by
Richard Grieve;
Youqi Yang;
Sam Abbott;
Giridhara R. Babu;
Malay Bhattacharyya;
Natalie Dean;
Stephen Evans;
Nicholas Jewell;
Sinead M. Langan;
Woojoo Lee;
Geert Molenberghs;
Liam Smeeth;
Elizabeth Williamson;
Bhramar Mukherjee
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought about valuable insights regarding models, data, and experiments. In this narrative review, we summarised the existing literature on these three themes, exploring the challenges of providing forecasts, the requirement for real-time linkage of health-related datasets, and the role of ‘experimentation’ in evaluating interventions. This literature review encourages us to broaden our perspective for the future, acknowledging the significance of investing in models, data, and experimentation, but also to invest in areas that are conceptually more abstract: the value of ‘team science’, the need for public trust in science, and in establishing processes for using science in policy. Policy-makers rely on model forecasts early in a pandemic when there is little data, and it is vital to communicate the assumptions, limitations, and uncertainties (theme 1). Linked routine data can provide critical information, for example, in establishing risk factors for adverse outcomes but are often not available quickly enough to make a real-time impact. The interoperability of data resources internationally is required to facilitate sharing across jurisdictions (theme 2). Randomised controlled trials (RCTs) provided timely evidence on the efficacy and safety of vaccinations and pharmaceuticals but were largely conducted in higher income countries, restricting generalisability to low- and middle-income countries (LMIC). Trials for non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) were almost non-existent which was a missed opportunity (theme 3). Building on these themes from the narrative review, we underscore the importance of three other areas that need investment for effective evidence-driven policy-making. The COVID-19 response relied on strong multidisciplinary research infrastructures, but funders and academic institutions need to do more to incentivise team science (4). To enhance public trust in the use of scientific evidence for policy, researchers and policy-makers must work together to clearly communicate uncertainties in current evidence and any need to change policy as evidence evolves (5). Timely policy decisions require an established two-way process between scientists and policy makers to make the best use of evidence (6). For effective preparedness against future pandemics, it is essential to establish models, data, and experiments as fundamental pillars, complemented by efforts in planning and investment towards team science, public trust, and evidence-based policy-making across international communities. The paper concludes with a ‘call to actions’ for both policy-makers and researchers.
by
Winfred C. Wang;
Robert Clark Brown;
Melissa A. McNaull;
Zora R. Rogers;
Martha Barton;
Meghna R. Dua;
Jane S. Hankins;
Jeffrey Gossett;
Julie Richardson;
Jerlym S. Porter;
Guolian Kang;
Jeremie H. Estepp
TO THE EDITOR:
Standard hydroxyurea treatment for sickle cell anemia (SCA) is often initiated at an oral dose of 15 to 20 mg/kg once daily. In 2014, the Expert Panel Report of the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute recommended starting doses of 15 to 20 mg/kg per day for adults and children, with increases of 5 mg/kg per day every 8 weeks “if dose escalation is warranted.” However, escalating the dose to the maximum tolerated dose (MTD) vs maintaining a fixed dose has been controversial, and relatively little has been published regarding hydroxyurea treatment for infants.
This essay analyses the innovative architectonic approaches developed by Soviet architects in their entries to a 1927 design competition for a new socialist housing type, the so-called dom-kommuna or house-commune. The competition, sponsored by the preeminent architectural journal, Sovremennaia Arkhitektura, sought solutions to address Moscow’s severe housing shortage within the limits of economic stringency. While the eight published entries abound with charts and graphs to substantiate claims of eficiency, these technocratic accoutrements obscure radical spatial complexity. At the scale of both the building and the unit, the competition designs capitalize on architectural expertise to wrest generosity from Spartan conditions. In each entry, careful allocation of program and circulation resulted in a masterful balance of plan minimalism and sectional expansiveness. This paper situates the house-commune competition entries within their historic context, but also thoroughly analyzes the architectural solutions to elicit programmatic and spatial and strategies that may be instructive for current practice.
In 1940 a group of villagers from the Oaxaca town of Zapotitlán Lagunas wrote to the president to protest that the local authorities were forcing them to build a new road for free. Every day, local policemen stormed into their houses, pulled them out of bed, and marched them to the site of the new route. Here, they were forced at gunpoint to work for twelve hours without food, rest, or remuneration. They had never agreed to the project and as “proletarians” they deserved at least the minimum salary for such labor. In reply, the local mayor claimed that these villagers formed a small minority. They were longtime refuseniks, who had repeatedly disobeyed the authorities and simply wanted to “interrupt works of public utility” and “hamper a village that wants to progress.” As the mayor explained, “Tomorrow Zapotitlán will be a town of great improvements, an air field, a road, and other improvements . . . from which we will obtain happiness.” Most had accepted his claims and “offered their labor with good will.”
