Public Appeal Research Articles

Commentary: Screening: a seductive paradigm that has generally failed us.

Screening healthy people has face value and great public and political appeal. It looks so simple, and yet screening is fraught with difficulties. These start already with the terminology, and common slogans like, ‘Catch the disease early, before it has produced any symptoms!’ are misleading on two counts. First, disease means lack of ease, which is not what we understand by being healthy; but people who work with screening tend to forget that they deal with healthy people. For example, women being invited to mammography screening are often called patients in scientific articles. The second error is the assumption that the disease is caught early. That is rarely the case, and breast cancer is again a good example. If we assume that the growth rate for a particular cancer is constant, then the women have harboured the cancer for 21 years on average before it is large enough to be detected by mammography screening. Finding precursors to cancer is of course an entirely different matter. Screening with flexible sigmoidoscopy identifies polyps and vaginal smear finds carcinoma in situ. A third problem with screening is that it always causes harm. Sometimes it also leads to benefits, and sometimes the benefits are sufficiently large to outweigh the harms. The main focus in screening trials should therefore be to quantify the harms, but this has rarely been the case, if ever. Screening trials focus on disease-specific mortality, which may seem natural, but it is the wrong outcome. Screening leads to overdiagnosis, and interventions that are beneficial for real patients can be lethal for healthy overdiagnosed people. Radiotherapy of overdiagnosed women may kill at least as many as those who are spared dying from breast cancer by attending breast screening. Total mortality should therefore be the primary outcome in screening trials of mortality, and Saquib et al. report a systematic review in this issue of the journal that aimed at clarifying whether screening lowers total mortality for diseases that carry a high disease-specific mortality. They focused on cancer, cardiovascular diseases, type 2 diabetes and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. They did not find any screening trials for hypertension or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. Disease-specific mortality was reduced with ultrasound for abdominal aortic aneurysm in men, mammography for breast cancer and faecal occult blood test and flexible sigmoidoscopy for colorectal cancer, but the risk ratio point estimates for allcause mortality were all very close to 1.00 (range 0.98–1.03). Screening proponents often say that disease-specific mortality is the right outcome, arguing that in order to show an effect on total mortality, trials would become unrealistically large. I believe this argument is invalid, for both scientific and ethical reasons. We do randomized trials in order to avoid bias, and our primary outcome should therefore not be a biased one. Drug interventions are usually more common in a screened group, and they tend to increase mortality for a variety of non-disease related reasons. From an ethical perspective, it is problematic to screen the whole population in a certain age group without knowing whether this makes people live longer, while knowing almost certainly that it makes people less happy. It took 50 years after the first randomized trial of mammography started before we knew what the psychological consequences are of the many false-positive findings. A specially designed questionnaire was developed using focus

Conservation inequality and the charismatic cat: Felis felicis

Conservation resources are limited, making it impossible to invest equally in all threatened species. One way to maximise conservation gains is to focus upon those species with particular public appeal, using them to generate funding and support that could also benefit less charismatic species. Although this approach is already used by many conservation organisations, no reliable metrics currently exist to determine the likely charisma of a given species, and therefore identify the most appropriate targets for such campaigns. Here we use market research techniques on over 1500 people from five continents to assess the relative charisma of different mammals, which factors appear to drive it, and how these patterns vary between countries. Felids and primates emerged as highly favoured species for conservation, with the tiger (Panthera tigris) the top species by a wide margin. Using an information theoretic approach we develop models that successfully predict respondents’ preferences across the entire sample, suggesting global commonalities in the attributes that people prefer for conservation. However, by analysing each country separately we are able to improve our models, thus highlighting the importance of identifying locally specific flagships for conservation. The most important attributes were body size and IUCN status, although the extent of baldness, whether the species was a potential threat to humans and whether the eyes were forward or side facing were also widely important. Several of the key attributes revealed in this study could be extrapolated to nearly all terrestrial mammals, paving the way for a standardised global identification of species likely to prove effective for future conservation campaigns. The public preferred species with which they had affinity and familiarity, and we discuss how these aspects could be increased to promote the under-achievers, whilst maximising the funding potential of the highly charismatic mammals. While the felids are widely regarded as a popular taxonomic group, the great extent to which they appealed to our respondents emphasises their potential as ambassadors for conservation. Indeed, the big cats were so highly rated that we might think of them as one, Felis felicis: a globally powerful flagship for conservation.

