author to use their article to articulate this view).

Mushtaque Chowdhury: seeking health transition in Bangladesh

Mushtaque Chowdhury, principal author of a Lancet Bangladesh Series paper, is only too aware of how far his country has come since its creation amid the horror of a bloody civil war 42 years ago. “Overall, there has been a shift from the priority of managing infectious diseases to where we are now, and a focus on public health programmes to mitigate the effects of natural disasters and the burgeoning of non-communicable diseases, especially in the country's urban areas”, he says.

The Standard Oil Treatment: Willa Cather, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy , and Early Twentieth Century Collaborative Authorship

The Standard Oil Treatment:Willa Cather, The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy, and Early Twentieth Century Collaborative Authorship Ashley Squires (bio) It will be a great historical series, as great, perhaps, as the history of the Standard Oil, and to most people more interesting. It is not an attack on Christian Science, as most magazine articles have been. It is the history of a remarkable woman and a remarkable movement. —“The Life of Mrs. Eddy,” McClure’s advertisement The Willa Cather canon needs to be one book shorter. Two decades ago, it seemed that a century-old debate had been settled about the novelist’s role in the production of the 1907 McClure’s series The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy. So clear was the critical consensus surrounding her ultimate authorship of the text that David Stouck, in his introduction to the 1993 University of Nebraska edition, confidently declared that “Willa Cather is indisputably the principal author of The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy and the History of Christian Science” (xvii). Newly available documentary evidence at the Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston strongly indicates that it is time to reevaluate that consensus. The work in question—which ran as a series of articles from December 1906 to August 1908—presented the life of one of the most famous women of the day in scintillating, even scandalous detail. Mary Baker Eddy was the founder of the religio-medical sect that claimed that all physical suffering was the product of erroneous beliefs in physical matter. By the time the series appeared, she had attracted an international following, amassed a considerable personal fortune from her writings, and erected a politically and financially influential organization. For those who claimed to be healed by Eddy’s techniques, which were practiced throughout the world by her students, Christian Science represented the very pinnacle of human efforts to conquer physical suffering and disease. For those who regarded her theology and healing practices as [End Page 328] fraudulent, Mrs. Eddy was a public menace who amassed her largesse at the expense of a credulous public and threatened the very stability of American democracy. Ida Tarbell’s 1904 exposure of Standard Oil in another McClure’s biographical series on Rockefeller was frequently invoked by the magazine and its readers when discussing the Eddy project. As one admirer wrote to S. S. McClure after the publication of the first installment, “As the Standard Oil is the worst monopoly in the commercial world, so is ‘Christian Science’ the greatest, most criminal fraud in the religious field” (Adams, 12 Jan. 1907). The editorial team responsible for meeting a complex set of public expectations included the credited author, Georgine Milmine; Ida Tarbell herself before she left the magazine in 1906; Burton J. Hendrick, future Pulitzer Prize winner; and Willa Sibert Cather, who had just taken the job at McClure’s following the success of her early short stories. I argue—as Cather did herself—that rather than being the property of any one writer, the biography was a collaborative work, though critical preoccupation with the question of who deserves to be listed first (or listed at all) on the spine of the book has obscured that central fact of its production. Furthermore, the resultant habit of reading The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy within a single-author framework, mining it for evidence about Cather’s supposed early development as a writer (based on inaccurate assumptions about what she was responsible for), has led to some questionable conclusions based on assumptions about what precisely Cather did. It has also precluded some interesting possibilities for critical inquiry into a rich symptomatic text that tells us much about Mary Baker Eddy, Christian Science, and investigative journalism in the early twentieth century US. Documentary Evidence and the Question of Authorship Rumors about Cather’s role in writing The Life of Mary Baker G. Eddy circulated throughout the decades following its original publication. Once Willa Cather achieved a national reputation as a novelist—winning a Pulitzer Prize for One of Ours in 1922—admirers began speculating that she was the true author of the McClure’s series that had served as the basis...

America’s “Broken Government”

It has become impossible, or so it seems, to reach agreement on reasonable solutions to the problems confronting American government. Many claim that our political system is broken, our unique Constitutional scheme of governance - separation of powers, checks and balances, federalism, pluralism—dysfunctional or obsolete. Would James Madison, the principal author of that scheme, agree? It Truem the way our political system works can undermine the general welfare. Often our politics seem farcical. Bur Madison would know why. Our governing structures do not fail. We, the people, do. Liberty and justice cannot be secured, Madison argued, unless the people embrace the principle that the stronger parties among them submit to a government that protects all parties, the weaker as well as themselves. When the people abandon this principle - when, for example, wealth rules and joblessness persists - liberty and justice for all, the goals of our republican democracy, are in jeopardy.

