scholarly journals Understanding basic numbers: examples from Brexit, Covid and common medical conditions

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-38
Author(s):  
Michael J Campbell ◽  
Dan Green ◽  
Daniel Barker
Keyword(s):  
Absolute Risk ◽  
Continuous Variable ◽  
Primary Sources ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Numbers Needed To Treat ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Pictorial Representations ◽  
Basic Numbers

The UK Brexit debate and the current Covid pandemic have been fertile grounds for people seeking poor use of statistics, and demonstrate a need to reiterate some basic principles of data presentation. Communicating basic numbers to convey the correct message is a vital skill for a public health professional but even basic numbers can be difficult to understand, and are susceptible to misuse. The first issue is how to understand ‘orphan’ numbers; numbers quoted without comparison or context. This leads on to the problems of understand numbers as proportions and how to make comparisons using proportions. Percentages, and in particular percentage changes, are also a major source of misunderstanding and the baseline percentage should always be given. The use of relative risk can also convey the wrong message and should always be accompanied by a measure of absolute risk. Similarly, numbers needed to treat should also refer to baseline risks. Communicating numbers is often more effective using natural counts or frequencies rather than fractions or proportions, and using pictorial representations of proportions can also be effective. The paper will also examine the problems of using simple ratios to try and adjust one continuous variable by another in particular the use of the BMI and for standardising death rates by institution. The misuse of reporting occurs in primary sources such as academic papers, but even more so in secondary reporting sources such as general media reports. It is natural to try and convey complex messages using a single summary number, but there are assumptions behind these summaries that should be questioned. It is usually better to give the individual numbers rather than a ratio of them.

Hermeneutic circle in development of methodological culture of future music teacher

2017 ◽  
pp. 154-158
Author(s):  
A. S. Koval
Keyword(s):  
Future Teacher ◽  
Music Teacher ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Hermeneutic Circle ◽  
High Culture ◽  
Text Understanding ◽  
Hermeneutic Approach ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Positive Effect

This article is devoted to the studying hermeneutic circle in the development of methodological culture of future music teacher. Under the conditions of globalization processes, tendencies of convergence of world cultures improvement of culturological training of student youth requires new approaches, in particular, culturological training of students of pedagogical specialties. The task of pedagogical education is to develop a teacher as a specialist and as a person of high culture, who has a special positive effect on the personality of school student. This article analyses the works of scientists dedicated to the issues of establishment and development of the hermeneutic approach in philosophical, psychological, and logical and gnosiological contexts. It is defined the essence of the concept of “hermeneutic circle” as one of the basic principles of the hermeneutic approach. There have been provided the examples of interpretation of the principle of hermeneutic circle by various scientists. Hermeneutic approach is applied in sciences such as pedagogy, psychology, economics, sociology etc. In pedagogical science the hermeneutic approach at the level of conceptual use was elaborated by A. Zakirova. She introduced the term “pedagogical hermeneutics”. Hermeneutic circle as a principle of text understanding is based on the interrelation of the part and the whole. Understanding of the whole consists of the understanding of the individual parts, and understanding of the parts requires understanding of the whole. The concepts of the part and the whole are correlated: the text is a part concerning the whole creative activity of the author, which in its turn is a part of the particular genre or literature in general, as well as the part of spiritual life and biography of the author. The idea of hermeneutic circle means also that there is no understanding of the text without certain prerequisites: understanding is preceded by some idea of what is yet to understand. There have been determined the peculiarities of the use of the principle of hermeneutic circle in the development of methodological culture of the future teacher of musical art. In light of hermeneutical trends, the penetration of which in the realm of musical art can be traced quite clearly, the use of the hermeneutic circle principle in the development of methodological culture of the future teacher of musical art appears not only in the narrow interpretation of the particular phenomenon or group of phenomena, but much wider — as a means of learning and understanding of the worldview by a person.

