Minimizing bias in clinical peer review

The chief sources of bias in peer review include the clinical outcome and the reviewer. But there are ways to mitigate any bias.     

“Privacy please!” The public to private decision in Germany

This paper examines the characteristics and motives of German public to private transactions (PTPs) between 1996 and 2004. We empirically test hypotheses regarding free cash flow, leverage potential, ownership concentration, a stock market quotation’s decreasing benefits, limited capital market efficiency, and dividends. The results illustrate that, in the relevant period, the going private companies originated from mature industries and that, in the three financial years preceding the PTP transaction, their sales figures showed slow growth. Furthermore, the capital structure had potential for further leveraging and the companies were marked by low profitability. Trading in the PTPs’ shares was very sluggish, which limited the efficiency of the capital markets. Ultimately, we do not find evidence supporting the free cash flow hypothesis regarding German firms.     

Race, punishment, and the Michael Vick experience

Objective. The relationship between race and crime has been contentious, focusing primarily on offending and incarceration patterns among minorities. There has been some limited work on public perceptions of criminal punishment, and findings show that while minorities believe in the role and rule of law, they simultaneously perceive the justice system as acting in a biased and/or unfair manner. Two limitations have stalled this literature. First, research has focused mainly on criminal punishments to the neglect of noncriminal punishments. Second, most studies have not examined whether race remains salient after considering other demographic variables or discrimination and legitimacy attitudes.Methods. Using data from 400 adults, we examine how race affects perceptions of criminal punishment and subsequent reinstatement into the National Football League in the case of Michael Vick, a star professional quarterback who pled guilty to charges of operating an illegal dog-fighting ring.Results. Findings show that whites are more likely to view Vick's punishment as too soft and that he should not be reinstated, while nonwhites had the opposite views. Race remained significant after controlling for other variables believed to be related to punishment perceptions.Conclusion. Attitudes toward both criminal punishment and NFL reinstatement vary across race such that there exists important divides in how individuals perceive the system meting out punishment and subsequently reintegrating offenders back into society. These results underscore that white and nonwhites perceive the law and its administration differently.     

Profit implications of estimation methods for the allocation of marketing resources

We deal with the question whether estimating heterogeneous multiplicative sales response models without carry over effects by either ordinary least squares or Gibbs sampling makes a difference if resources (like advertising budgets, sales budgets, sales force sizes, sales calls) have to be allocated to sales units (like sales districts, customer groups, individual costumers or prospects) in a profit maximizing way and only short time series are available. To this end we generate artificial series on sales and allocations by stochastic simulation. These series are used to estimate multiplicative models whose coefficients are either specific to individual sales units or follow a hierarchical Bayesian framework. Ordinary least squares and Gibbs sampling serve as appropriate estimation methods. Performance of the two estimation methods is measured by recovery of optimal profits which are computed on the basis of the known true parameter values. We start to determine optimal allocations based on the plug-in method which uses average coefficients to determine expected profits. Gibbs sampling always leads to profits nearer to the true optima. This advantage of Gibbs sampling is especially pronounced for combinations with high average elasticity, high variation of elasticity and high number of sales units. On the other hand, differences between Gibbs sampling and OLS become smaller the more observations are available. Optimization with expected profits taking parameter uncertainty (i.e., the distribution of parameters) into account leads to higher profits than the plug-in method, but relative increases turn out to be rather small.     

A Sociodemographic Risk Index

In this paper, we conceptualize and develop an index of sociodemographic risk that we hypothesize will be an improvement over the standard poverty measure as a measure of risk for children’s development. The poverty line is widely used in government statistics and in research but is also widely acknowledged to have multiple shortcomings. Using recent data from the National Survey of America’s Families, we develop and examine a Sociodemographic Risk Index for two potential purposes: (a) to serve as a summary indicator of children’s environments that affect their well-being, and (b) to serve as a variable that can be used to identify at-risk subgroups of children whose well-being should be examined separately in indicator reports. Based on substantial research on children’s development, we chose five variables for the index: family income, family structure, parent education, family size, and home ownership. An additive sociodemographic risk index using these variables is strongly associated with multiple measures of child well-being in both bivariate and multivariate analyses. Hence, it serves as a good marker of risk for children and therefore as an indicator that could be monitored over time, across groups, and across places, as well as a variable that could be used to identify subgroups of at-risk children whose well-being should be monitored. However, analyses do not indicate that it performs better at identifying at-risk children than the current poverty measure. Therefore, we recommend the Sociodemographic Risk Index primarily as an additional summary indicator to be monitored, rather than as a replacement for the poverty measure.     