Dealing with maps: the identification of intellectual responsibilities and the application of relator codes

Treatment of information about those responsible for the intellectual content of work is one of the most complicated tasks in the bibliographic description of cartographic material. There are particular characteristics that make it difficult to apply some general rules laid down by technical cataloguing manuals for recording this information. The classic situation typified by the monographs — "an author and an editor" or "multiple authors and an editor" — differs from the large quantity of cartographic resources which have various contributors, with distinct functions, who contribute to the production of the resource. Field work, compilation of information and its standardization or homogenization, drawing, engraving or printing are some of the tasks often recorded on the maps associated with different individuals or organizations. In such cases, the problem is to select the person who should be considered as the principal author, determining with this choice the main entry of the record, and who should be chosen as co-authors or secondary authors. It is often difficult to know whether or not the functions performed by each one, or even by only one individual, deserve the epithet of "author" of the map.In cartographic material a great variety of situations and many aspects can be taken into account, which allows evaluating the different solutions to problems that complicate documental treatment. Therefore, maps, loose or forming homogeneous groups, the nature of represented information, the time and institutional context in which they are produced and published, as well as whether they are printed or digital or manuscripts, influence the procedure for giving the authorial statement.Modern maps (produced using digital tools), although they confront librarians with problems about the determination of access points, may be easier to treat than those created prior to the nineteenth century. However, this is not a rule: old maps are not always more difficult to treat than contemporary cartography.

Gnawa Confusion: The Fusion of Algeria’s Favorite French Band

Gnawa Diffusion was a successful musical group of first- and second-generation North African immigrants that achieved significant fame in North Africa, the Middle East and Europe during the last two decades. Based in France, though from Algeria, their politicized egalitarian message reached the world. Their musical skills, instrumentation, tastes and appeal to youth sounds, sentiments and meanings gave their globalized music a prominent place on the global stage. In their work Gnawa Diffusion addressed a panoply of political issues and sought to represent and reach their audience. Their greatest popularity came at the height and conclusion of the Algerian civil war. By parsing the meanings of the band’s name, this paper engages the events and cultures that informed Gnawa Diffusion, exploring the history of the Gnawa, the history of Algeria, and the relationships between France, North Africa and contemporary “French” music. Issues of cultural authenticity and representation are tightly layered within the band’s purposes and process of artistic production. Because Gnawa Diffusion was envisioned, organized and led by Amazigh Kateb Yassin, and because the band and media recognized him as the spokesperson and principal author for Gnawa Diffusion, Amazigh’s life story and words accompany this paper’s arguments and analysis. Through a selective sketch of the various musical consequences of the North African slave trade, the spread of Islam, the colonization of North Africa and the immigration of Algerians to France, we can begin to comprehend how these histories combined and harmonized through Gnawa Diffusion to form the new musical forms of a generation of people who seek to overcome their often divisive cultural heritage. In this case, the intent of the music challenges common notions of authenticity and thereby affirms it.

Settlement and Subsistence in Early Formative Soconusco: El Varal and the Problem of Inter-Site Assemblage Variation. Richard G. Lesure, editor and principal author. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, University of California Los Angeles, 2010.292 pp., 72 tables, 125 figures, appendix, references, index. $55 (paper).

Settlement and Subsistence in Early Formative Soconusco: El Varal and the Problem of Inter-Site Assemblage Variation. Richard G. Lesure, editor and principal author. Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, University of California Los Angeles, 2010.292 pp., 72 tables, 125 figures, appendix, references, index. $55 (paper). - Volume 24 Issue 1

Rhinoplasty: Surface Aesthetics and Surgical Techniques

Surface aesthetics of the attractive nose are created by certain lines, shadows, and highlights, with specific proportions and breakpoints. Our evaluation of the nasal surface aesthetics is achieved using the concept of geometric polygons as aesthetic subunits, both to define the existing deformity and the aesthetic goals. Surgical techniques have been developed and modified to achieve the desired surface appearance, and those are detailed in this article. The principles of geometric polygons allow the surgeon to analyze the deformities of the nose, to define an operative plan to achieve specific goals, and to select the appropriate operative technique. These aesthetic concepts and surgical techniques were used in 257 consecutive rhinoplasties performed in the past 3 years by the principal author (B.Ç.).

Retracted article: Radioactivity Concentration and Dose Assessment for soil samples of Western Ghats

I, the Editor, Harpal Minhas, hereby wholly retract this article as it contains significant overlap including the reuse of data with the article “Distribution of radionuclide in the forest soils (Western Ghats-India)”, P. K. Manigandan, S. Selvasekarapandian and N. Manikandan, Iranian Journal of Radiation Research, 2007, 5, 17-22 without sufficient attribution to this earlier work being given. The principal author declined to sign the retraction notice and did not agree to the retraction. Signed: Harpal Minhas, Editor. Retraction published 26 February 2014.

