Full Disclosure Fung, Archon; Graham, Mary; Weil, David
03/2007
eBook
Odprti dostop
Governments in recent decades have employed public disclosure strategies to reduce risks, improve public and private goods and services, and reduce injustice. In the United States, these targeted ...transparency policies include financial securities disclosures, nutritional labels, school report cards, automobile rollover rankings, and sexual offender registries. They constitute a light-handed approach to governance that empowers citizens. However, as Full Disclosure shows these policies are frequently ineffective or counterproductive. Based on a comparative analysis of eighteen major policies, the authors suggest that transparency policies often produce information that is incomplete, incomprehensible, or irrelevant to the consumers, investors, workers, and community residents who could benefit from them. Sometimes transparency fails because those who are threatened by it form political coalitions to limit or distort information. To be successful, transparency policies must place the needs of ordinary citizens at centre stage and produce information that informs their everyday choices.
Bacterial surface fouling is problematic for a wide range of applications and industries, including, but not limited to medical devices (implants, replacement joints, stents, pacemakers), municipal ...infrastructure (pipes, wastewater treatment), food production (food processing surfaces, processing equipment), and transportation (ship hulls, aircraft fuel tanks). One method to combat bacterial biofouling is to modify the topographical structure of the surface in question, thereby limiting the ability of individual cells to attach to the surface, colonize, and form biofilms. Multiple research groups have demonstrated that micro and nanoscale topographies significantly reduce bacterial biofouling, for both individual cells and bacterial biofilms. Antifouling strategies that utilize engineered topographical surface features with well-defined dimensions and shapes have demonstrated a greater degree of controllable inhibition over initial cell attachment, in comparison to undefined, texturized, or porous surfaces. This review article will explore the various approaches and techniques used by researches, including work from our own group, and the underlying physical properties of these highly structured, engineered micro/nanoscale topographies that significantly impact bacterial surface attachment.
This lightly edited transcript of the inaugural (2023) Coral Bell School Lecture on Indigenous Diplomacy sketches the foundations of Aboriginal Australian socio-political ordering and inter-nation ...relations while issuing a challenge to dominant International Relations (IR) scholarship and the settler-derived Australian political order. For many millennia the original peoples of the Australian continent engaged in a long-term process of evolutionary political design using landscape as a template for political ordering. The resulting relationalist system enables the interconnected autonomy of individuals and groups, facilitates inter-group diplomacy, and provides long-term stability and security while managing survivalist human tendencies. Aboriginal political ordering and diplomacy are largely unknown in IR scholarship per settler-colonial dominance and the discipline's institutionalisation of survivalism. Aboriginal relational approaches nonetheless offer resources for expanding mainstream understandings of international relations and ameliorating dominant political practice, including by reconceptualising approaches to multipolarity and diplomacy. While there are no easy or immediate equivalences between Aboriginal inter-polity relations and contemporary political and international affairs, the civilisational culture of Australia's original owners and runners of Country provides openings for supporting modern nation-building and advancing diplomatic relations in our region. Headings in the text indicate sections of the lecture delivered by Mary Graham and Morgan Brigg.
Summary
The risk of off‐the‐job misconduct by high‐profile employees is a serious concern of top management in professional sport organizations, media and entertainment companies, and public‐facing ...entities in the government and education sectors. Yet there is little research on how to prevent or mitigate this form of misconduct in organizations. Utilizing upper echelons theory and the literature on demographic composition, we examine the relationship between the gender composition of executives of team organizations in a men's professional sport league and subsequent misconduct by players on those teams. Specifically, we employed multilevel and logistic regression analyses to unique data on U.S. National Football League team organizations, and we found that firms with a critical mass of women executives experienced fewer player arrests. No support was found for executive power as a moderator of this relationship. We discuss the implications of our findings for the demographic composition literature. We also offer guidance for preventing and managing off‐the‐job misconduct by high‐profile employees.
This reflective engagement with responses to the inaugural (2023) Coral Bell School Lecture on Indigenous Diplomacy considers and suggests a way of addressing conceptual and practical chasms ...associated with advancing Indigenous diplomacy in the context of contemporary foreign policy. First, we argue that differences among lifeworlds as well as deleterious challenges arising from settler colonialism need to be registered, embraced, and inhabited rather than glossed over. Second, we revisit the meaning and relationship between our terms 'survivalism' and 'relationalism', for increased clarity and understanding. Third, we consider challenges associated with the contingency and historical specificity of the ontological forms that are typically assumed in mainstream International Relations (IR) knowing. We conclude by drawing together the sketch of 'principled pragmatism' that we have explicated throughout as an orientation and way of responding to the challenge and difficulties of advancing Indigenous diplomacy in contemporary foreign policy. Our concluding comments register the necessity of pursuing principled pragmatism and Indigenous diplomacy in 'lawful' Aboriginal terms in the Oceania regional context.
The first peoples of the Australian continent and surrounding islands have fashioned ways of organising being together and relating among polities for many millennia. These longstanding forms of ...political ordering and diplomacy, operating for tens of thousands of years prior to the emergence of the state and the 'international system', gesture toward diverse species-historical forms of diplomacy that disrupt dominant contemporary understandings of diplomacy as a formalised and state-based practice (cf., Numelin 1950). We are therefore called upon to challenge the dominant approach to International Relations (IR) scholarship and international affairs practice. The necessary associated moves include unlearning dominant ways of thinking about and doing diplomacy and recuperating and engaging with the inter-polity ordering of diverse peoples of the world. This forum, centred on the Australian National University's inaugural Coral Bell School Annual Lecture on Indigenous Diplomacy, contributes one strand of the necessary unlearning of dominant diplomacy and evolving consideration of First Nations and diverse peoples' diplomacies and accompanying systems of political ordering.
