True Facts Research Articles

Surgical site infections in any hospital: the true facts.

I read with much interest the article titled ‘A prospective study of surgical site infections in a teaching hospital in Goa’ by Kamat et al. [1]. Articles defi ning the surgical site infections in Indian set up are plenty. The authors mentioned at the very beginning in the introduction section of the abstract section that the problem was unexplored in Goa but a detailed search of literature search depicts that past studies have been performed at hospitals in Goa and other parts of India to defi ne such a problem. The abbreviation of SSI was suddenly introduced in the aims and objectives section of the abstract with the actual abbreviation being defi ned for the fi rst time in the introduction section of the text. It is interesting to read an important article on surgical site infection with three key words with two hailing from the statistical discipline. Usually, appropriate keywords are to be chosen from the MeSH database. An important study like this may be missed out by any reader because of the inappropriate keywords. The authors have omitted an important article which was published recently by Kownhar et al. [2]. This article describes in detail about the SSI and its expenses in an Indian set up [2]. It was mentioned that the prospective study started in June–July 2005 but the end point of the study was not mentioned. It is very important to mention the exact period during which the bacterial isolates were collected from the post surgical cases because prevalence of bacteria may vary accordingly. The authors did not mention at what point of time in the post surgical period they carried out tests. It is very pertinent to mention the exact site of collection of the microorganism because sometimes the deeper aspect of the wound may be explored while at other instances the superfi cial aspect may be explored. In this study, the authors did not mention which aspect of the wound was taken for culture. The organism which inhabitate the superfi cial layers may be absent in the deeper layers and vice versa. The article generates much debate. The authors and the editors are applauded for their efforts in highlighting a major problem.

Understanding the Water Crisis in Northern China: What the Government and Farmers are Doing

The overall aim of this paper is to attempt to discover the true facts in order to ascertain whether or not there is a water crisis in China, and if there is, to identify the responses of the different stakeholders—government water officials, community leaders and farmers. In order to achieve this goal, several specific objectives are pursued. First, the paper evaluates the status of China's groundwater economy, examining whether or not the groundwater table is systematically falling. Second, in the parts of China that face a water crisis (or potential crisis), the paper documents the regulations and policies that the government—both local and regional—have implemented and discusses whether they have been successfully implemented. Third, it describes how farmers have responded to the water crisis and tries to assess whether or not their roles have helped alleviate the water scarcities or exacerbated the crisis. To meet these objectives, two large field surveys are used that cover seven provinces in northern China. The findings demonstrate that, although the water table is not falling everywhere in northern China, there are still a substantial number of communities that appear to be facing a water crisis. When there is a water crisis, the data show that the government in China has begun to make a number of policy responses, but the implementation is not always effective. Where water is becoming scarce, farmers and community leaders have also responded in numerous ways. However, farmers do not necessarily respond in ways that effectively save water, mostly because they do not always have incentives to do so. With good incentives, the research shows that they do save water. Hence, the government cannot ignore the way that farmers respond. Indeed, good policy needs to use this responsiveness to reduce the adverse effects of water scarcities and encourage conservation.

Guarding and Transmitting the Vulnerability of the Historical Referent

In her essay “Truth and Politics,” Hannah Arendt distinguishes between “rational truth” and “factual truth.” Arendt associates “rational truth” with durability: the human mind will always be able to reproduce axioms, rational discoveries, and theories, so “the burning of all books of geometry would not be radically effective” (TP, 230). On the other hand, when it comes to “factual truth,” or the historical referent, we are dealing with something much more fragile that is in danger of being lost forever. Given that historical facts and accounts of events are the outcomes of human beings living and acting together in an ever-changing context — given that historical facts depend on the precariousness of human relationality rather than solitary deductions — Arendt notes that once the historical referent is lost, “no rational effort will ever bring [it] back” (TP, 231, emphasis added).

