Retrospective Reflections of a Whistleblower: Opinions on Misconduct Responses

Almost 10 years ago, when I was in my fourth year of graduate school, my fellow graduate students discovered that our thesis advisor had engaged in misconduct by falsifying and fabricating data in two grant applications. We informed the university and my advisor resigned. This event was a turning point in my life. Years later, I have gathered my thoughts and reflections on the experience. I believe we must first prevent what misconduct we can. But unfortunately some misconduct will still occur and in those circumstances we must respond to protect those affected by the misconduct and to progress beyond the event. In so doing, we get the most value out of scientific research.     

Introduction: Accountability in Neuroethics

Pharmaceutical sponsored clinical trials, formerly conducted predominantly in the United States and Europe, have expanded to emerging regions, including the Middle East. Our study explores factors influencing clinical trial privacy and confidentiality in the United Arab Emirates. Factors including concept familiarity, informed consent compliance, data access, and preservation, were analyzed to assess current practices in the Arab world. As the UAE is an emerging region for clinical trials, there is a growing need for regulations related to data confidentiality and subject privacy. Informational and decisional privacy should be viewed within the realms of Arab culture and religious background.     

Streetwise sales and the social order of city streets

This paper analyses how a Big Issue vendor approached passers-by and how they responded, how recognizable courses of social and economic activity were interactionally produced from initiation through to some conclusion. The paper recovers how the vendor's work was contextually embedded in the urban landscape, how it was constrained by, and actively shaped, the social order of the street. Drawing on video-audio recordings the paper contributes to a growing body of ethnographic and ethnomethodological research which has emphasized the embodied, contingent and interactional character of economic activity. By examining such materials, the paper is well positioned to describe how the vendor found his market on the street, social interventions that propelled passers-by into buying behaviour. The paper sheds light on now familiar encounters which occur millions of times each week in the UK and beyond.     

Comparability of the 6-min walk test using different test configurations

The 6-min walk test (6MWT) is a common component of fitness assessments of older adults; however, differing course configurations might affect 6MWT performance. It is unclear how comparable 2 different configurations are. To determine the comparability of 2 courses, 35 adults >65 years of age completed two 6MWT, once walking around a 20- by 5-yd outdoor rectangle and once on an indoor oval track (circumference 144.3 yd). Scores for the 2 tests were internally consistent (intraclass correlation coefficient = .95). The participants walked farther on the oval track than around the rectangle (639 +/- 19 vs. 582 +/- 16 yd; p < .0001), but responses to the rectangular configuration could be readily estimated using the equation 66.7 yd + 0.807 x (oval walking distance), R2 = .85. Thus, within-participant responses are similar across both 6MWT, but the course configuration affects the distance walked.     

AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON OF LIFETIME INEQUALITY: HOW CONTINENTAL EUROPE RESEMBLES NORTH AMERICA

We compare earnings inequality and mobility across the United States, Canada, France, Germany and the United Kingdom during the late 1990s. A flexible model of earnings dynamics that isolates positional mobility within a stable earnings distribution is estimated. Earnings trajectories are then simulated, and lifetime annuity value distributions are constructed. Earnings mobility and employment risk are found to be positively correlated with base‐year inequality. Taken together they produce more equalization in countries with high cross‐section inequality such that the countries in our sample have more similar lifetime inequality levels than cross‐section measures suggest.     

Age-Specific Death Rates With Tobacco Smoking and Occupational Activity: Sensitivity to Sample Length,Functional Form,and Unobserved Frailty

In this article, we estimate accelerated time-to-failure and proportional-hazard functions with about 100,000 members of the Dorn sample, finding greater hazards associated with smoking and some dependence on occupational variables that measure risk and physical activity. We answer three questions: (1) How sensitive are the estimates to sample length, using monthly data for the periods 1954–1969 and 1954–1980? The results differ somewhat between these sample periods. (2) How sensitive are the estimates to alternative functions for the hazard? Within a given time period, the estimates are fairly robust to specification changes in the distribution of the hazard in the accelerated time-to-failure models. (3) How sensitive are the estimates to alternative controls for unobserved frailty? Within a given sample period, the estimates are fairly robust to the allowance for parametric or nonparametric heterogeneity in the proportional-hazard models.     

Valuation of education and crime neighborhood characteristics through hedonic housing prices

This article studies households' valuation of neighborhood amenities through analysis of housing as a bundle of structural and neighborhood characteristics. Using statistical techniques, hedonic prices, or incremental values in the market, can be imputed to each element of the bundle. Twelve variables describe neighborhood crime; twenty-one variables describe neighborhood schools. Together with structural variables, they significantly and substantially explain house prices in the Baltimore metropolitan area. The technique is also shown to provide a market framework for approximating the benefits of localized neighborhood improvements.The authors wish to thank David Puryear, Ralph Taylor, and the two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper. We also thank Central Maryland Multiple Listing Service, the Baltimore City and Baltimore County Police Departments, and the Johns Hopkins Center for the Social Organization of Schools for house price, crime, and education data. None of the people or organizations listed is in any way responsible for the analyses or conclusions presented. Requests for reprints should be addressed to Dr. Allen C. Goodman, Center for Metropolitan Planning and Research, The Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218.     

Stakeholder value disclosures: anchoring on primacy and importance of financial and nonfinancial performance measures

In the growing debate about stakeholder values, there has been little discussion about information overload or whether the requested disclosures can be effectively used. Stakeholder advocates call for complicated and massive environmental and related social disclosures while not considering how information overload might affect the discourse about corporate performance. Stakeholders, including shareholders, plead for more transparency in financial statements, management discussion and analysis (MDA), and other corporate disclosures. As we know, shareholders and boards of directors are most concerned with the ‘Holy Trinity’ of earnings per share, dividends and market value changes. We believe that managers and stakeholders involved in performance evaluations have multiple interests that extend beyond traditional shareholder value measures. We note that the Balanced Scorecard (BSC) was developed as one tool to reflect and communicate these multiple measures. We test how managers use (or ignore) multiple performance measures and we posit that stakeholders will face many of the same constraints when using and processing multiple disclosures including Corporate Social Reports (CSR), environmental, or similar disclosures. While we do not directly test a wide variety of stakeholder disclosures, we examine eight (four for a single subject) shareholder values (financial measures) and four stakeholder values (nonfinancial measures). The eight measures included in our research instruments serve as proxies for the multiple concerns that might be of interest to many stakeholders. Note that stakeholders are likely to be extremely interested in nonfinancial performance measures, while many shareholders will likely concentrate on financial performance measures. Field research has reported managers tend to favor financial measures while discounting or ignoring nonfinancial measures when evaluating subordinates, making it difficult to align performance evaluations and incentives with corporate strategies (Ittner et al. Account Rev 78:725–758, 2003). In this study, we find the relative weights managers place on financial and nonfinancial performance measures are influenced by both (1) presentation order and (2) the relative importance of specific measures. When financial measures are presented first, the manager who performs better on financial measures is rated higher than the manager who performs better on nonfinancial measures. However, when nonfinancial measures are presented first, managers who excel on nonfinancial measures are rated higher. Reports that include financial measures that are relatively more (less) important also produce higher (lower) ratings for the manager who excels on financial measures. Thus, the relative weights that superiors place on financial and nonfinancial measures in evaluating corporate managers’ performance are substantially anchored both by the order in which measures are presented as well as by the importance of the specific performance measures employed. Other stakeholder disclosures are likely to be similarly anchored, perhaps biased, by primacy and a priori importance rankings.