Background. Human monkeypox is an emerging smallpox-like illness that was identified for the first time in the United States during an outbreak in 2003. Knowledge of the clinical manifestations of ...monkeypox in adults is limited, and clinical laboratory findings have been unknown. Methods. Demographic information; medical history; smallpox vaccination status; signs, symptoms, and duration of illness, and laboratory results (hematologic and serum chemistry findings) were extracted from medical records of patients with a confirmed case of monkeypox in the United States. Two-way comparisons were conducted between pediatric and adult patients and between patients with and patients without previous smallpox vaccination. Bivariate and multivariate analyses of risk factors for severe disease (fever temperature, ⩾38.3°C and the presence of rash ⩾100 lesions), activity and duration of hospitalization, and abnormal clinical laboratory findings were performed. Results. Of 34 patients with a confirmed case of monkeypox, 5 (15%) were defined as severely ill, and 9 (26%) were hospitalized for >48 h; no patients died. Previous smallpox vaccination was not associated with disease severity or hospitalization. Pediatric patients (age, ⩽18 years) were more likely to be hospitalized in an intensive care unit. Nausea and/or vomiting and mouth sores were independently associated with a hospitalization duration of >48 h and with having ⩾3 laboratory tests with abnormal results. Conclusion. Monkeypox can cause a severe clinical illness, with systemic signs and symptoms and abnormal clinical laboratory findings. In the appropriate epidemiologic context, monkeypox should be included in the differential diagnosis for patients with unusual vesiculopustular exanthems, mucosal lesions, gastrointestinal symptoms, and abnormal hematologic or hepatic laboratory findings. Clinicians evaluating a rash illness consistent with possible orthopoxvirus infection should alert public health officials and consider further evaluation.
Despite the scientific consensus, climate change continues to be socially and politically controversial. Consequently, teachers may worry about accusations of political indoctrination if they teach ...climate change in their classrooms. Research shows that many teachers are using the 'teaching the controversy' approach to teach climate change, essentially allowing students to make up their own mind about climate change. Drawing on some philosophical literature about indoctrination and controversial issues, we argue that such an approach is inappropriate and, given the escalating crisis that is climate change, potentially dangerous. Instead, we propose integrating three well-established educational practices, Philosophy for Children, place-responsive pedagogies, and Critical Indigenous Pedagogy, to help teachers and students critically examine climate change controversy while still meeting the key goals of climate change education.
Phase I of Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG) 0117 determined that 74 Gy was the maximum-tolerated dose with concurrent weekly carboplatin/paclitaxel chemotherapy for inoperable non-small-cell ...lung cancer (NSCLC). Phase II results are reported here. PATIENTS AND METHODS Patients with unresectable stages I-III NSCLC were eligible. Chemotherapy consisted of weekly paclitaxel at 50 mg/m(2) and carboplatin at area under the curve 2 mg/m(2). The radiation dose was 74 Gy given in 37 fractions. Radiation therapy volumes included those of the gross tumor and involved nodes. The volume of lung at or exceeding 20 Gy (V20) was mandated to be <or= 30%.
Of the combined phase I/II enrollment, a total of 55 patients received 74 Gy, of whom 53 were evaluable. The median follow-up was 19.3 months (range, 0.9 to 57.9 months) for all patients and 25.4 months (range, 13.1 to 57.9 months) for those still alive. The median survival for all patients was 25.9 months. The percentage surviving at least 12 months was 75.5% (95% CI, 65.7% to 85.2%). The median overall survival (OS) and progression-free survival (PFS) times for stage III patients (n = 44) were 21.6 months and 10.8 months, respectively. OS and PFS rates at 12 months were 72.7% and 50.0%, respectively. Twelve patients experienced grade >or= 3 lung toxicity (two patients had grade 5 lung toxicity).
The median survival time and OS rate at 12 months for this regimen are encouraging. These results serve as projection expectations for the high-dose radiation arms of the current RTOG 0617 phase III intergroup trial.
To test the Washington University (WU) patient dataset, analysis of which suggested that superior-to-inferior tumor position, maximum dose, and D35 (minimum dose to the hottest 35% of the lung ...volume) were valuable to predict radiation pneumonitis (RP), against the patient database from Radiation Therapy Oncology Group (RTOG) trial 9311.
The entire dataset consisted of 324 patients receiving definitive conformal radiotherapy for non-small-cell lung cancer (WU = 219, RTOG 9311 = 129). Clinical, dosimetric, and tumor location parameters were modeled to predict RP in the individual datasets and in a combined dataset. Association quality with RP was assessed using Spearman's rank correlation (r) for univariate analysis and multivariate analysis; comparison between subgroups was tested using the Wilcoxon rank sum test.
The WU model to predict RP performed poorly for the RTOG 9311 data. The most predictive model in the RTOG 9311 dataset was a single-parameter model, D15 (r = 0.28). Combining the datasets, the best derived model was a two-parameter model consisting of mean lung dose and superior-to-inferior gross tumor volume position (r = 0.303). An equation and nomogram to predict the probability of RP was derived using the combined patient population.
Statistical models derived from a large pool of candidate models resulted in well-tuned models for each subset (WU or RTOG 9311), which did not perform well when applied to the other dataset. However, when the data were combined, a model was generated that performed well on each data subset. The final model incorporates two effects: greater risk due to inferior lung irradiation, and greater risk for increasing normal lung mean dose. This formula and nomogram may aid clinicians during radiation treatment planning for lung cancer.
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