L’altérité ou l’histoire de la poutre et de l’écharde. Réflexions autour des manières de considérer l’autre

Otherness or the story of the beam and a splinter. Thoughts on how to consider the other To think that all men are equal is to admit that all men can bear halos of our virtues as they can be stricken by our flaws. In our times, this has no factual truth. The barbarian is first and foremost someone who believes in barbarianism as Claude Lévi-Strauss underlined. It is because we consider the other as being nonhuman, and as being crudely and improperly different from what we are – and what we think we are – that we behave like barbarians and that we can inflict a treatment that we would never think of inflicting on members of our own group. Indeed, it is only on very rare occasions that we are able to realise what is deeply at fault in our behaviours and attitudes, while we show great perspicacity in spotting and denouncing the flaws in others.

On a Modal Epistemic Axiom Emerging from McDermott-Doyle Logics

An important question in modal nonmonotonic logics concerns the limits of propositional definability for logics of the McDermott-Doyle family. Inspired by this technical question we define a variant of autoepistemic logic which provably corresponds to the logic of the McDermott-Doyle family that is based on themodal axiom p5: ◊p⊃ (¬sp⊃s¬sp). This axiomis a naturalweakening of classical negative introspection restricting its scope to possible facts. It closely resembles the axiom w5: p⊃ (¬sp⊃s¬sp) which restricts the effect of negative introspection to true facts. We examine p5 in the context of classical possible-worlds Kripke models, providing results for correspondence, completeness and the finite model property. We also identify the corresponding condition for p5 in the context of neighbourhood semantics. Although rather natural epistemically, this axiom has not been investigated in classical modal epistemic reasoning, probably because its addition to S4 gives the well-known strong modal system S5.

Reflections about the methodological dualism in health research

Nursing assembles knowledge from different theoretical sciences and applied areas, involving the biological, human and social. Production of this specific knowledge aims to contribute to improve the quality of care and obtain better levels of health for human beings. Assuming truth of knowledge is the basis that determines the understanding of how people relate to each other. It is worth questioning the adjectives connected with it and actions taken towards it, in contexts that can be real or not: what is the range of rationality of knowledge? What is the extent of the diversity of knowledge? Is it possible to trust this knowledge and its rationality? Overcoming antagonisms among perspectives previously considered opposite, excluding and incompatible, in their epistemological and ontological positions towards the nature of research and society, makes it obsolete to defend the descriptive positivism of numbers in contrast to the descriptive qualitative production of words. Nevertheless, forms of knowledge legitimacy need to be reconsidered, approaching factual truth (quantitative) to the truth of discourse (qualitative). Quantitative, positivist research aims to document objective facts of reality and is interested in the numerical expression of phenomena. This presumes the separation between observing subject and observed “object”, and supports the existence of an objective reality, subject to “immutable” laws. Qualitative research aims to reconstruct symbolical patterns, expressed in an intersubjective way; is interested in heterogeneity and relational logic, expressed in words and images. It accepts the role of ideology as well as subjectivity. In principle, qualitative and quantitative research are distinct paradigmatic forms of conceiving reality, of conceiving the determining axes of social tissue, methodological instruments and strategies, and ideological reflections about human problems. Nonetheless, exact sciences are not free of values since, in the act of knowing, there is interest in transforming. On the other hand, subjectivity alone does not manage to cover the context it is formed in or which it transforms. Besides that, the intangible nature of quality “falsely” suggests its imponderability. The mathematization of the world coincides with the appearance of the bourgeois society. The 20th century marks the strengthening of the theoretical and epistemological inquisitive bases, from the quantitative and statistical perspective. It tries to find laws independently of the social, cultural, historical and political contexts. The cause-effect relation is present in the design of dependent and independent variables, where knowledge of the phenomena is valid if it is countable, measurable or provable. Marxism caused an intense reflection about the basis of knowledge, but also an overvaluation of the social. Neo-positivism excludes objective naivete, recognizes the lack of radical subject/object maintenance and uses different methods in a complementary way. It considers science free from preconceived values, searching for explanation, prediction and control of phenomena, not only in numbers but also in words. The constructivist paradigm is opposed to positivism as it does not intend to predict, control or transform the natural world, but tries to reconstruct and understand the universe, from the mind of the people who form it. In applied fields like health, integration of these different perspectives has been more and more frequent, due to the complexity and level of knowledge regarding human and social problems. Thus, the use of mixed or multiple methods is a tendency in nursing.