A new approach to authorship: A farce since the dawn of time

The authorship issue has been a farce since the dawn of medical writing, simply because there are many in the medical profession who are unable to produce original work or synthesize texts attractive enough for publication; yet they are very good clinicians and are assets for their institutions. Accordingly, the ghost authorship arises and the process becomes self-explanatory. I personally do not understand the logic behind a stringent authorship criteria for qualification as an author.1 What is more important for the industry? Is it a good scientist or a clinician, or rather a person with good imagination, application and excellent writing skills? Again, who is more important, a person with excellent surgical skills, or the one who has efficiently mastered the skills for passing a study through an Institutional Review Board, or obtain fat grants? Who came first - was it the clinician or the author? Only few of us are innovators. The combination of the above in a single person is not so common. So why not combine different people different skills? I fail to understand the harm in including a person's name who may have contributed even intellectually in a study, or in preparation of a manuscript. One or two people always do the main job. Why not frame a policy to recognize their work in a way which is slightly better than at present? They may be given more credentials as principal authors through some policy which adequately defines and recognizes their contribution. The pressure of ‘publish or perish’ can have devastating effects. The more stringent the law, the more dubious is the style to bypass it. It is time we understand the basic problem and adjust. In my opinion, a fair policy which recognizes the principal author is a better way to calibrate his credential rather than imposing sanctions for authorship on the other members of the team.

Locoregional radiation therapy in the era of personalized medicine

Pauline Truong speaks to Alisa Crisp, Assistant Commissioning Editor: Pauline Truong is Clinical Professor of Radiation Oncology at the University of British Columbia (BC, Canada). She obtained her medical degree from McGill University (QC, Canada) in 1990 and completed her postgraduate training in Radiation Oncology in 1994. At the BC Cancer Agency, Vancouver Island Centre (BC, Canada), she enjoys a busy clinical practice caring for patients with breast cancer and serves as Medical Leader for the institution’s Radiation Therapy Research Unit, which operates clinical trials examining radiation therapy innovations. She also directs the center’s Population Outcomes Research Unit, which conducts studies evaluating population-based patterns of care and associated cancer outcomes. Her research is focused on questions that directly relate to patient care and clinical decision-making. She is recognized for her breast cancer outcomes research examining locoregional recurrence risk prognostication and adjuvant radiation treatment for women with breast cancer. She has led grant-funded studies and international collaborative studies using large population-based datasets to design prediction models for recurrence risk after mastectomy or breast-conserving therapy. She is the principal author of the Canadian clinical practice guidelines on the use of postmastectomy radiotherapy and has published extensively on this topic and on locoregional therapy for breast cancer. She has served on editorial boards of oncology journals and on grant reviewer panels including the National Cancer Institute, Canadian Cancer Society of Research Institute, Canadian Institute of Health Research and US Department of Defense Medical Research Program. As a teacher and mentor, Dr Truong participates enthusiastically in undergraduate and postgraduate education. She strongly believes that part of the educational experience of students, residents and clinical fellows is to learn about the process of research and the thoughtful evaluation of outcomes of the care we provide. As Fellowship Program Director at her center, she takes pleasure in mentoring radiation oncology fellows pursuing academic careers in breast cancer research.

Demographic analysis of randomized controlled trials in bladder cancer

WHAT'S KNOWN ON THE SUBJECT? AND WHAT DOES THE STUDY ADD?: Results from well designed randomized controlled trials usually provide the strongest evidence possible in favour of one medical intervention over another. For this reason, it is of paramount importance to conduct such trials in bladder cancer, where randomized trials are lacking, in particular to answer questions that have so far confounded us or to investigate the efficacy of new diagnostic tools or interventions. This study provides a demographic analysis of randomized controlled trials published in bladder cancer between the years of 1995 and 2010, with only 238 articles identified. Less than one-third of these reported a statistical power calculation, and only 8% were double-blinded. With many publications inaccurately labelled as randomized trials, we reveal the scarcity of trials performed over the given time period, even compared with other cancers with similar incidence, and highlight the need for more well designed trials to be conducted. To demographically examine randomized controlled trials (RCTs) that have been conducted in bladder cancer over a predefined time period. Various techniques have been described to detect RCTs using different databases. We searched the MEDLINE database by crossing the heading 'Urinary bladder neoplasms' with the MeSHs 'Clinical trial$.mp. OR clinical trial.pt. OR random:.mp. OR tu.xs.' between 1995 and 2010. For the RCTs identified, analysis was performed on each RCT, placing particular emphasis on modality of intervention, cohort size, principal author, region, journal type, disease status, histology, blinding, number of centres involved, performance of a statistical power calculation, accrual status and trial support. Of 5002 RCT bladder cancer papers retrieved over the given period, only 238 represented actual RCTs after manual appraisal. More than half of the RCTs investigated medical and surgical therapies (54.2%), and only half had a sample size of >100 patients. A small percentage of studies were double-blinded (8.0%), and there was an almost equal distribution of multicentre vs single centre trials (54.6% vs 45.4%). More studies were conducted in Europe (61.3%) than the rest of the world combined, with urologists principally the lead investigators in the majority (72.3%). Most studies were conducted on patients with urothelial carcinoma (97.1%), with less than one-third reporting a statistical power calculation (31.5%). Only 238 RCTs were published for bladder cancer between 1995 and 2010. RCTs are under-utilized in bladder cancer. More trials need to be designed with larger sample sizes in order to optimize diagnostic and treatment strategies for patients with bladder cancer.