The cult of amphioxus in German Darwinism; or, our gelatinous ancestors in Naples' blue and balmy bay.

Biologists having rediscovered amphioxus, also known as the lancelet or Branchiostoma, it is time to reassess its place in early Darwinist debates over vertebrate origins. While the advent of the ascidian–amphioxus theory and challenges from various competitors have been documented, this article offers a richer account of the public appeal of amphioxus as a primitive ancestor. The focus is on how the ‘German Darwin’ Ernst Haeckel persuaded general magazine and newspaper readers to revere this “flesh of our flesh and blood of our blood”, and especially on Das neue Laienbrevier des Haeckelismus (The new lay breviary of Haeckelism) by Moritz Reymond with cartoons by Fritz Steub. From the late 1870s these successful little books of verse introduced the Neapolitan discoveries that made the animal’s name and satirized Haeckel’s rise as high priest of its cult. One song is reproduced and translated here, with a contemporary “imitation” by the Canadian palaeontologist Edward John Chapman, and extracts from others. Predating the American “It’s a long way from amphioxus” by decades, these rhymes dramatize neglected ‘species politics’ of Darwinism and highlight the roles of humour in negotiating evolution.

Why Not Solve the Democratic Deficit within the EU Through Genuine Transnational Political Conflict?

The last European elections of 2014 were characterized by a concrete effort to increase public participation to the European political debate. However the overall electoral turnout remained disappointingly low. In this paper I deal with the problem of the formation of a European electorate and argue that a better representation on the European integration dimension should substantially contribute to the formation of a transnational electorate. Often, there is the fear that European political conflict framed on this dimension would lead to a radical bipolar conflict between pro- and anti-EU parties. In this paper I show that, if citizens’ preferences are properly represented, this does not have to be the case. What I show is that citizens’ preferences on European integration are distributed in three roughly equivalent blocs: pro-EU, anti-EU and a neutral position. The point I make is that a proper representation of the neutral position should ensure that the conflict does not become too radical, as the parties representing the neutral position would be the necessary coalition partners of both pro- and anti-EU parties. An important shortcoming of the current European parliament, I argue, is that the neutral position on European integration is not represented and that consequently there is a disproportionate high presence of pro-EU parties. This misrepresentation in the long run may increase the public appeal of Euro-sceptic parties. The data on which my argument is based are from the 2014 Eurobarometer survey.

English

The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of a public appeal to encourage voluntary blood donation by comparing the pattern of blood donations in 2000 and 2007. A retrospective analysis of blood donation records was conducted at the University Hospital of the West Indies (UHWI) Blood Collection Centre from April to December of 2000 and 2007. Data were analysed to identify any significant changes in donation patterns and donor profiles. The total number of blood donor records reviewed was 3194 in 2000 and 2634 in 2007 representing 69.0% and 72.3% of the total blood donations, respectively. Autologous donations accounted for 1% in 2000 and 2.2% in 2007; however, there was no corresponding change in voluntary donations (3.4% in 2000 and 3.2% in 2007). Despite a reduction in the number of first-time donors (1539 in 2000 and 1115 in 2007), the percentage of units discarded for the presence of a marker of transfusion transmission infection (TTI) increased, being 6.5% in 2000 and 7.4% in 2007. Human T-lymphotropic virus (HTLV) was the most common infectious marker in 2000 (3.4% of donors) whereas reactive Venereal Disease Research Laboratory (VDRL) predominated in 2007 (3.6% of donors). The per capita donations (0.99% in 2000 and 0.88% in 2007) failed to meet the World Health Organization (WHO) recommendation for an adequate blood supply of 1-3%. Despite a national effort to improve voluntary donations, the positive changes in the pattern of blood donation over a period of seven years were limited to a decrease in the proportion of first-time donors and an increase in blood donors with one to four previous donations.