An epistemic logic for becoming informed

Various conceptual approaches to the notion of information can currently be traced in the literature in logic and formal epistemology. A main issue of disagreement is the attribution of truthfulness to informational data, the so called Veridicality Thesis (Floridi 2005). The notion of Epistemic Constructive Information (Primiero 2007) is one of those rejecting VT. The present paper develops a formal framework for ECI. It extends on the basic approach of Artemov’s logic of proofs (Artemov 1994), representing an epistemic logic based on dependent justifications, where the definition of information relies on a strict distinction from factual truth. The definition obtained by comparison with a Normal Modal Logic translates a constructive logic for “becoming informed”: its distinction from the logic of “being informed”—which internalizes truthfulness—is essential to a general evaluation of information with respect to truth. The formal disentanglement of these two logics, and the description of the modal version of the former as a weaker embedding into the latter, allows for a proper understanding of the Veridicality Thesis with respect to epistemic states defined in terms of information.

British drugs policy: Problematizing the distinction between legal and illegal drugs and the definition of the `drugs problem'

This article draws upon an extensive literature review of the social and medical sciences, official documents and various websites to critically re-evaluate the basis of British drugs policy. The article problematizes the rationale for criminalizing certain substances and questions the distinctions created between legal and illegal drugs; in so doing, the article argues that the definition of the `drugs problem' is the real problem. It shows that the debate on illegal drugs is filled less with factual truths and more with misinformation which creates public fear and provides a questionable basis for public policy. The article questions current thinking regarding the drugs/crime relationship and concludes by exploring some implications for policy and practice.

Truth Discovery with Multiple Conflicting Information Providers on the Web

The World Wide Web has become the most important information source for most of us. Unfortunately, there is no guarantee for the correctness of information on the Web. Moreover, different websites often provide conflicting information on a subject, such as different specifications for the same product. In this paper, we propose a new problem, called Veracity, i.e., conformity to truth, which studies how to find true facts from a large amount of conflicting information on many subjects that is provided by various websites. We design a general framework for the Veracity problem and invent an algorithm, called TRUTHFlNDER, which utilizes the relationships between websites and their information, i.e., a website is trustworthy if it provides many pieces of true information, and a piece of information is likely to be true if it is provided by many trustworthy websites. An iterative method is used to infer the trustworthiness of websites and the correctness of information from each other. Our experiments show that TRUTHFlNDER successfully finds true facts among conflicting information and identifies trustworthy websites better than the popular search engines.

The boundaries of law and the purpose of legal philosophy

Many of the current debates in jurisprudence focus on articulating the boundaries of law. In this essay I challenge this approach on two separate grounds. I first argue that if such debates are to be about law, their purported subject, they ought to pay closer attention to the practice. When such attention is taken it turns out that most of the debates on the boundaries of law are probably indeterminate. I show this in particular with regard to the debate between inclusive and exclusive positivists: I present several ways of understanding what this debate is about and argue that none of them is defensible. My second argument focuses more on the purpose of jurisprudential inquiry. I argue there that even if some jurisprudential debates have determinate answers, it does not follow that they deserve our attention, because not all true facts are worth knowing. After discussing and rejecting the claim that jurisprudence could be justified as knowledge for its own sake, I propose one possible justification for engaging in legal philosophy and outline its implications for the kind of issues that should be pursued.

