Increasing walking in college students using a pedometer intervention: differences according to body mass index

Objective: The researchers assessed the effectiveness of a pedometer intervention and differences in walking behaviors according to body mass index (BMI). Participants: Two hundred ninety college students completed the intervention from January to February 2005. Methods: Participants wore pedometers 5 days per week for 12 weeks and completed questionnaires assessing demographic information. The authors calculated daily step averages for weeks 1, 6, and 12. They then classified students as underweight (UW), normal weight (NW), or overweight/obese, by BMI. The authors analyzed data using repeated-measures analysis of variance. Results: The average number of daily steps increased from week 1 to week 6 (p < .001) and week 12 (p = .002). UW participants reported the fewest steps at each time point, but the difference was significant only when compared with NW participants (p = .03). Conclusions: These results support the effectiveness of a pedometer intervention to increase walking in college students. Health benefits other than weight management should be emphasized to maximize the effects for all students.     

A Longer View: Is Industrial Metabolism Really the Problem?

Seen from the long perspective of recent historical research on Europe's pre-industrial millennia, large-scale human destruction of natural environments and ecological relationships evidently pre-dates industrial metabolism. If so, the limited view of the most recent centuries arguably fails to encompass the depth of experience required to understand current problems or therefore to formulate successful remedies or responses to human violations of carrying capacity. The longer past reveals some cultural mechanisms to counteract the pressures of human wants and needs. Comparative research is urged on long-term ecological outcomes in other great pre-industrial civilizations.     

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.     

Environmental determinism as Orientalism: The geo-political ecology of crisis in the Middle East

From ‘Resource Curse’ to ‘Climate Conflict’, more and more analyses of the current crisis in the Middle East start their reasoning from geo-physical or natural conditions as determinants of social life. Paradoxically, despite its resource riches giving rise to conflict, the region's ecology is portrayed as fragile, alien and hostile. This imperial oriental imagination, assumes that a scarce nature is mismanaged by societies and states overall incapable of negotiating modernity. This precarious, crisis driven environment is now pushed to the edge by the effects of climate change with looming desertification and weather extremes and a scramble for shrinking oil reserves threatening to make the region all but inhabitable. This article suggests that this environmental oriental determinism in Middle East can be overcome by entering political ecology into the register of historical sociological analysis. Re-socialising and historicising nature-society relations avoids reifying the Cartesian nature/society divide, offering historical sociology a better toolkit to navigate the current crisis. Vice-versa, it argues that political ecology can benefit from recognising the role of geopolitical relations in the social reproduction nature.     

Comparing Observed and Unobserved Components of Childhood: Evidence From Finnish Register Data on Midlife Mortality From Siblings and Their Parents

In this study, we argue that the long arm of childhood that determines adult mortality should be thought of as comprising an observed part and its unobserved counterpart, reflecting the observed socioeconomic position of individuals and their parents and unobserved factors shared within a family. Our estimates of the observed and unobserved parts of the long arm of childhood are based on family-level variance in a survival analytic regression model, using siblings nested within families as the units of analysis. The study uses a sample of Finnish siblings born between 1936 and 1950 obtained from Finnish census data. Individuals are followed from ages 35 to 72. To explain familial influence on mortality, we use demographic background factors, the socioeconomic position of the parents, and the individuals’ own socioeconomic position at age 35 as predictors of all-cause and cause-specific mortality. The observed part—demographic and socioeconomic factors, including region; number of siblings; native language; parents’ education and occupation; and individuals’ income, occupation, tenancy status, and education—accounts for between 10 % and 25 % of the total familial influence on mortality. The larger part of the influence of the family on mortality is not explained by observed individual and parental socioeconomic position or demographic background and thus remains an unobserved component of the arm of childhood. This component highlights the need to investigate the influence of childhood circumstances on adult mortality in a comprehensive framework, including demographic, social, behavioral, and genetic information from the family of origin.     

Approaches to Equity Management and their Relationship to Women in Management

Developing equitable practices that provide fair access for all individuals to the benefits and burdens within an organization remains a dilemma for management both in policy and in practice. Research continues to show that the employment status and representation for members of some groups is significantly less than in relation to those of other groups. Addressing the issue of disparity has resulted in a number of different approaches. The main aim of this paper is to explore the ability of a typological theory of equal employment opportunity implementation to account for the differences in the numbers of women in management and in management tiers. This paper identifies and analyses four ideal-typical equity management approaches to achieving workplace parity: traditional (non-compliance), anti-discrimination, affirmative action and equal employment opportunity. While the objective of these approaches may be to ensure equity management in order to encourage equal outcomes the results tell a different story. Results show that an affirmative action approach to equity management predicts increases in women in management across all tiers of management.     

Governance Considerations for Seeker–Solver Relationships: A Knowledge‐Based Perspective in Crowdsourcing for Innovation Contests

The need to solve innovation problems and insource knowledge has led to an increasing number of organizations engaging in crowdsourcing activities and subsequently establishing working relationships with winning solution providers. Using a knowledge‐based view and the problem‐solving perspective, we develop a theoretical framework suggesting how specific innovation problem attributes (i.e. the decomposability, formulation and search space of the problem) influence the governance decision (unilateral vs. bilateral) of seekers to manage the relationship with winning solvers. We empirically analyse the framework using 582 challenges broadcast on the NineSigma crowdsourcing platform. Our results indicate that problem attributes – the formulation and search space of the problem – have a positive effect on seekers’ preference towards unilateral governance structures. However, we did not find any empirical confirmation of the effect that the decomposability of the innovation problem has on seekers’ preference towards unilateral governance structures. This study offers several contributions to the crowdsourcing literature, and also has important implications for managers of organizations aiming to insource knowledge through crowdsourcing for innovation contests.     

Musculoskeletal problems in bricklayers as a function of length of employment: The role of secondary selection by low-back pain

Abstract

Low-back problems that are caused by heavy physical work should increase with the length of employment. In a cross-sectional study 195 bricklayers were interviewed and subjected to a medical examination concerned with complaints and functional impairments of the musculoskeletal systems of different body regions (neck/shoulder, arms/hands, back, hip/legs/feet). Summary variables for complaints and impairments indicated an increase with increasing age. Contrary to expectation, in pairs of bricklayers of the same age, but different length of employment, a general decline of complaints and impairments with longer employment was observed. This finding suggested a healthy worker effect. In a follow-up the turnover rate among 190 of the 195 bricklayers of the original study was determined. Bricklayers who had quit the job had a higher incidence of low-back troubles before leaving than bricklayers who had stayed in the job; the relation between turnover and low-back problems was limited to bricklayers older than about 40 years.