The phenomenal growth of global pharmaceutical sales and the quest for innovation are driving an unprecedented search for human test subjects, particularly in middle- and low-income countries. Our ...hope for medical progress increasingly depends on the willingness of the world's poor to participate in clinical drug trials. While these experiments often provide those in need with vital and previously unattainable medical resources, the outsourcing and offshoring of trials also create new problems. In this groundbreaking book, anthropologist Adriana Petryna takes us deep into the clinical trials industry as it brings together players separated by vast economic and cultural differences. Moving between corporate and scientific offices in the United States and research and public health sites in Poland and Brazil,When Experiments Traveldocuments the complex ways that commercial medical science, with all its benefits and risks, is being integrated into local health systems and emerging drug markets.
Providing a unique perspective on globalized clinical trials,When Experiments Travelraises central questions: Are such trials exploitative or are they social goods? How are experiments controlled and how is drug safety ensured? And do these experiments help or harm public health in the countries where they are conducted? Empirically rich and theoretically innovative, the book shows that neither the language of coercion nor that of rational choice fully captures the range of situations and value systems at work in medical experiments today.When Experiments Travelchallenges conventional understandings of the ethics and politics of transnational science and changes the way we think about global medicine and the new infrastructures of our lives.
Habitat‐selection analyses allow researchers to link animals to their environment via habitat‐selection or step‐selection functions, and are commonly used to address questions related to wildlife ...management and conservation efforts. Habitat‐selection analyses that incorporate movement characteristics, referred to as integrated step‐selection analyses, are particularly appealing because they allow modelling of both movement and habitat‐selection processes.
Despite their popularity, many users struggle with interpreting parameters in habitat‐selection and step‐selection functions. Integrated step‐selection analyses also require several additional steps to translate model parameters into a full‐fledged movement model, and the mathematics supporting this approach can be challenging for many to understand.
Using simple examples, we demonstrate how weighted distribution theory and the inhomogeneous Poisson point process can facilitate parameter interpretation in habitat‐selection analyses. Furthermore, we provide a ‘how to’ guide illustrating the steps required to implement integrated step‐selection analyses using the amt package
By providing clear examples with open‐source code, we hope to make habitat‐selection analyses more understandable and accessible to end users.
Habitat‐selection analyses allow researchers to link animals to their environment in support of wildlife management and conservation efforts. We provide a ‘how to' guide for correctly interpreting parameters in habitat‐ and step‐selection functions and for implementing integrated step‐selection analyses using the amt package for program R.
This is a masterly theoretical treatment of one of the central problems in evolutionary biology, the evolution of social cooperation and conflict. Steven Frank tackles the problem with a highly ...original combination of approaches: game theory, classical models of natural selection, quantitative genetics, and kin selection. He unites these with the best of economic thought: a clear theory of model formation and comparative statics, the development of simple methods for analyzing complex problems, and notions of information and rationality. Using this unique, multidisciplinary approach, Frank makes major advances in understanding the foundations of social evolution. Frank begins by developing the three measures of value used in biology-- marginal value, reproductive value, and kin selection. He then combines these measures into a coherent framework, providing the first unified analysis of social evolution in its full ecological and demographic context. Frank also extends the theory of kin selection by showing that relatedness has two distinct meanings. The first is a measure of information about social partners, with close affinity to theories of correlated equilibrium and Bayesian rationality in economic game theory. The second is a measure of the fidelity by which characters are transmitted to future generations--an extended notion of heritability. Throughout, Frank illustrates his methods with many examples, including a complete reformulation of the theory of sex allocation. The book also provides a unique "how-to" guide for constructing models of social behavior. It is essential reading for evolutionary biologists and for economists, mathematicians, and others interested in natural selection.