When (or how) do the Olympics become ‘stale’?

This paper presents a discussion about the ongoing search for seemingly faddish new events in the Olympic programme, such as golf, rugby, and BMX cycling, which may be intended to liven up the Olympic Games to maintain public appeal. Whilst programme space may be a logistical concern, there is also an aesthetic debate over how the avant-garde in sporting events may take precedence over the classic, more established events with which we are familiar. Consequently, a number of questions are posed in this paper which explores the aesthetic and commercial implications of Olympic taste through the selection and rejection of Olympic events. The paper concludes that the current popularity of the Olympic Games may hang upon a frail sequence of dependencies: an overburdening commercial interest resting upon an ill-defined aesthetic purpose or identity.

The contribution of immunization: saving millions of lives, and more.

The contribution of immunization: saving millions of lives, and more.

Metrics to assess ecological condition, change, and impacts in sandy beach ecosystems

Complexity is increasingly the hallmark in environmental management practices of sandy shorelines. This arises primarily from meeting growing public demands (e.g., real estate, recreation) whilst reconciling economic demands with expectations of coastal users who have modern conservation ethics. Ideally, shoreline management is underpinned by empirical data, but selecting ecologically-meaningful metrics to accurately measure the condition of systems, and the ecological effects of human activities, is a complex task. Here we construct a framework for metric selection, considering six categories of issues that authorities commonly address: erosion; habitat loss; recreation; fishing; pollution (litter and chemical contaminants); and wildlife conservation. Possible metrics were scored in terms of their ability to reflect environmental change, and against criteria that are widely used for judging the performance of ecological indicators (i.e., sensitivity, practicability, costs, and public appeal). From this analysis, four types of broadly applicable metrics that also performed very well against the indicator criteria emerged: 1.) traits of bird populations and assemblages (e.g., abundance, diversity, distributions, habitat use); 2.) breeding/reproductive performance sensu lato (especially relevant for birds and turtles nesting on beaches and in dunes, but equally applicable to invertebrates and plants); 3.) population parameters and distributions of vertebrates associated primarily with dunes and the supralittoral beach zone (traditionally focused on birds and turtles, but expandable to mammals); 4.) compound measurements of the abundance/cover/biomass of biota (plants, invertebrates, vertebrates) at both the population and assemblage level. Local constraints (i.e., the absence of birds in highly degraded urban settings or lack of dunes on bluff-backed beaches) and particular issues may require alternatives. Metrics – if selected and applied correctly – provide empirical evidence of environmental condition and change, but often do not reflect deeper environmental values per se. Yet, values remain poorly articulated for many beach systems; this calls for a comprehensive identification of environmental values and the development of targeted programs to conserve these values on sandy shorelines globally.

An Occitan Prayer against the Plague and Its Tradition in Italy, France, and Catalonia

In 1716 Pierre Lebrun, a member of the Congregation of the French Oratory in the Séminaire Saint-Magloire, Paris, made a public appeal for collaboration in a study of manuscripts of the Mass. Answers came from more than a hundred correspondents, Oratorians, canons, clergy regular and secular, curates, and laymen. Today these responses constitute twenty-three volumes in the Bibliothèque nationale de France, lat. 16796–16818, titled “Papiers du P. Lebrun sur la liturgie.” One of them, lat. 16797, contains a section on Toulon (fols. 138–178v) in which a correspondent, no doubt the canon named Desparra who was Lebrun's correspondent in that city, includes a prayer against the plague written in the Occitan language. Although Lebrun made use of his correspondence in three subsequent volumes that appeared in 1726, he did not mention this prayer. More recently two other versions of the prayer have been published, but this one, which dates from the fourteenth century, has remained unknown to historians of the plague and students of medieval Occitan.