Big Fish: Understanding Historical Narrative

Big Fish raises the hermeneutic question how narrative truth relates to factual truth—how “what is said happened” relates to “what really happened.” Will wants to know facts about his father’s life. His father, Edward, is dying but he never accedes to his son’s request for a factual autobiography, preferring to tell stories about the significant moments in his life and the people he encountered. Narrative truth is what Edward values, for it opens up the dimension of significance— “what an event means to the narrator.” The meaning of events narrated is dramatized in this film. Big Fish is a story about redemption and transformation. Everyone whom Edward encounters is redeemed or changed in a positive manner. Even his son, Will, is changed. Over time, he comes to see the value of story and vows to portray his father’s life the way he wanted it told. Big Fish poses hermeneutic problems on two levels. On the individual level, the conflict between narrative and factual truth arises when individuals seek to authenticate stories told by aged relatives or when therapists attempt to interpret accounts told them by patients. On a cultural level, the narrative versus factual truth issue is experienced by scholars puzzling over the historicity of ancient religious narratives. The importance of this issue is illustrated in relation to narratives about Abraham, Moses and Jesus. Not only do these texts stand at a distance from the events they purport to describe, we, too, as interpreters, are situated at a distance from their time of writing. The question arises, can we now move from narrative truth to factual truth (historicity)? If so, how? It is argued that with respect to ancient cultural historical narratives, we cannot now “get behind” the narratives to corroborate the historicity of actions and sayings. In contrast, Big Fish portrays Will ascertaining details about his father’s story by hearing the account of his birth firsthand, finding records and in speaking to people still alive in Specter, a town transformed by his father’s actions. In a sense the film “cheats,” that is, it portrays what is often not possible— historical corroboration—with respect to personal, therapeutic or scholarly hermeneutic situations. It is therefore contended that the film should have ended just with Will’s hearing the stories. That would have placed him squarely in the hermeneutic quandary.

LEGAL TRUTH: THE CONFLICT BETWEEN REAL JUSTICE AND LEGAL JUSTICE

The following article is a chapter taken from my dissertation, and as such needs to be situated for the reader. The dissertation is a philosophical discussion concerning the divergence between ‘legal truth’ and ‘factual truth’, practically illustrated by critically evaluating the effect that our law of evidence, criminal procedure as entrenched in the Criminal Procedure Act, and the evidentiary exclusion clause entrenched in section 35(5) of the South African Constitution have on the ultimate decision of the court. It argues that often these rules and procedures obscure the truth rather than assist in finding it. The crux of the discussion revolves around decisions of our criminal courts, where accused persons who are factually guilty are acquitted due to the operation of our evidence rules and procedures which call for the exclusion of evidence in specific instances or on technical grounds. The result of this exclusion is that relevant reliable evidence is deemed not to exist for the purposes of the trial, and evidence which might otherwise have lead to the conviction of the accused person is put beyond the reach of the courts. This article then deals specifically with the debate surrounding ‘what is justice?’; it looks at various concepts of justice and seeks to show that within the confines of our positivistic criminal justice system — a marriage between positive and natural law approaches — we might well be able to avoid decisions that are ‘legally correct’ yet offend one, as one cannot really say that justice was served.

Legality Policies and Theories of Legality: From 'Bananas' to Radbruch's Formula

I shall argue that issue of legal validity or legality (I will use these two terms as synonymous) can be addressed by taking an inferential stand, namely, by considering under what preconditions (antecedents) the legality of a norm can be inferred, and what postconditions (consequences) can be inferred from a norm's legality. Consequently, I shall consider what form theory of legality can take, where by a theory of legality I mean a set of conditionals (legality policies) which, together with true facts, circumscribes the set of legal norms. In particular, I shall consider to what extent such conditionals need to be positivistic.

Elated Citizenry: Deception and the Democratic Task of Bearing Witness

AbstractIt has become nearly a truism for contemporary theorists of democracy to understand the democratic space as agonistic and contested. The shadow that haunts thinkers of democracy today, and out of which this assumption emerges, is the specter of totalitarianism with its claims to a totalizing knowledge in the form of ideology and a totalizing power of a sovereign will that claims to be the embodiment of the law. Caught up in these totalizing claims, the citizenry becomes elated. The only remedy to totalitarianism is a democratic space wherein no one can claim to know the truth, no one can claim to occupy the space of power, and no one can claim to embody the law. The problem with this remedy is that it fails entirely to take account of what Arendt understands to be the fundamental condition of totalitarianism, namely, the institution of a "lying world order" whereby reality is replaced with a lie. For Arendt therefore the remedy for totalitarianism and its elated citizenry depends first and foremost upon the existence of factual truth. Following Arendt as well as Shoshana Felman's work on testimony, I argue that bearing witness to factual reality is the ground of the democratic public space and the remedy to an elated citizenry caught up in a lying world order.