Humour in the Ancient World

Since the ending of the Second World War and the establishment of the United Nations, the international concept of racism, first initialised in the 1930s, has been inscribed in an unacknowledged conceptual double bind. Western political culture has inherited a hegemonic concept of racism that foregrounds those meanings associated with the anti‐fascist critiques of the Jewish Holocaust, while foreclosing subaltern anti‐colonial critiques centred on Western Imperialism. This can be taken to suggest a divergence within a western tradition of critical thought that in one of its guises occurs between the view that ‘‘race’ thinking’ resembles ideological exceptionality and the contrary view that ‘race relations’ approximates colonial conventions. The present essay explores the extent to which these views are constituted conceptually and dialogically in opposition and divergence. This is defined as racism's conceptual double bind. In other words, the international concept of racism is doubly bound into revealing its imprints in nationalism and concealing its anchorage in liberalism; or recognising extremist ideology while denying routine governmentality. The essay, therefore, asks the following: is it im/plausible to deny that there is an inescapable conceptual double bind between these differing conceptualisations of racism that has been ignored by the dominant social science traditions in the West? The idea of a double bind in the concept of racism, reiterated throughout this essay, is not to be confused with the proposition that there are two concepts of racism. On the contrary, during the twentieth‐century conceptualisation of racism, there have rather been two distinct orientations, the hegemonic Eurocentric and the subaltern De/colonial, based on conflicting yet dialogical paradigmatic experiences of the referent of racism.     

Does Culture Affect Divorce? Evidence From European Immigrants in the United States

This article explores the role of culture in determining divorce by examining country-of-origin differences in divorce rates of immigrants in the United States. Because childhood-arriving immigrants are all exposed to a common set of U.S. laws and institutions, we interpret relationships between their divorce tendencies and home-country divorce rates as evidence of the effect of culture. Our results are robust to controlling for several home-country variables, including average church attendance and gross domestic product (GDP). Moreover, specifications with country-of-origin fixed effects suggest that immigrants from countries with low divorce rates are especially less likely to be divorced if they reside among a large number of coethnics. Supplemental analyses indicate that divorce culture has a stronger impact on the divorce decisions of females than of males, pointing to a potentially gendered nature of divorce taboos.     

An interactive web-based method of outreach to college students at risk for suicide

OBJECTIVE AND PARTICIPANTS: From 2002 to 2005, the authors tested an interactive, Web-based method to encourage college students at risk for suicide to seek treatment. METHODS: The authors invited students at 2 universities to complete an online questionnaire that screened for depression and other suicide risk factors. Respondents received a personalized assessment and were able to communicate anonymously with a clinical counselor online. At-risk students were urged to attend in-person evaluation and treatment. RESULTS: A total of 1,162 students (8% of those invited) completed the screening questionnaire; 981 (84.4%) were designated as at high or moderate risk. Among this group, 190 (19.4%) attended an in-person evaluation session with the counselor, and 132 (13.5%) entered treatment. Students who engaged in online dialogues with the counselor were 3 times more likely than were those who did not to come for evaluation and enter treatment. CONCLUSIONS: The method has considerable promise for encouraging previously untreated, at-risk college students to get help.     

Long-term safety of stimulant medications used to treat children with ADHD

Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a common mental health condition that affects children, adolescents, and adults. Because it is a chronic condition and typically requires effective treatment for several years or more, information on the benefits and risks of long-term pharmacotherapy for ADHD is vital to clinicians. This article reviews the emerging literature on the safety of long-term stimulant medications in ADHD-the most commonly prescribed medications for this condition. Common side effects, including cardiovascular effects, growth effects, and tics, are discussed, as well as treatment of children younger than age 6 and evidence of carcinogenic and reproductive effects.