Wushe, Literature, and Melodic Black Metal: The “Nonpolitics” Of Wuhe and the “Political” ChthoniC

This article revolves around the contemporary Taiwanese writer Wuhe and the Taiwanese melodic black-metal band ChthoniC (Shanling) and their “political” use of the Wushe Incident that occurred in 1930 in colonial Taiwan. The event, which was brutally repressed by the Japanese authorities immediately thereafter and, in many ways, lent impetus to the kominka (assimilationist) movement, has been represented and interpreted in numerous ways, shapes, and forms over the course of the last seventy plus years. Notably, during the postwar period, it was often interpreted as an anticolonial/anti-Japanese movement. More recently, however, the novelist Wuhe has highlighted its ambiguous nature in his award-winning novel The Remains of Life (Yusheng, 2000). For Wuhe, the incident is an entangled web of conflicting impulses: a violent confluence between modern politics and traditional culture(s). Conversely, the band ChthoniC has used the Wushe Incident to push an overtly political position, that of an independent Taiwan, in their fourth studio album Seediq bale (Chinese: Saideke balai, 2005). The fact that a melodic black-metal band has appropriated this event to convey a political stance is in itself intriguing, since their chosen genre of expression is generally viewed in Europe and the United States as being inherently apolitical. Coupled with the fact that it is a musical genre without the same kind of mass public appeal as Mando-pop or Canto-pop makes one ask not only why this band chose melodic black metal (an offshoot of death metal) but also why it is attempting to articulate a political position through such means. Reading Wuhe's more nuanced account on the incident with ChthoniC's use of it highlights the tension between history, memory, and its political usages and implications in contemporary Taiwanese society and helps to articulate a means to better understand a conflicted history and its national/nationalized memory.

Linguistic creativity in Nigerian Pidgin advertising

Advertising communication aims at attracting audiences’ attention. It also motivates interest, changes perceptions, stimulates desires and manipulates social values and attitudes. In achieving these objectives, the language medium needs to be carefully selected, especially in a multilingual setting like Nigeria, given that language is the driving force that determines the effectiveness of ad messages. This paper explores the (socio)linguistic devices that are exploited in ad discourse in Nigerian Pidgin (NP) as well as the pragmatic and creative potentials of lexical innovation, code-switching, proverbs, humour and other stylistic strategies that are employed in both print and electronic ads in NP. The paper discovers that advertising in NP commands enormous public appeal because of its spread, flexibility and the creative possibilities it allows. Advertising communication presents yet another platform to further deepen the social utility and functional relevance of NP in the public space in spite of the widespread and age-long misconceptions and prejudices against it.

“We Ain’t Doin’ Civil Rights”: The Life and Times of a Genre, as Told in The Help