Etyczne doktryny Kościoła i ich sprzeniewierzenie w mediach

Every man has to make moral (ethical) decisions, whether they are quite insignificant or are those discussed on the front pages of newspapers and on TV screens. One may refer to Plato here, who said millennia ago that instead of admiring wise philosophers people concentrate their attention on silver-tongued politicians and the promises they make. Ethics and morality can be treated as inextricable. Whereas morality concerns the realm of decisions and acts, however, ethics concerns our considerations of these acts. Truth is the most significant element related to the ethical and moral consideration of the media and the Church. In August 1993 Pope John Paul II published an encyclical letter Veritatis Splendor (The Splendor of Truth), where he presented ethical matters concerning truth. In the world of the media it is not always obvious what is meant by somebody speaking about truth. Arealistic expression of truth is provided by what is in agreement with the status quo that is independent from this truth. In this approach there is only one truth and it is decided by factual truth or falsity. This is the point of view the Church recognizes.

Truths, Facts and Values

AbstractThe paper suggests a revival of the 17th century distinction between truths of reason and truths of fact. Some points are made which seem to me show it obviously false that a fact is merely a true proposition. Truths of fact, contingent truths, are rightly seen as corresponding to facts. Other truths, including ethical truths of right and wrong are, if true, necessarily true. In general, necessarily true statements, including those of mathematics are wrongly construed as factual.Ethics and aesthetics, it is maintained, can be construed as noncognitive; but not because claims in these domains are other than claims to truth. They are, in large part, not claims to knowledge, which does not bar them from being claims to truth.

Mathematical correlation between biomaterial and cellular parameters—Critical reflection of statistics

For mathematical modelling of the biomaterial-cell contact, it is necessary to find both parameters characterizing physical and chemical properties of the material surface and also such describing the reaction of the adhering cells. Only those material and cell parameters that correlate with each other are applicable to model this contact mathematically. Only few papers are dealing with this special problem. The aim of this paper is to present results of physical/chemical and biological investigations made on differently modified rough titanium implant surfaces in order to find out only the correlating parameters. Furthermore we discuss several ways to apply statistical methods to the correlation problem. Only few ones of all investigated parameters both on material and on cellular side were applicable for correlation. For example we found in our studies that fractal structure parameter topothesy has influence on the spreading behaviour of the osteoblastic cells. However the value of the correlation coefficient and its statistical significance heavily depend on the method of averaging the available data. Especially the biological data (spreading area) were afflicted with relatively high error up to 30%. Averaging of this data masks the true facts. That is why the correlation coefficient considerably decreases if the biological parameters are not averaged. On the other hand, the statistical reliability increases due to the higher number of investigated cases. Critical error discussion is necessary in statistical correlation between material and biological parameters. Often the results are heavily influenced by the statistical handling of data, especially if only few data are available. May be that new unconventional methods like bootstrap method can show a way out of this dilemma.

Truth, Wonder, and Exemplarity in Aphra Behn's Oroonoko

Overtly locating Oroonoko within the new epistemologies of factual evidence and observational ethnography, Aphra Behn uses belief in new-world wonders to reassert a humanist and royalist model of exemplarity through the character of Oroonoko, not so subtly critiquing her own society's changing values. Behn's deferral (and even deconstruction) of factual truth in Oroonoko to emphasize moral example, in terms of late Renaissance humanism, remains largely ignored. Behn has been examined too frequently in terms of her influence on the novel and not understood sufficiently within her own moment, particularly the pervasive humanist influence of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

What kind of theory for anthropological demography?

