Investigation of the robustness of two models for assessing synergy in pre‐clinical drug combination studies

Pre‐clinical studies may be used to screen for synergistic combinations of drugs. The types of in vitro assays used for this purpose will depend upon the disease area of interest. In oncology, one frequently used study measures cell line viability: cells placed into wells on a plate are treated with doses of two compounds, and cell viability is assessed from an optical density measurement corrected for blank well values. These measurements are often transformed and analysed as cell survival relative to untreated wells. The monotherapies are assumed to follow the Hill equation with lower and upper asymptotes at 0 and 1, respectively. Additionally, a common variance about the dose–response curve may be assumed. In this paper, we consider two models for incorporating synergy parameters. We investigate the effect of different models of biological variation on the assessment of synergy from both of these models. We show that estimates of the synergy parameters appear to be robust, even when estimates of the other model parameters are biased. Using untransformed measurements provides better coverage of the 95% confidence intervals for the synergy parameters than using transformed measurements, and the requirement to fit the upper asymptote does not cause difficulties. Assuming homoscedastic variances appears to be robust. The added complexity of determining and fitting an appropriate heteroscedastic model does not seem to be justified. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Mrs Stone and Dr Smellie: British eighteenth-century birth attendance and long-run levels and trends in maternal mortality discussed in a north European context

This is a book review turned research paper. The aim is to estimate the differences in the maternal mortality rate (MMR) between untrained midwives, expert midwives, and the famous obstetrician Dr Smellie in eighteenth-century Britain. The paper shows that the birth attendance practices of the expert midwife Mrs Stone and of Dr Smellie were very similar, though Stone used her hands whereas Smellie used forceps. Both applied the same invasive techniques to successfully deliver women with similar fatal complications, techniques that untrained midwives and most surgeons of the time could not perform. However, the same procedures, if used for normal births, would have increased the MMR. So, the key to the low MMR of both was that they kept interventions away from the majority of births that were normal. The paper quantifies the likely MMR for a ‘Stone and Smellie style’ birth attendance and concludes that the wider dissemination of their techniques can explain the decline in the British MMR.     

That Teenage Feeling

This article deconstructs news media representations of two custody abductions that took place in Aotearoa New Zealand in the mid-2000s. In the first case, the father abducted his five-month-old daughter; in the second case, the mother was held responsible for the abduction of her six-year-old son even though he was in the presence of his maternal grandfather. The analysis demonstrates that the media's pejorative construction of the mothers at the center of both cases was facilitated by a number of significant gaps and silences in the narration of the abductions. These silences, in lending support to a fathers' rights construction of custody disputes in which mothers are to blame for dispossessing fathers of their children, reveal the media's reliance on pro-father discourses, particularly fathers' rights discourse.     

Most and Least Meaningful Learning Experiences in Marriage and Family Therapy Education

Marriage and family therapy educators increasingly emphasize training competencies. What we know less about is what makes family therapy education meaningful to marriage and family therapy (MFT) graduate students and what does not. In this study, through an Internet survey, we explored the most and least meaningful learning experiences of 68 MFT graduate students and recent graduates of Commission on Accreditation for Marriage and Family Therapy Education—accredited programs. We used thematic analysis to identify and illustrate resulting themes, which included the importance of experiential and personal components to learning, the professor‐student alliance, tying theory to practice, and the experiences of students with their clients, among others. We discuss the implications of these findings to support family therapy education and offer tentative suggestions for formative discussions both within and across programs. Video Abstract is found in the online version of the article .     

Worker Behavior on the Job: A Multi-Methods Study of Labor Cooperation with Management

In the 2000s, the leadership of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) called for labor-management cooperation from its rank and file members in response to concerns about increasing competition from the nonunionized electrical contracting sector. The IBEW??s leadership implored members to cooperate by altering their behavior on the job, thereby modifying the effort bargain between workers and management. To date, this type of cooperation with management has been little studied. Using qualitative and quantitative data collected from one Local of the IBEW, this study analyzes how workers responded to the leadership??s call and the factors guiding this behavior. Among the findings, cooperative behavior on the job is found to be strongly associated with workers?? attitudes, as measured by their commitments to their occupation and to their union.     

Women on the margins? Intellectual sociability and citizenship in belle époque France

Prosopographic analysis of three gender-inclusive civic associations, the Union pour l'Action Morale (later Union pour la Vérité), the Société de Sociologie de Paris, and the Société pour l’Éducation Sociale, demonstrates that at the turn of the twentieth century intellectual sociability and the networks it fostered enabled certain well-connected women to practice citizenship without the right to vote. If gender inclusive, these enterprises were far from egalitarian. But their social composition and the sociability that characterized them facilitated women's access to the public sphere, an important dimension of citizenship. For this reason, the article concludes, models of citizenship without voting rights that emerged during the period appealed to contemporary women, to whom they seemed much less contradictory than we find them a century later.     

In Two Minds? — Parental Attitudes toward Physical Punishment in the UK

Since the Millennium, the use of physical punishment in the home has been a widely debated topic across the UK. Reliance on public opinion has been an important feature of this debate with a variety of UK surveys showing that many find physical punishment acceptable and do not support a complete ban on smacking. Drawing on the results from a comprehensive review of the literature, this article highlights that public/parental opinion is less than straightforward. Parents are often ambivalent about physical discipline, do not view it as an optimal method of behaviour management and are more prone to smack when stressed or angry. Likewise, a survey of the disciplinary practices and attitudes of 1000 parents in Northern Ireland shows that majority of parents have negative attitudes towards physical discipline. Nonetheless, many parents continue to smack despite the fact they do not believe it to be effective. Lack of parental support for legislative reform should be reconsidered in the light of this ambivalence. Most important, the UK Government needs to reframe the smacking debate in terms of children’s rights rather than relying on public opinion if it is to fulfil its commitment to protect children from harm as set out in the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.     

Understanding public relations in the ‘sharing economy’

In spite of the macro-economic impact of the so-called ‘sharing economy’ there is a nearly complete dearth of contributions from the communication academy to its discourse. More attention is overdue, particularly for the conceptual pressure the ‘sharing economy’ is exerting on the public relations function. The authors propose a reconceptualization of public relations by identifying the constitutive aspects of the sharing economy and bringing together the explanatory concepts ‘circuits of commerce’ and ‘viable matches’ from economic sociology and communicative constitution of organizations theory to develop the notions of ‘deliberate disintermediation’ and ‘circuits of communication’ in public relations. The contention is that by doing this, communicative acts not only contribute meaning in the sharing economy, but have economic value. Furthermore, the sharing economy poses challenges to the traditional forms of organizing public relations functions, but offers opportunities to realize different potential when public relations facilitates circuits of communication and becomes a meta-communicative competence embedded within the organization.     

An Essay on the Intrinsic Relationship between Social Facts and Moral Questions

Value neutrality and science are often equated. This paper argues that the work of doing science and engaging in scientific practices with meaningful objects depend on social facts which have moral prerequisites and are not value neutral.