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Midway through 2011 film adaptation of The Help, Charlotte Phelan storms into relaxing room of her plantation home and turns off television set her daughter Skeeter and two members of domestic staff have been watching. Don't them like that! she yells at her daughter, as the help rush from room. The futility of outburst is matched only by its historical improbability. By late spring or early summer of 1963 (when scene takes place), turning off a news clip of Mississippi NAACP leader Medgar Evers urging black residents in Jackson remain steadfast in their boycott of racist merchants would have done little, if anything, discourage most black viewers, whose support of protest had been operating below their employers' racial radar for months. Moreover, offending clip probably never aired in Jackson (at least while Evers was alive). Evers had not been invisible on local TV screens in spring of 1963, however. On May 20, he had delivered a 17-minute televised speech Jackson and much of Mississippi described indignities and injustices experienced every day by black Mississippians, and had assured his audience the years of change are upon us. Granting local airtime a black leader in Mississippi was unprecedented; time had been allocated by local NBC affiliate WLBT--a station since its first broadcast in 1953 had censored, selectively edited, and often simply refused broadcast programs it deemed integrationist--defied white and black belief. The station, however, had little choice in matter. For six years, Evers had petitioned FCC and WLBT provide airtime for opposing arguments segregationist programming and news coverage. Under investigation by FCC in 1963 for its role in instigating violence during James Meredith's desegregation of Ole Miss a year earlier, WLBT finally acceded local and federal pressure and allowed Evers respond on-camera Mayor Allen Thompson's previously televised defense of Jackson's race relations. seems probable, Adam Nossiter has written, that until his final month, Evers was an obscure figure a majority of white Mississippians. Nossiter, who covered retrial of Evers's killer for Atlanta Journal-Constitution during 1990s, believes at moment Evers stepped in front of WLBT camera on May 20, 1963, he entered a new, ultimately fatal zone of notoriety. Nine days later, a Molotov cocktail was thrown at his home; less than two weeks after that, he was murdered in his carport, shot in back by Greenwood, Mississippi Klan member Byron De La Beckwith. The broadcast may or may not have prompted Beckwith track down and silence Evers, but in long-running debate about effects of speech one fact remains undisputed: for first time in Mississippi, a black man had formally and directly addressed a white audience on local television. Some members of intended audience--the silent, responsible citizens of white community, as Evers called them--no doubt found themselves compelled follow logic of speech and, possibly, question moral and legal premises of segregation; others found image of Evers standing behind a podium so provocative they demanded station stop broadcast as soon as it began and even threatened, as one viewer did, to come up there and take [Evers] off. Evers knew well a public appeal sympathy and reason of white Mississippians could inflame die-hard segregationists--that it could, in fact, encourage all manner of white action. It was this encouragement--of white, not black, listeners--that appeared on Jackson television screens in May 1963. (1) Recordings of Evers's historic address have not surfaced (as of this writing), which may explain a reliance by The Help's co-writer and director Tate Taylor on a widely used archival excerpt of a different event. …

No Need for Modesty Here: Enhancing Japan's Public (Intellectual) Diplomacy

Japan is well known as a highly literate nation and ranks high in the actual as well as relative number of books published annually. A significant number of these books include translations of foreign works as well. However, Japanese works translated into foreign languages, especially English, are far less common. While interest in Japan is high, this does not mean Japan has influence. This article argues that Japan's failure to see more of its writers' works, some of which are world class or cutting-edge, published abroad limits not only its public diplomacy and soft power appeal, but also prevents Japan from making a greater contribution internationally. In order to improve this situation, this article introduces a detailed recommendation for a translation/publishing project in which important works of universal importance written by Japanese authors would be identified, translated, and published rapidly to contribute to the intellectual debate on a wide range of subjects in all fields.

Humanitarian appeal and the paradox of power

Humanitarian organizations have in the past 10 years enjoyed immense support with their western publics. At the same time, however, the humanitarian sector is under increasing pressure from various sources, under scrutiny for its administration costs, its marketized practices and its alleged politicization. Some say that humanitarianism is in crisis. This article examines the development of humanitarian advertising through analysis of 124 newspaper ads published in the period from 1970 to 2005. Using a discourse analytical approach which combines institution analysis with multimodal text analysis, it draws out the most marked changes that can be observed in the mode of appeal employed during this period, with a view to understanding the impact of the changing conditions of existence of humanitarian organizations on their public appeal. The article exposes an increasing submission of humanitarian organizations to external demands, in terms of their choice of beneficiaries for public attention and in terms of the symbolic relations they set up between donors and beneficiaries. It is argued that this development is associated with a paradox of power and results in humanitarian organizations surrendering their moral authority and professional expertise.

A note on the ‘Linsanity’ of measuring the relative efficiency of National Basketball Association guards

This note examines the productive efficiency of 62 starting guards during the 2011/12 National Basketball Association (NBA) season. This period coincides with the phenomenal and largely unanticipated performance of New York Knicks’ starting point guard Jeremy Lin and the attendant public and media hype known as Linsanity. We employ a data envelopment analysis (DEA) approach that includes allowance for an undesirable output, here turnovers per game, with the desirable outputs of points, rebounds, assists, steals and blocks per game and an input of minutes per game. The results indicate that depending upon the specification, between 29% and 42% of NBA guards are fully efficient, including Jeremy Lin, with a mean inefficiency of 3.7% and 19.2%. However, while Jeremy Lin is technically efficient, he seldom serves as a benchmark for inefficient players, at least when compared with established players such as Chris Paul and Dwayne Wade. This suggests the uniqueness of Jeremy Lin's productive solution and may explain why his unique style of play, encompassing individual brilliance, unselfish play and team leadership, is of such broad public appeal.