Six exotic terrestrial earthworms (Oligochaeta: Megadrilacea: Moniligastridae, Lumbricidae, Ocnerodrilidae & Megascolecidae) newly added to Korean species biodiversity list

Preliminary inspection by the principal author of the NIBR Oligochaete collection, maintained by marine Annelida curator T.-S. Park, revealed several new endemic species, such as an Amynthas sp. nov. described in the current Zootaxa issue, plus three of the six exotics titled above. Three additional new exotic records are the results of recent in-country collection by the authors in early 2012 that together raise the Korean earthworm biodiversity count to ~113 named species.

Comparative Analysis of Fruit and Vegetable Consumption in a Food Service Unit: Is it Possible to Influence the Choices?

The objectives of this work were to evaluate workers’ consumption of fruits and vegetables in their main meals in food service unit, the principal author’s local work place, as well as to analyze the effect of diet contracts of this group of food intake. The study was divided into three phases, and it lasted two years. It involved a registered company in the Workers’ Nutrition Program (WNP) that chooses one of its units to prepare meals. It was formalized by contract intermediates and was signed under a business beneficiary and the agencies. It was found that the satisfactory consumption of fruits and vegetables was directly related to the way foods were offered. This included the correct menu planning and preparation of nutritional choices. Results obtained emphasized the importance of direct management of contracts and suppliers to help provide a healthy lifestyle. Keywords: Worker's Nutrition Program, nutrition, graviola, cupuacu, vegetables, friuts, health, lifestyle, nutritional deficency, diet.

Websites of note

Websites of note

The discharge of individuals from hospital: Do we need to refocus our research?

Safe and timely discharge of individuals from hospital into the community continues to face a number of barriers. This is despite concerted research efforts to gain better understanding of processes of, and outcomes from, various discharge initiatives. During the doctoral research by the principal author, as with any research, more questions than answers were identified. One of the findings from this research, which incorporated both primary and secondary research methods, raised the question of the direction of future research into the discharge process of individuals from hospital. This question goes to the heart of discharge research, that is, is it time to consider researching discharge interventions which are multi-pronged and take a systems-wide approach? Such interventions need to actively engage policymakers, hospitals, community services and individuals, in order to develop possible solutions to the ongoing barriers which appear to have hindered improvements in the discharge process for over 30 years.

Lighting conditions in sustainable buildings: results of a survey of users’ perceptions

For the last 4 years, the authors have been investigating the performance in practice of a range of sustainable commercial and institutional buildings worldwide. These investigations involved the principal author in one or more visits to each of the buildings and the personal distribution and collection of a questionnaire survey seeking users’ perceptions (on a 7-point scale) of a range of factors: operational, environmental, personal control and satisfaction. For this article, the authors focus on users’ perceptions of the quality of lighting in their work areas. The users’ overall perceptions of lighting conditions are presented and analysed, first with an overview of the average scores for each question, followed by a look at the shapes of their distributions over the set of buildings and then the results of some correlations between lighting overall and a number of other key performance factors such as health, productivity and overall comfort. It was found that lighting overall was one of the higher scoring factors of the environmental category, and the average scores for the amount of natural and artificial lighting were close to the ideal. However, direct glare from the lights and from the sun and sky were noted as issues to be addressed.

Darwinian Natural Selection: Its Enduring Explanatory Power

Evolutionary theory has never had a stronger scientific foundation than it does today. In a short review I hope to portray the deep commitment of today's biologists to Darwinian natural selection and to discoveries made since Darwin's time. In spite of the scientific advances in the century and a half since the publication of On the Origin of Species,Darwin still remains the principal author of modern evolutionary theory. He is one of the greatest contributors of all time to our understanding of nature.