Is it Worth CANVASing for CREDENCE? A Benefit-risk Analysis

2020 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 509-514
Author(s):  
Binayak Sinha ◽  
Samit Ghosal
Keyword(s):  
Adverse Events ◽  
Fungal Infections ◽  
Absolute Risk ◽  
Pooled Analysis ◽  
Major Adverse Cardiovascular Events ◽  
Number Needed To Treat ◽  
Pooled Data ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Fracture Risks ◽  
Number Needed To Harm

Background and Aims: A number of significant positive and negative signals emerged from the CANVAS Program and CREDENCE trial with the use of canagliflozin. These signals are confusing. A Likelihood of being Helped of Harmed (LHH) analysis was conducted to determine the risk, benefit ratio associated with canagliflozin use and address the signals as a continuum. Materials &Methods: LHH was calculated from the number needed to treat (NNT) and number needed to harm (NNH) available from the absolute risk reductions reported with the outcomes of interest, in these two trials. Results: In the CANVAS Program, LHH for major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE) points at a significant benefit with canagliflozin use in comparison to amputation (1.65), fractures (1.65) and euglycaemic diabetic ketoacidosis (euDKA) (16.67) risks. Only genital fungal infections were significant more in both sexes (0.21-M and 0.1-F) when LHH was matched against the positive outcomes. In contrast, the hHF benefits were outweighed by amputation (0.95) and fracture risks (0.95). : In CREDENCE trial, the LHH for Primary composite, Renal composite and MACE, all supported the benefits in comparison to any adverse events encountered in the trial. : The LHH from pooled data (CANVAS Program and CREDENCE trial) was in favour of all the benefits (hHF and renal composites) except for MACE matched against amputation (0.66). Conclusion: The outcome benefits were in favour of canagliflozin in comparison to all reported adverse events, when hHF and renal composite were under consideration, in both the individual and pooled LHH analysis. However, the MACE benefits were overwhelmed by amputation risk in the pooled analysis.

Sisterhood and After

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Margaretta Jolly
Keyword(s):  
Oral History ◽  
Women's Liberation ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
Collective Memories ◽  
Women’S Liberation ◽  
Two Generations ◽  
Personal Accounts ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Cultural Taste

This ground-breaking history of the UK Women’s Liberation Movement explores the individual and collective memories of women at its heart. Spanning at least two generations and four nations, and moving through the tumultuous decades from the 1970s to the present, the narrative is powered by feminist oral history, notably the British Library’s Sisterhood and After: The Women’s Liberation Oral History Project. The book mines these precious archives to bring fresh insight into the lives of activists and the campaigns and ideas they mobilised. It navigates still-contested questions of class, race, violence, and upbringing—as well as the intimacies, sexualities and passions that helped fire women’s liberation—and shows why many feminists still regard notions of ‘equality’ or even ‘equal rights’ as insufficient. It casts new light on iconic campaigns and actions in what is sometimes simplified as feminism’s ‘second wave’, and enlivens a narrative too easily framed by ideological abstraction with candid, insightful, sometimes painful personal accounts of national and less well-known women activists. They describe lives shaped not only by structures of race, class, gender, sexuality and physical ability, but by education, age, love and cultural taste. At the same time, they offer extraordinary insights into feminist lifestyles and domestic pleasures, and the crossovers and conflicts between feminists. The work draws on oral history’s strength as creative method, as seen with its conclusion, where readers are urged to enter the archives of feminist memory and use what they find there to shape their own political futures.

Punk as Folk: Continuities and Tensions in the UK and Beyond

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pete Dale
Keyword(s):  
Folk Music ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Collective Creativity ◽  
Living Tradition ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk

