On Causal Inferences for Personalized Medicine: How Hidden Causal Assumptions Led to Erroneous Causal Claims About the D-Value

Abstract

Personalized medicine asks if a new treatment will help a particular patient, rather than if it improves the average response in a population. Without a causal model to distinguish these questions, interpretational mistakes arise. These mistakes are seen in an article by Demidenko that recommends the “D-value,” which is the probability that a randomly chosen person from the new-treatment group has a higher value for the outcome than a randomly chosen person from the control-treatment group. The abstract states “The D-value has a clear interpretation as the proportion of patients who get worse after the treatment” with similar assertions appearing later. We show these statements are incorrect because they require assumptions about the potential outcomes which are neither testable in randomized experiments nor plausible in general. The D-value will not equal the proportion of patients who get worse after treatment if (as expected) those outcomes are correlated. Independence of potential outcomes is unrealistic and eliminates any personalized treatment effects; with dependence, the D-value can even imply treatment is better than control even though most patients are harmed by the treatment. Thus, D-values are misleading for personalized medicine. To prevent misunderstandings, we advise incorporating causal models into basic statistics education.     

Interregional flows of economically active persons in France, 1975–1982

Recent net interregional migration into southern and western France is widely appreciated, but much less is known about the composition of these flows in terms of the occupational characteristics of economically active migrants. Using results from the 1982 census, this article disaggregates net flows to reveal inflows and outflows of migrants defined by gender and occupational groups. Important differences between these groups with regard to absolute flows and geographical mobility are uncovered and discussed in relation to the new spatial division of labor perspective on counterurbanization.     

Mixture designs for five components in orthogonal blocks

The methods developed by John and Draper et al. of partitioning the blends (runs) of four mixture components into two or more orthogonal blocks when fitting quadratic models are extended to mixtures of five components. The characteristics of Latin squares of side five are used to derive rules for reliably and quickly obtaining designs with specific properties. The designs also produce orthogonal blocks when higher order models are fitted.     

Virtues,Values and Victims: Toward a Theory of Social Problems

Abstract

The area of social problems has suffered from inadequate definitions, largely because there is no serious application of theory to the problem. An examination of epistemological issues reveals three distinct approaches: the virtues approach, based on objectivity, the values approach, based on subjectivity, and the victims approach, based on a dialectical relationship of object and subject. The implications of these epistemologies for social problems are assessed, and the necessity of an ethical position is demonstrated. Finally three social problem issues are defined: issues of human survival, of human community, of human dignity.     

Gender and insult in an Italian city: Bologna in the later Middle Ages

There are few studies of insult in later medieval Italy. This article aims not only to fill that gap, but also to show the value of applying one branch of modern linguistics to the evidence for medieval insult. The overall aim is to study the particularly gendered aspects of insult: what words and actions could men and women use against their own gender and against the other? The copious judicial archive of Bologna allows for extensive study of this phenomenon. The article falls into three parts: first, establishing the general pattern of insult; second, examining closely the strongest male term of insult; and finally investigating the practice of ‘doorscorning’, by which the doors of victims’ houses were defiled. To interpret the findings, methodological approaches are borrowed from anthropology, medieval legal theory and modern linguistics.     

Green Citizenship

This paper first describes the influence that environmentalism and ecologism have had upon thinking about citizenship before, second, moving on to discuss conventional models of citizenship and potential models of Green citizenship. The discussion focuses on the competing moral discourses that inform our understanding of citizenship and concludes by arguing in favour of an eco-socialist citizenship model that would embrace, on the one hand, an ethic of co-responsibility by which collectively to achieve the just distribution of scarce resources and, on the other, an ethic of care through which to negotiate the basis for human interdependency.     

Energy crop production in an urban area: a comparison of habitat types and land use forms targeting economic benefits and impact on species diversity

In urban areas, the potential of biomass production is rarely utilized, although many biomass sources are located in cities, ranging from road margins to public parks. There is, however, increasing interest in these potential biomass sources, as they are close to consumers and provide options to reduce maintenance costs of urban green areas. We analyzed the costs and benefits of utilizing biomass, and compared it to the biodiversity maintained on 17 urban land use forms the Ruhr Metropolitan Area (Germany). Economic costs and benefits were reflected by contribution margins, while biodiversity was measured by species numbers of plants, birds and butterflies. For the 17 land use types, there is a weak overall correlation between contribution margins and species numbers. However, this is mainly due to the two land use forms with the highest contribution margins (cultivation of energy maize and fertilized grassland), which are characterized by the lowest species numbers. For the remaining cases, there is no relationship between contribution margins and species numbers. Comparatively high contribution margins and high mean species numbers were observed for road margins, industrial fallows with wood cutting for biogas production and water-influenced grassland mown traditionally. We conclude that biomass production and the maintenance of urban biodiversity is not necessarily a contradiction.     

Exploratory Analysis of Factors Associated with Participation in Self-Directed and Traditional Marriage and Relationship Education

Although self-directed marriage and relationship education (MRE) has the potential to reach a larger or different audience than traditional MRE, little has been done to examine the characteristics of self-directed MRE participants. This study examined whether various individual, couple, family, and sociocultural context variables predicted participation in both self-directed and traditional MRE programs. A series of logistic regressions were conducted on a cross-sectional data set. Different factors predicted participation for each intervention. For self-directed programs, factors predictive of involvement included older age, religiosity, higher education, being more self-regulated, having a neurotic partner, more open relationship boundaries, a history of divorce, more relationship problems, and more family-of-origin problems. A wider range of factors predicted participation in traditional programs. Some factors increasing odds for participation in one intervention decreased odds in the other. Implications for MRE are discussed. This study provides evidence that some higher risk couples may choose self-directed MRE over more traditional programs.