Institutional Pathology and the Death of Dan Markingson

In the spring of 2015, 11 years after a mentally ill young man named Dan Markingson stabbed himself to death in an industry-sponsored drug study, officials at the University of Minnesota suspended recruitment of subjects into drug trials in its Department of Psychiatry. University officials agreed to act only after a scathing investigation by Minnesota Office of the Legislative Auditor found damning evidence of coerced recruitment, inadequate clinical care, superficial research oversight, a web of serious, disturbing conflicts of interest, and a pattern of misleading public statements by university officials aimed at deflecting scrutiny. In this article, I examine the larger institutional factors leading up to Markingson’s suicide and prevented corrective action for so long.     

Honorary Authorship Practices in Environmental Science Teams: Structural and Cultural Factors and Solutions

Overinclusive authorship practices such as honorary or guest authorship have been widely reported, and they appear to be exacerbated by the rise of large interdisciplinary collaborations that make authorship decisions particularly complex. Although many studies have reported on the frequency of honorary authorship and potential solutions to it, few have probed how the underlying dynamics of large interdisciplinary teams contribute to the problem. This article reports on a qualitative study of the authorship standards and practices of six National Science Foundation-funded interdisciplinary environmental science teams. Using interviews of the lead principal investigator and an early-career member on each team, our study explores the nature of honorary authorship practices as well as some of the motivating factors that may contribute to these practices. These factors include both structural elements (policies and procedures) and cultural elements (values and norms) that cross organizational boundaries. Therefore, we provide recommendations that address the intersection of these factors and that can be applied at multiple organizational levels.     

A Critique of Ryberg's “The Argument from Overpopulation”

Population and Environment -     

Qualitative examination of rural service provision to persons with concurrent developmental and mental health challenges

Although there has been an international trend away from institutionalization to community-based care, this has not always been successful, particularly for the unique and vulnerable population diagnosed with both mental health and developmental disabilities. The challenge of meeting the needs of this population is increased in rural and remote areas. As a part of a larger study, this paper reports on the voices of service providers for people dually diagnosed as they maneuver through the considerable challenges of meeting complex needs while located in remote northern communities. The complexities of rural service provision for those with a dual diagnosis of mental illness and developmental disability is also highlighted and includes challenges of northern living, difficulties in diagnosis, and system level issues. This paper confronts the inequities in provision of effective community-based services to this population and draws attention to the need to support and develop local, integrated services in order to build inclusive communities for all.     

Disease clusters: should they be investigated, and, if so, when and how?

Individual cluster reports are subject to several difficulties in interpretation. Although they rarely lead to new aetiological insights, a public health response to delineate the size and extent of any excess risk may be warranted. Further investigation, where merited, should usually include an examination of data for different areas and/or different time periods. A statistical evaluation of disease clusters is often secondary to a detailed appreciation of issues such as the availability and quality of data, confounding and bias in the selection of areas for study.     

AHP DESIGN ISSUES FOR LARGE-SCALE SYSTEMS

The analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is a decision analysis technique that uses judgments from a group of relevant decision makers and hierarchical decomposition to derive a set of ratio-scaled utility measures for decision alternatives. This paper addresses a number of design issues involved in the implementation of AHP for large-scale systems. Specifically, it describes the use of incomplete experimental designs for simplifying data-collection tasks. The effects of reducing the size of the hierarchy through attribute deletion and the effects of including identical attributes on any given level also are evaluated.     

Book Review: Food Ethics. Ben Mepham (Ed.). London: Routledge, 1996. 178 Pages. $59.95 (cloth), $17.95 (paperback)

Population and Environment -     

Work and Family Role Strain Among University Employees

This paper analyzes the determinants of work and family role strain among university employees with data from a survey of faculty and staff of a public university in the Western U.S. The results indicate that difficulties caring for children and elderly dependents are the primary causes of work and family role strain in the family domain, while dissatisfaction with resources and perceived unfair criticism are primary in the work domain. The predictors of work and family role strain are similar for faculty and staff, and for men and women, with one exception: Having a supportive spouse or partner reduces work and family role strain much more for women than it does for men. Implications for university personnel policy are discussed.     

Micro-ESR:微型电子自旋共振光谱仪

电子自旋共振光谱(ESR),又称顺磁共振光谱(EPR),是直接检测自由基、引起石油氧化降解含有未成对电子的活性分子以及食物的唯一方法,也在生物化学研究疾病方面起着一定的作用。本文所描述的微型、高灵敏度的ESR光谱仪通过显著降低光谱技术的成本,能够为工业和科学研究者扩大ESR光谱学的实用范围。     

艺术、遗留物和身份技巧

尽管身份一词最近才频繁地出现在民俗学家的论文中,但它和民俗研究的关系却一直非常密切。身份概念是民俗定义的基础。民俗的各种定义、方法、理论与艺术、遗留物和技巧又紧密相连,也正是在此过程中,身份得以形成并且概念化,从而被表达出来。