The Trinidadian guppy ( Poecilia reticulata ) is well known to biologists and home aquarium enthusiasts alike. Scientists have studied guppies for most of the twentieth century. Some of the most ...intensive recent research has been conducted by behavioral ecologists, who have found that the guppy mating system makes guppies especially useful in the study of sexual selection and mate choice. By observing guppy behavior in aquaria, researchers hope to obtain new insights into how selection operates in natural populations. Here Anne Houde summarizes and synthesizes the scientific work done to date, relates the empirical findings on guppies to current themes in sexual selection theory, and suggests new directions for future research. This book describes the sexual behavior of guppies and examines how mate choice by females leads to the evolution of the conspicuous colors and the courtship displays for which guppies are widely recognized. The author shows that female guppies prefer males with bright color patterns, especially those with orange spots, and that the mating preferences of females lead to sexual selection on both color patterns and courtship displays of males. Houde's work addresses a number of areas that are of interest in sexual selection, including the remarkable degree of plasticity and evolutionary lability of sexual behavior in guppies, geographic variation in mating preferences, possible mechanisms for the evolution of female mating preferences, and the role of sexual selection in speciation. In conclusion, the author explores the implications of her findings for behavioral ecologists who study sexual selection in other species.
Habitat‐selection analyses are often used to link environmental covariates, measured within some spatial domain of assumed availability, to animal location data that are assumed to be independent. ...Step‐selection functions (SSFs) relax this independence assumption, by using a conditional model that explicitly acknowledges the spatiotemporal dynamics of the availability domain and hence the temporal dependence among successive locations. However, it is not clear how to produce an SSF‐based map of the expected utilization distribution. Here, we used SSFs to analyze virtual animal movement data generated at a fine spatiotemporal scale and then rarefied to emulate realistic telemetry data. We then compared two different approaches for generating maps from the estimated regression coefficients. First, we considered a naïve approach that used the coefficients as if they were obtained by fitting an unconditional model. Second, we explored a simulation‐based approach, where maps were generated using stochastic simulations of the parameterized step‐selection process. We found that the simulation‐based approach always outperformed the naïve mapping approach and that the latter overestimated home‐range size and underestimated local space‐use variability. Differences between the approaches were greatest for complex landscapes and high sampling rates, suggesting that the simulation‐based approach, despite its added complexity, is likely to offer significant advantages when applying SSFs to real data.
In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, many questioned whether the large number of political appointees in the Federal Emergency Management Agency contributed to the agency's poor handling of the ...catastrophe, ultimately costing hundreds of lives and causing immeasurable pain and suffering.The Politics of Presidential Appointmentsexamines in depth how and why presidents use political appointees and how their choices impact government performance--for better or worse.
One way presidents can influence the permanent bureaucracy is by filling key posts with people who are sympathetic to their policy goals. But if the president's appointees lack competence and an agency fails in its mission--as with Katrina--the president is accused of employing his friends and allies to the detriment of the public. Through case studies and cutting-edge analysis, David Lewis takes a fascinating look at presidential appointments dating back to the 1960s to learn which jobs went to appointees, which agencies were more likely to have appointees, how the use of appointees varied by administration, and how it affected agency performance. He argues that presidents politicize even when it hurts performance--and often with support from Congress--because they need agencies to be responsive to presidential direction. He shows how agency missions and personnel--and whether they line up with the president's vision--determine which agencies presidents target with appointees, and he sheds new light on the important role patronage plays in appointment decisions.
This book combines theory and research from educational and organizational psychology to provide guidance on improving the teacher selection process and, subsequently, educational outcomes for all ...students. The book identifies the characteristics of effective teachers, analyzes research on selection practices, and examines new approaches to teacher selection, recruitment, and development. The central premise of the book is that improving the effectiveness of teachers -- and, thus, students' educational outcomes -- can be achieved by making the recruitment and selection process more effective and more efficient. Accordingly, the book describes how to identify and select individuals for the teaching profession who display both strong cognitive attributes (e.g., subject knowledge) and essential non-cognitive attributes such as resilience, commitment to the profession, and motivation for teaching. Key topics include: (1) Teacher selection practices from the viewpoint of organizational and educational psychology; (2) Teacher effectiveness and the role of individual attributes; (3) Situational judgment tests (SJTs) and multiple mini-interviews (MMIs) for teacher selection; (4) Implementation of teacher selection programs; and (5) Teacher recruitment and development. Given its scope, the book represents an essential reference guide for scholars, educational leaders and policymakers, and graduate students in educational leadership programs, as well as professionals in child and school psychology, educational psychology, teaching and teacher education.