Abstract: This paper argues that anthropological demography has, for most part, imported rather than exported theory. However, the discipline has the potential to generate important rethinking of population, culture, and their interaction. After discussing the challenges that must be faced in developing new theoretical approaches in anthropological demography, the paper suggests a framework for research based on the related ideas of the conjuncture and construal. 1. Introduction Anthropological demography is both an old discipline and a new one. It is old in the sense that our core intellectual project-that of integrative understanding of cultural practices and demographic rates-has been conducted in some form for nearly two centuries. Quetelet's analysis of marriage (1968 [1842]) or Durkheim's of suicide (1930) might rightly be called primeval exercises in anthropological demography, because they treat demographic phenomena as facts with unique, and cultural explanations. At the same time, our discipline is brand new. It was only in the 1990s that a series of monographs and edited volumes began to codify the emerging field (see especially Basu and Aaby 1998; Greenhalgh 1995; Kertzer and Fricke 1997), and a decade later, we anthropological demographers are still sufficiently rare to count ourselves among a vanguard of a sort. That is not to say that we have no intellectual history between Durkheim and the renaissance of the 1990s. Scholars including Blake (1961); Bledsoe (1980); Fortes (1970); Hammel (1990); Howell (1979); Kertzer (1993); Kreager (1982); Lee (1984); Lesthaeghe (1977); and Watkins (1990, 2000) continued to develop an integrative intellectual program. However, they remained relatively few. Today, by contrast, there is considerable interest in the intersection of cultural anthropology and demography. Papers and books published since the mid-1990s are dazzling in their number, diversity, and quality (examples include: Bledsoe 2002; Castle 1994, 2001; Clark et al. 1995; Delaunay 1994; Hill and Hurtado 1996; Lockwood 1995; Setel 1999; Schneider and Schneider 1996; Smith 2001, 2004). It is an exciting time to be an anthropological demographer. Given this effervescence of research and writing, what kinds of theory should we look to? The differences in models, methods and epistemologies between contemporary demography and cultural anthropology could hardly be starker. Whereas contemporary anthropology focuses largely on ideology, power, and phenomenological experience, demography in the last ten years has been dominated by the statistical analysis of variation within western populations. Whereas the largest innovations in anthropology have been theoretical, the major advances in demography have been in the domains of data and method. The most widely cited papers in the major cultural anthropology journals in the past ten years address issues such as globalization (Ferguson and Gupta 2002; Tsing 2000), modernity and post-coloniality (Comaroff and Comaroff 1999; Mills 1997), citizenship (Ong 1996), and the politics of space (Escobar 1999; Moore 1998)2. In the major anglophone demography journals, by contrast, the most widely cited papers concern the welfare of American children (e.g. Bianchi 2000; Bumpass et al. 1995) changing rates of marriage, divorce and cohabitation (Bumpass and Lu 2000; Smock and Manning 1997); mortality differentials (Hummer et al. 1999; Smith and Kington 1997), fertility decline (Mason 1997; Bongaarts and Watkins 1996), and methodology (Bongaarts and Feeney 1998)3. In this sense, it would seem to be a very difficult moment to be an anthropological demographer, because the two fields are so distant from each other. Despite the distance between the contemporary practice of cultural anthropology and demography, the possibilities for mutually productive intellectual exchange are enormous. Demographic rates are true social facts, in the sense intended by Durkheim (1962), which offer a compelling way to think about the relationship between the individual and the collective, about agency and structure, intentional action and conscience collective. …

Transparency in the age of AIDS: the reality and mythology of a disease

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to describe how the lack of transparency about the AIDS disease has affected the spread of this pandemic.Design/methodology/approachThe catalyst for this article was an interview with Dr Everett Koop who was the US Surgeon General during the Reagan presidency.FindingsIn his interview, Dr Koop describes the problems that government officials in the Reagan administration had with the subject of AIDS. Through the study of the history of information flow and dialogue about AIDS/HIV, this paper demonstrates the importance of transparency to public reaction and response to a life‐threatening disease. It shows how our first impressions of a disease can create a mythology that is very difficult to change even when the true facts are discovered. This mythology has affected the development of this disease into a full‐blown pandemic and continues to deter the advances that medical research has developed to fight the disease.Originality/valueDr Koop was one of the first public health leaders who had the responsibility to describe AIDS/HIV to the public and to help form the US response to the disease. His observations are uniquely valuable.