The present report describes the activities and results of primary research in 2017 on Gebusi violence and conflict management funded by the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation as a follow up to research separately funded by HFG in 2016 (see previous 2016 final project HFG report). The project investigates the causes of homicide reduction among Gebusi of Papua New Guinea, who the PI documented to have one of the highest rates of homicide ethnographically known during the precolonial, colonial, and early postcolonial periods (Knauft 1985a, 2013) – following which there has been a now-confirmed reduction of homicide to zero, since 1989. The presently-described research was undertaken successfully in May-July 2017. Unforeseen circumstances included an intense La Niña cloudy and rainy season that reduced solar power and computer use in the field to a minimum along with other challenges that included closure of the nearest airstrip at Nomad; failure of all outside communications; difficulty of arranging flights in or out of the area at the beginning and end of fieldwork (there are no roads); deterioration of supplies stored locally in 2016; and various health difficulties. Despite these issues, fieldwork was completed very successfully, with dramatic new developments both reinforcing and extending the preliminary project results obtained in 2016.
The thesis of my paper - evolving out the abstract submitted months ago - is that our lingering ethnocentric reification of "dreaming" as not just distinct from but the opposite of "waking" - dream consciuosness versus waking consiousness - elides and occludes much power and value in and across mental states that include dreaming. There is arguably a strong connection if not continuum across mental states that may include waking thought projections, day dreaming, somnolence, and states of lucid consciousness that can include dreaming, spirit possession or shamanism, and the impact of externally induced hallucinogenic visions and experiences. Especially when viewed in comparative cultural context, there is frequently a prductive if not conversational continuum across diverse types and states of consciousness, While this is a simple and obvious point - and one that psychological anthropologists have been at the forefront of making for many years, it can be useful to reassert and rediscover it in our current context of dreams and dreaming. Like the critique of the Western split between mind and body, as well as that between mind and brain, critiques once made don't preclude the scholarly tendency to reproduce them over time, reinforcing their continuing limitations of perspective. Like other contraining Western reifications and polarized conceptualizations, that between waking daytime consciousness and the nighttime consciousness of dreaming can be productively reconsidered.
History is always in part a history of the present, reflecting our figure-ground relation to the past. So too, arguably, anthropology over the decades has arguably reflected its particular time and place as this has changed over time. We can presently consider this in relation to the terms "savage" and "primitive" in our field. First, some objective evidence concerning the validity of our session statement can be taking from ngram - Google's calculation of the frequency of word use in English language books.
During the past four decades, mining and oil/gas developments have increasingly become the centrepiece, the Holy Grail, of economic and social development in Papua New Guinea (PNG). This is highly evident in national-level discourse and in local desires for mega-development. One may take by example an eight-page full-colour PNG advertising spread in The Wall Street Journal (WSJ), which came to news-stands in the US in November 2018 (Eye on PNG 2018). Based on published advertising rates for the WSJ, the newspaper insert cost about USD2 million, or about 6.5 million kina, for distribution in the US alone. This is equivalent to 1 kina and 20 toea for every man and women in PNG over the age of 15. A prominent statement of self-promotion to the larger world of global investment and finance, this advertising section is also a significant statement of national self-identification and aspiration.
How would Foucault have viewed Trump as President, and Trumpism in the US more generally? More realistically, how can we discern and insightfully apply genealogical insights after Foucault to better comprehend and act in relation to our current political situation in the US? Questions of factuality across a base register of asserted falsehoods are now prominent in American politics in ways that put assertions of scholarly objectivity and interpretation in yet deeper question than previously. The extent, range, and vitriol of alt-Right assertions and their viral growth in American media provoke progressivist resistance and anxiety, but how can this opposition be most productively channeled? This paper examines a range of critical perspectives, timeframes, and topical optics with respect to Trump and Trumpism, including nationalist, racist, sexist, class-based, and oligarchical dimensions. These are considered in relation to media and the incitement of polarized subjectivity and dividing practices, and also in relation to Marxist political economy, neoliberalism/neoimperialism, and postcolonialism. I then address the limit points of Foucault, including with respect to engaged political activism and social protest movements, and I consider the relevance of these for the diverse optics that political genealogy as a form of analysis might pursue. Notwithstanding and indeed because of the present impetus to take organized political action, a Foucauldian perspective is useful in foregrounding the broader late modern formations of knowledge, power, and subjectivity within which both Rightist and Leftist political sensibilities in the US are presently cast. At larger issue are the values inscribed through contemporary late modernity that inform both sides of present divisive polarities—and which make the prognosis of tipping points or future political outcomes particularly difficult. As such, productive strategies of activist opposition are likely to vary under alternative conditions and opportunities—including in relation to the particular skills, history, and predilection of activists themselves. If the age of reason threatens to be over, the question of how and in what ways critical intellectualism can connect with productive action emerges afresh for each of us in a higher and more personal key.
Genealogical analysis in the present begs reconsideration of Nietzschean and Foucauldian precursors in relation to the ethical subject position of the subject, on the one hand, and application to concrete contexts of lineal connection asserted diversely across cultural time and space, on the other. This paper considers how the relation between genealogy and history has emerged in anthropologically relevant ways since Foucault, including comparisons and contrasts with selected recent philosophical treatments, with implications for contemporary understandings of subversion, resistance, and the critical assessment of truth claims, including concerning veridiction itself. Developments in anthropology resonate with many features associated with genealogical analysis in Foucault’s latter works. In selected respects, the subversive process of problematizing received accounts of historical and cultural development articulates with the subversive process of ethnographic investigation, whereby received Western or other assumptions are defamiliarized by being thrown into contrastive cultural relief. The more general relation between genealogical analysis and the critical understanding of modernity is discussed, including in relation to contemporary political genealogy and ‘inter-genealogical’ analysis.