In the current resurgence of interest in the biological basis of animal behavior and social organization, the ideas and questions pursued by Charles Darwin remain fresh and insightful. This is ...especially true ofThe Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex, Darwin's second most important work. This edition is a facsimile reprint of the first printing of the first edition (1871), not previously available in paperback.
The work is divided into two parts. Part One marshals behavioral and morphological evidence to argue that humans evolved from other animals. Darwin shoes that human mental and emotional capacities, far from making human beings unique, are evidence of an animal origin and evolutionary development. Part Two is an extended discussion of the differences between the sexes of many species and how they arose as a result of selection. Here Darwin lays the foundation for much contemporary research by arguing that many characteristics of animals have evolved not in response to the selective pressures exerted by their physical and biological environment, but rather to confer an advantage in sexual competition. These two themes are drawn together in two final chapters on the role of sexual selection in humans.
In their Introduction, Professors Bonner and May discuss the place ofThe Descentin its own time and relation to current work in biology and other disciplines.
In recent years the American public has witnessed several hard-fought battles over nominees to the U.S. Supreme Court. In these heated confirmation fights, candidates' legal and political ...philosophies have been subject to intense scrutiny and debate.Citizens, Courts, and Confirmationsexamines one such fight--over the nomination of Samuel Alito--to discover how and why people formed opinions about the nominee, and to determine how the confirmation process shaped perceptions of the Supreme Court's legitimacy.
Drawing on a nationally representative survey, James Gibson and Gregory Caldeira use the Alito confirmation fight as a window into public attitudes about the nation's highest court. They find that Americans know far more about the Supreme Court than many realize, that the Court enjoys a great deal of legitimacy among the American people, that attitudes toward the Court as an institution generally do not suffer from partisan or ideological polarization, and that public knowledge enhances the legitimacy accorded the Court. Yet the authors demonstrate that partisan and ideological infighting that treats the Court as just another political institution undermines the considerable public support the institution currently enjoys, and that politicized confirmation battles pose a grave threat to the basic legitimacy of the Supreme Court.
Popular frameworks for studying habitat selection include resource‐selection functions (RSFs) and step‐selection functions (SSFs), estimated using logistic and conditional logistic regression, ...respectively. Both frameworks compare environmental covariates associated with locations animals visit with environmental covariates at a set of locations assumed available to the animals. Conceptually, slopes that vary by individual, that is, random coefficient models, could be used to accommodate inter‐individual heterogeneity with either approach. While fitting such models for RSFs is possible with standard software for generalized linear mixed‐effects models (GLMMs), straightforward and efficient one‐step procedures for fitting SSFs with random coefficients are currently lacking.
To close this gap, we take advantage of the fact that the conditional logistic regression model (i.e. the SSF) is likelihood‐equivalent to a Poisson model with stratum‐specific fixed intercepts. By interpreting the intercepts as a random effect with a large (fixed) variance, inference for random‐slope models becomes feasible with standard Bayesian techniques, or with frequentist methods that allow one to fix the variance of a random effect. We compare this approach to other commonly applied alternatives, including models without random slopes and mixed conditional regression models fit using a two‐step algorithm.
Using data from mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus) and Eurasian otters (Lutra lutra), we illustrate that our models lead to valid and feasible inference. In addition, we conduct a simulation study to compare different estimation approaches for SSFs and to demonstrate the importance of including individual‐specific slopes when estimating individual‐ and population‐level habitat‐selection parameters.
By providing coded examples using integrated nested Laplace approximations (INLA) and Template Model Builder (TMB) for Bayesian and frequentist analysis via the R packages R‐INLA and glmmTMB, we hope to make efficient estimation of RSFs and SSFs with random effects accessible to anyone in the field. SSFs with individual‐specific coefficients are particularly attractive since they can provide insights into movement and habitat‐selection processes at fine‐spatial and temporal scales, but these models had previously been very challenging to fit.
The authors provide a coherent framework for fitting resource‐selection functions (RSFs) and step‐selection functions (SSFs) with random effects. To allow fitting of SSFs, the authors reformulate the conditional logistic regression model as a (likelihood‐equivalent) Poisson model, where stratum‐specific intercepts are included as a random effect with a fixed large prior variance.
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