Numerous claims have been made by a wide range of commentators that punk is somehow “a folk music” of some kind. Doubtless there are several continuities. Indeed, both tend to encourage amateur music-making, both often have affiliations with the Left, and both emerge at least partly from a collective/anti-competitive approach to music-making. However, there are also significant tensions between punk and folk as ideas/ideals and as applied in practice. Most obviously, punk makes claims to a “year zero” creativity (despite inevitably offering re-presentation of at least some existing elements in every instance), whereas folk music is supposed to carry forward a tradition (which, thankfully, is more recognized in recent decades as a subject-to-change “living tradition” than was the case in folk’s more purist periods). Politically, meanwhile, postwar folk has tended more toward a socialist and/or Marxist orientation, both in the US and UK, whereas punk has at least rhetorically claimed to be in favor of “anarchy” (in the UK, in particular). Collective creativity and competitive tendencies also differ between the two (perceived) genre areas. Although the folk scene’s “floor singer” tradition offers a dispersal of expressive opportunity comparable in some ways to the “anyone can do it” idea that gets associated with punk, the creative expectation of the individual within the group differs between the two. Punk has some similarities to folk, then, but there are tensions, too, and these are well worth examining if one is serious about testing out the common claim, in both folk and punk, that “anyone can do it.”

scholarly journals ‘Rising demand and decreasing resources’: Theorising the ‘cost of austerity’ as a barrier to social worker discretion

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
CIARÁN MURPHY
Keyword(s):  
Social Worker ◽  
Child Protection ◽  
Child Protection Services ◽  
Radical Reform ◽  
Critical Realist ◽  
Documentary Analysis ◽  
Effective System ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
The Cost

Abstract The Munro Review of Child Protection asserted that the English child protection system had become overly ‘defensive’, ‘bureaucratised’ and ‘standardised’, meaning that social workers were not employing their discretion in the interests of the individual child. This paper reports on the results of an ethnographic case study of one of England’s statutory child protection teams. The research sought to explore the extent of social worker discretion relative to Munro’s call for ‘radical reform’ and a move towards a more ‘child-centred’ system. Employing an iterative mixed methods design – encompassing documentary analysis, observation, focus group, questionnaire, interview and ‘Critical Realist Grounded Theory’ – the study positioned the UK Government’s prolonged policy of ‘austerity’ as a barrier to social worker discretion. This was because the policy was seen to be contributing to an increased demand for child protection services; and a related sense amongst practitioners that they were afforded insufficient time with the child to garner the requisite knowledge, necessary for discretionary behaviour. Ultimately, despite evidence of progress relative to assertions that social worker discretion had been eroded, the paper concludes that there may still be ‘more to do’ if we are to achieve the ‘child-centred’ and ‘effective’ system that Munro advocated.

Gender perspectives on extended working life policies

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Áine Ní Léime ◽  
Wendy Loretto
Keyword(s):  
Working Life ◽  
Defined Contribution ◽  
Population Policies ◽  
Flexible Working ◽  
Working Set ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Pension Age ◽  
Pension Contribution ◽  
The Uk ◽  
State Pension

This chapter documents international policy developments and provides a gender critique of retirement, employment and pension policies in Australia, Ireland, Germany, Portugal, Sweden, the UK, and the US. It assesses the degree to which the individual country's extended working life policies have adopted the agenda (increasing pension age and introducing flexible working) set out by the OECD and the EU. Policies include raising state pension age, changes in the duration of pension contribution requirements, the move from defined benefits to defined contribution pensions, policies on caring for vulnerable members of the population, policies enabling flexible working and anti-age discrimination measures. An expanded framework is used to assess the degree to which gender and other intersecting issues such as health, caring, class, type of occupation and/or membership of minority communities have (or have not) been taken into account in designing and implementing policies extending working life.

Guidelines for Teaching Speech-Language Pathologists About the AAC Assessment Process

2011 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 82-86
Author(s):  
Iris Fishman
Keyword(s):  
Augmentative And Alternative Communication ◽  
Communication Systems ◽  
Feature Matching ◽  
Assessment Process ◽  
High Tech ◽  
Alternative Communication ◽  
Team Process ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Communication Needs ◽  
The Individual

Abstract Although students may not become augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) clinical specialists, they often will work with individuals demonstrating complex communication needs who benefit from AAC. This necessitates knowledge of some basic principles of assessment including AAC assessment as a team process involving planning and implementing interventions for current and future communication needs; the inclusion of no-tech, low-tech, and high-tech communication systems; and assessing communication needs with partners in the individual's social network. The assessment also must include a capability profile and feature matching to select the appropriate components of the AAC system. Because the system we provide for today will become the system we use tomorrow, assessment must be considered an ongoing process throughout the lifespan of the individual.

scholarly journals ‘'Sex Changes'? Paradigm Shifts in ‘Sex’ and ‘Gender’ following the Gender Recognition Act?’

