Age Is But a Number? An Exploration of Age Differences in Episodic Volunteering

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Age has long been understood as a strong demographic determinant of volunteering. However, to date, limited literature...     

A new long-term survival model with dispersion induced by discrete frailty

Lifetime Data Analysis - Frailty models are generally used to model heterogeneity between the individuals. The distribution of the frailty variable is often assumed to be continuous. However, there...     

Assessment of Distraction From Erotic Stimuli by Nonerotic Interference

Distraction from erotic cues during sexual encounters is a major contributor to sexual difficulties in men and women. Being able to assess distraction in studies of sexual arousal will help clarify underlying contributions to sexual problems. The current study aimed to identify the most accurate assessment of distraction from erotic cues in healthy men (n = 29) and women (n = 38). Participants were assigned to a no distraction, low distraction, or high distraction condition. Distraction was induced using an auditory distraction task presented during the viewing of an erotic video. Attention to erotic cues was assessed using three methods: a written quiz, a visual quiz, and a self-reported distraction measure. Genital and psychological sexual responses were also measured. Self-reported distraction and written quiz scores most accurately represented the level of distraction present, while self-reported distraction also corresponded with a decrease in genital arousal. Findings support the usefulness of self-report measures in conjunction with a brief quiz on the erotic material as the most accurate and sensitive ways to simply measure experimentally-induced distraction. Insight into distraction assessment techniques will enable evaluation of naturally occurring distraction in patients suffering from sexual problems.     

Inference and Decision Making for 21st-Century Drug Development and Approval

ABSTRACT

The cost and time of pharmaceutical drug development continue to grow at rates that many say are unsustainable. These trends have enormous impact on what treatments get to patients, when they get them and how they are used. The statistical framework for supporting decisions in regulated clinical development of new medicines has followed a traditional path of frequentist methodology. Trials using hypothesis tests of “no treatment effect” are done routinely, and the p-value < 0.05 is often the determinant of what constitutes a “successful” trial. Many drugs fail in clinical development, adding to the cost of new medicines, and some evidence points blame at the deficiencies of the frequentist paradigm. An unknown number effective medicines may have been abandoned because trials were declared “unsuccessful” due to a p-value exceeding 0.05. Recently, the Bayesian paradigm has shown utility in the clinical drug development process for its probability-based inference. We argue for a Bayesian approach that employs data from other trials as a “prior” for Phase 3 trials so that synthesized evidence across trials can be utilized to compute probability statements that are valuable for understanding the magnitude of treatment effect. Such a Bayesian paradigm provides a promising framework for improving statistical inference and regulatory decision making.     

Developing ethical approaches to data and civil society: from availability to accessibility

This research note reflects on the gaps and limitations confronting the development of ethical principles regarding the accessibility of large-scale data for civil society organizations (CSOs). Drawing upon a systematic scoping study on the use of data in the United Kingdom (UK) civil society, it finds that there are twin needs to conceptualize accessibility as more than mere availability of data, as well as examine the use of data among CSOs more generally. In order to deal with the apparent “digital divide” in UK civil society – where, despite extensive government rhetoric about data openness, organizations face not only the barriers of limited time, funds, and expertise to harness data but also the lack of representation within existing data – we present a working model in which ethical concerns accompanying data utilization by civil society may be better accounted. This suggests there is a need for further research into the nexus of civil society and data upon which interdisciplinary discussion about the ethical dimensions of engagement with data, particularly informed by insight from the social sciences, can be predicated.     

Cyclical Evolution of the Global Right

An understanding of the current right‐wing national and transnational social movements can benefit from comparing them to the global and national conditions operating during their last appearance in the first half of the twentieth century and by carefully comparing twentieth‐century fascism with the neofascist and right‐wing populist movements that have been emerging in the twenty‐first century. This allows us to assess the similarities and differences, and to gain insights about what could be the consequences of the reemergence of populist nationalism and fascist movements. Our study uses the comparative evolutionary world‐systems perspective to study the Global Right from 1800 to the present. We see fascism as a form of capitalism that emerges when the capitalist project is in crisis. World historical waves of right‐wing populism and fascism are caused by the cycles of globalization and deglobalization, the rise and fall of hegemonic core powers, long business cycles (the Kondratieff wave), and interactions with both Centrist Liberalism and the Global Left. We consider how crises of the global capitalist system have produced right‐wing backlashes in the past, and how a future terminal crisis of capitalism could lead to a reemergence of a new form of authoritarian global governance or a reorganized global democracy in the future.