Perishing Papers, Vanishing Witnesses? The Future Fate of Hungarian Diaspora Collections

The article is based on a recent grant proposal written for a Hungarian agency, and it is also written as a public appeal to all archives collecting sources of the Hungarian Western diaspora, both home and abroad. It provides an overview of émigré document sources stored by Hungarian archives, as well as those that can be found in the United States, much scattered and often endangered, unknown, or forgotten. The author, a founding member of the Consulting Committee for Exploring and Rescuing Hungarian Documents in the West, organized in January 2013 by the Hungarian National Archives, calls for broad national and international efforts to explore and save the written heritage of the Hungarian Western diaspora. In his conclusions he outlines the most demanding tasks of a program based on long- and short-term cooperation of all potential partners.

Asia and European transport biofuels stalled at the same place?

Over the past decade, both Asia and Europe have devoted considerable effort to expanding the production of first-generation biofuels to fuel cars, taxis, buses, trucks, motorcycles, etc. On the one hand, with “peak oil” potentially looming in the future, and on the other, with an insatiable need for petroleum and diesel, the prospect of large-scale use of biofuels enjoyed tremendous public appeal as they seemed to provide a long-term alternative and clean fuel source in Asia and Europe. However, globally today, biofuels constitute only 3 % of the total transport fuel mix. Production is still steadily increasing in some countries, but their economic competitiveness and environmental sustainability have come into question in others with the result that production has slowed down considerably or even halted. The outlook for second- and third-generation biofuels is promising. However, they also cannot yet supplement, far less substitute, for petroleum and diesel in a commercially viable way.

Focus on potential environmental issues on plastic world towards a sustainable plastic recycling in developing countries

Due to the tremendous growth of plastics in the world, it has brought about environmental concerns for over the past two or three decades. Most of these plastics, due to poor management, are currently disposed of in unauthorized dumping sites or burned uncontrollably in the fields. The paper outlines environmental concerns of so many applications of plastics. The most important mechanisms of degradation of plastics, environmental impacts and recommendations for sustainable development are fully discoursed, with recycling option being overviewed as the route under most intense development at this time because of its broad public appeal and obvious environmental advantages.

Yoga and mental health: Promising road ahead, but proceed with caution

Yoga and mental health: Promising road ahead, but proceed with caution

Osteology of Khaan mckennai (Oviraptorosauria: Theropoda)

The monophyly of Oviraptoridae, a group of theropod dinosaurs, which share a uniquely bizarre morphology, has never been called into question due in large part to their unusual complex of characters. Despite a vivid recent history of discovery and broad public appeal the nature of their morphological diversity has not been explored extensively. Many previous descriptions of oviraptorid taxa are lost in the obscurity of hard-to-find journals, and many lack illustrations of what are now recognized as phylogenetically important characters. The primary goal of this paper is to provide a relatively comprehensive descriptive morphology and illustrations for one member of Oviraptoridae, namely Khaan mckennai, with an emphasis on characters that can be used to establish a phylogenetic hypothesis for the taxon and group as a whole. K. mckennai is a small-bodied, crestless oviraptorid that is known from pristine material that has been collected from the Late Cretaceous sediments of Mongolia. Similar to other oviraptorids, it shares a wide number of features in common with extant birds. However, when these characters are put in the context of Oviraptorosauria, including relatively new, more basal forms like Incisivosaurus gauthieri and Caudipteryx zoui, character states such as extreme pneumatization of the skull or the reduction in the number of caudal vertebrae are found to be either homoplastic for the two groups or plesiomorphic for a more inclusive clade.