2007 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 75-89 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Whittle ◽  
Lewis Turner
Keyword(s):  
Sex Change ◽  
Gender Recognition ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
Gender Variance ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Legal Understanding

Gender transformations are normatively understood as somatic, based on surgical reassignment, where the sexed body is aligned with the gender identity of the individual through genital surgery – hence the common lexicon ‘sex change surgery’. We suggest that the UK Gender Recognition Act 2004 challenges what constitutes a ‘sex change’ through the Act's definitions and also the conditions within which legal ‘recognition’ is permitted. The sex/gender distinction, (where sex normatively refers to the sexed body, and gender, to social identity) is demobilised both literally and legally. This paper discusses the history of medico-socio-legal definitions of sex have been developed through decision making processes when courts have been faced with people with gender variance and, in particular, the implications of the Gender Recognition Act for our contemporary legal understanding of sex. We ask, and attempt to answer, has ‘sex’ changed?

scholarly journals Myth of King Arthur as a Conceptual Matrix for Understanding Brexit

2020 ◽  
pp. 192-214
Author(s):  
A. A. Sharapkova
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Analysis ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
King Arthur ◽  
Media Discourse ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Political Events ◽  
Three Stages ◽  
British Press ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk

The article analyses media discourse characterized by appealing to the myth about King Arthur against the background of the political crisis in the UK (Brexit). The publications of the British press in 2016-2019, online polls and blogs served as a material. Applying both linguistic and conceptual analysis, we identify the stages the myth about King Arthur gets gradually actualized. Cognitive mechanisms that get profiled at each stage are considered. Three stages of myth actualization are distinguished: (1) from using the idiom about the search for the Holy Grail in politics to comparing Brexit with finding a magic artifact, (2) comparing crisis participants with other elements of the myth, (3) modeling the way out of the crisis through the description of the search for a new leader. Particular attention is paid to how the individual elements of the myth work in dynamics. For example, it is shown that the image of the Grail undergoes an axiological reassessment from positive to negative as attitudes toward political events and figures change. We conclude that in times of crisis, society turns to national mythology, reinterprets it within a new context.

scholarly journals Impact of Ownership Structure on Bank Profitability in Nigeria

2008 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 170-183
Author(s):  
Uhomoibhi Aburime Toni
Keyword(s):  
Emerging Markets ◽  
Ownership Structure ◽  
Developed Countries ◽  
Bank Profitability ◽  
Limited Applicability ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Finance Theory ◽  
Political Economic

Ownership structure is considered an important factor that affects a firm’s health. If ownership structure affects a firm’s health, it is possible then to use the ownership structure to predict firm profitability. Against this backdrop, this paper analyzes the relationship between ownership structure and bank profitability in Nigeria. There are two motivations for this paper. Firstly, midway into the banks consolidation exercise in Nigeria, the CBN identified the need for a determination of the most appropriate composition of bank capitalization that would enhance the individual and systemic profitability and efficiency of banks in Nigeria post-consolidation. Hence, it decided to minimize state governments’ investment in banks during the exercise and also issued a December 2007 ultimatum to all tiers of governments that have stakes in banks to dilute their investments to a maximum of 10 per cent. Unfortunately, the CBN did not state any econometrically-based rationale giving credence to its directives. Secondly, the effect of ownership structure and concentration on a firm’s performance is an important issue in the literature of finance theory. However, no researcher has studied this important aspect of finance theory in the Nigerian context. It is worth noting that most research on ownership structure and firm performance has been dominated by studies conducted in developed countries. However, there is an increasing awareness that theories originating from developed countries such as the USA and the UK may have limited applicability to emerging markets. Emerging markets have different characteristics such as different political, economic and institutional conditions, which limit the application of developed markets’ empirical models.

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