Clinical trials of drugs used off-label in neonates: ethical issues and alternative study designs

The use of drugs for indications unapproved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA), often called "off label use, "is widespread in children, including neonates. The widespread off-label use of drugs in neonates presents ethical and safety challenges. Since the passage of the Best Pharmaceuticals for Children Act (BPCA) in 2002, both the FDA and National Institutes of Health (NIH) have taken initiatives to facilitate and encourage research to achieve the necessary labeling for drugs routinely used in infants and children. Federal regulations provide broad rules and guidance for the protection of human subjects in research. However, there are ethical issues that a physician may face when designing clinical trials of drugs in neonates that are routinely used off-label and widely believed to be beneficial. We attempt to describe these ethical challenges and provide recommendations, including alternative study designs, to resolve them in an ethical framework that takes into account the Belmont Report, the statement of the World Medical Association (WMA), and federal regulations.     

Brand image and equity: the mediating role of brand equity drivers and moderating effects of product type and word of mouth

In today’s competitive landscape, organizations are progressively searching for valuable practices to create strong consumer-based brand equity. Managers must remain vigilant and receptive to factors that influence brand equity. Accordingly, this paper addresses this issue. Specifically, the paper empirically investigates the mediating roles of three drivers of brand equity in the brand image—consumer-based brand equity relationship and explores the moderating roles of product type and word of mouth (WOM) on the linkages between brand image and brand equity. In order to understand these relationships, a questionnaire survey was administered among brand consumers, yielding a total of 321 responses. Confirmatory factor analysis and Cronbach’s alpha were utilized to estimate the validity and reliability of the measures. Structural equation modeling with maximum likelihood estimation was employed to test the hypotheses. The authors find that brand image positively affects brand attachment, brand attitude, and brand awareness. Brand attachment and attitude positively influence consumer-based brand equity. The findings show that brand attachment and brand attitude partially mediate the relationship between brand image and brand equity. Product type and WOM have a significant moderating effect on the relationships among brand image, drivers of brand equity, and brand equity. The authors discuss the limitations of the study and provide future research directions.     

Ethnic Diversity,Social Exclusion and Economic Determinants of Crimes: A Case Study of Pakistan

The eventual objective of social disciplines is to ensure the existence of peaceful and prosperous societies through the provision and protection of property rights for all segments of society. The deprived and socially excluded persons attempt to violate the formal rules and informal norms of the society. Developing countries have been facing rapidly increased number of violators of rules and norms, causing to higher crime rate which confronts multifarious ethnic problems, religion, multi-lingual problems. The case of Pakistan dose not varies when our study consider socioeconomic causes of crimes i.e. ethnic diversity and social exclusion. Present study is a contribution in this blistering issue, particularly in case of Pakistan. Therefore, our study explores the socioeconomic determinants of crime rate in Pakistan, by using bound testing and auto regressive distributive lag technique for the data period of 1970–2015. The estimated results reveal that ethnic diversity, social exclusion and deterrence have positive and significant impact on property, violence crime rates, and on overall crimes in Pakistan. While per capita income and population density, both have negative and significant impact on property and violence crimes.     

Poverty as Functioning Deprivation: Global Estimates

Poverty alleviation and eradication have always remained a major challenge for the political leadership at the national and international level. However, no consensus exists about the definition and measurement of poverty. Recent understanding sees poverty as much more than lack of income. Hunger, unemployment and ill heath are just some of many dimensions of poverty. We have contributed to the existing debate by defining poverty as a deprivation of a number of functionings (actual achievements), considered vital but not equally important for human wellbeing, caused by an inadequate command over market or nonmarket resources. We have identified nine basic functionings and corresponding indicators that best reflect these nine basic functionings and develop a composite index of poverty for 193 countries of the world for cross country comparison. We have analyzed poverty for two periods 1990–2000 and 2001–2010 to make an inter-temporal comparison in global poverty. According to our estimates, the global poverty has only modestly come down by 4 percentage points from 35% in 1990–2000 to 31% in 2001–2010. This contrasts sharply with the estimates based on the poverty line of the World Bank that the proportion of population living in extreme poverty has nearly halved from 47% in 1990 to 24% in 2015.     

Women and Jihad: Combating Violent Extremism and Developing New Approaches to Conflict Resolution in the Greater Middle East

The subject of female participation in combative jihad has proved to be contentious in Islam. Whilst some extremist Islamist groups, such as the so-called Islamic State (IS), have advocated women’s direct engagement in fighting in defense of Islam, others, for example Al Qaeda, have endorsed only a supporting role for women, primarily for the purpose of producing the next generation of jihadis. Whatever the validity of this debate, most radical jihadi groups have deployed women for combative operations, including suicide bombings. This has been more in the Middle East, where a resolution of several conflicts requires a comprehensive political strategy as against a predominantly military approach. This article has three objectives. The first is to provide some clarification about combative jihad in conceptual terms. The second is to focus on IS and its underlying appeal to a range of foreign Muslim male and female enthusiasts and several other like-minded entities who have gone to Iraq and to Syria to serve IS for convictive or deceptive reasons. The third is to see what distinguishes IS from other extremist groups which are operational in various parts of the Muslim domain, and to harness some ideas about how to deal with violent Muslim extremism in the Greater Middle East.     

Legal Representations of Muslim Slaves by American Courts and Legislative Bodies: 1650–1861

This paper is the first specific exploration of Muslim slaves in front of American courts and legal mechanisms more broadly from the seventeenth century through the nineteenth century. As hundreds of thousands of slaves who came to America had Muslim backgrounds, many of those Muslim slaves found themselves in front of legal regimes and American courts. However, the Muslim identities of these slaves, despite the importance that their religious beliefs might have had for them, were rarely discussed in the case law or not mentioned at all. Drawing from Patterson’s notion of the “socially dead” slave, this paper draws on numerous examples from cases like Amistad to cases dealing with wills and estates to note that the ties to Islam in these cases were obfuscated and minimized. The social death of Muslim slaves in the way that the court documented their experiences silences the voices of American Muslim slaves who reacted in unique ways to their condition of slavery.     

Revisiting the urban housing crisis in Zimbabwe: Some forgotten dimensions?

The housing problem in Zimbabwe has become synonymous with housing shortages. The mismatch between housing supply and demand has for long been accepted as the housing problem. Virtually all policies and strategies aimed at alleviating the housing problem reflect this pre-occupation with numbers. The quantitative dimension has been taken so seriously by policy makers that policy and practical responses are aimed almost exclusively towards new construction. This paper re-examines the wider housing crisis in urban Zimbabwe. It looks at problems of obsolescence, overcrowding and other qualitative aspects. It concludes by cautioning that although some of these problems have to do with numbers, construction alone is not the complete solution.     

Tests for the Validity of the Assumption that the Underlying Distribution of Life is Pareto

This article considers the problem of testing the validity of the assumption that the underlying distribution of life is Pareto. For complete and censored samples, the relationship between the Pareto and the exponential distributions could be of vital importance to test for the validity of this assumption. For grouped uncensored data the classical Pearson χ² test based on the multinomial model can be used. Attention is confined in this article to handle grouped data with withdrawals within intervals. Graphical as well as analytical procedures will be presented. Maximum likelihood estimators for the parameters of the Pareto distribution based on grouped data will be derived.     

Bayesian inference for the Pareto lifetime model under progressive censoring with binomial removals

This paper considers the estimation and prediction problems when lifetimes are Pareto-distributed and are collected under Type II progressive censoring with random removals, where the number of units removed at each failure time follows a Binomial distribution. The analysis is carried out within the Bayesian context.