Left-Wing Christians at Berkeley: Between the Theology of Liberation and Marxist Theories

The 1960s were marked by profound political and cultural transformation and Berkeley was one of most deeply involved institutions. Though much has been written about the students’ movement, no research has stopped to consider the experience of the Berkeley Free Church, the subsequent publication of the journal Radical Religion and the constitution of the American Christians toward Socialism movement. The young people who were the key figures in this experience are an emblem of the Christians of the times, open as they were to ecumenical exchange and attentive to the problems of the poor and the socially excluded. The international and national context led them to progressively assume more radical positions, to use Marxism as a method for interpreting society’s “contradictions” and to seek a political dialogue with the world of the Left. This path of theoretical and political quest concluded in the 1980s, when a new wave of conservatism put an end to any hope of radically transforming Western societies.

Film thickness in elastohydrodynamically lubricated slender elliptic contacts: Part I – numerical studies of central film thickness

In this paper, analytical equations for the central film thickness in slender elliptic contacts are investigated. A comparison of state-of-the-art formulas with simulation results of a multilevel elastohydrodynamic lubrication solver is conducted and shows considerable deviation. Therefore, a new film thickness formula for slender elliptic contacts with variable ellipticity is derived. It incorporates asymptotic solutions, which results in validity over a large parameter domain. It captures the behaviour of increasing film thickness with increasing load for specific very slender contacts. The new formula proves to be significantly more accurate than current equations. Experimental studies and discussions on minimum film thickness will be presented in a subsequent publication.

Charting the course from abstract to published article

OBJECTIVE Abstracts act as short, efficient sources of new information. This intentional brevity potentially diminishes scientific reliability of described findings. The authors’ objective was to 1) determine the proportion of abstracts submitted to the American Association of Neurological Surgeons (AANS) annual meeting that subsequently are published in peer-reviewed journals, 2) assess AANS abstract publications for publication bias, and 3) assess AANS abstract publications for differing results. METHODS The authors screened all abstracts from the annual 2012 AANS meeting and identified their corresponding full-text publication, if applicable, by searching PubMed/MEDLINE. The abstract and subsequent publication were analyzed for result type (positive or negative) and differences in results. RESULTS Overall, 49.3% of abstracts were published as papers. Many (18.1%) of these published papers differed in message from their original abstract. Publication bias exists, with positive abstracts being 40% more likely to be published than negative abstracts. The top journals in which the full-text articles were published were Journal of Neurosurgery (13.1%), Neurosurgery (7.3%), and World Neurosurgery (5.4%). CONCLUSIONS Here, the authors demonstrate that alone, abstracts are not reliable sources of information. Many abstracts ultimately remain unpublished; therefore, they do not attain a level of scientific scrutiny that merits alteration of clinical care. Furthermore, many that are published have differing results or conclusions. In addition, positive publication bias exists, as positive abstracts are more likely to be published than negative abstracts.

“Saratov font”: Complication of church-state relations in the USSR in the late 1940s (based on materials from the Saratov Volga region)

The article reveals the relationship between the Soviet state and the Russian Orthodox Church (the ROC) in the late 1940s on the territory of the Saratov Volga region. After several years of a forced truce, the state began to tighten its religious policy again and resumed an active anti-religious campaign. One of the reasons was the scandal in the Saratov region in 1949, connected with the mass bathing on the Epiphany holiday and the subsequent publication of I. Ryabov’s feuilleton called “Saratov font” in the Pravda newspaper. The anti-religious campaign that followed these events revealed multiple manifestations of religiousness in the Saratov region of both the ordinary population and representatives of the authorities. It turned out that many people participated in the sacraments of the Church, wore crosses and provided all possible assistance to the Church. As a result, a wave of administrative punishments started again: believers were expelled from the party, fired from their jobs. But a complete rupture of relations between the state and the church did not happen, which was associated with the intense foreign policy activities of the ROC and its participation in the struggle for peace.

Analyzing NIH KL2 Outcomes: A Pilot Study Using Administrative Data

Background: The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) funds “K” awards that provide both resources and access to mentoring believed to be invaluable for early career faculty. The KL2 Mentored Career Development Award trains early-career clinicians with the goal of guiding scholars toward an independent clinical and translational research career. This study presents the pilot of a systematic, low-burden method to examine scientific and career outcomes for these awardees, applying a novel set of linked administrative data. Methods: Clinical and Translational Science Award hubs administering KL2 awards at ten universities who participate in the Institute for Research on Innovation and Science (IRIS) provided names of scholars in their KL2 cohorts. Using extensive data on sponsored projects which IRIS member universities provide, we linked the KL2 scholars to information on subsequent publication, patent, and grant activity. Results: Analyses of linked data supported a rigorous, sustainable, low-cost approach to examining career outcomes. A subset of key metrics identified by CTSA evaluators were operationalized as an examination of the post-award careers of KL2 awardees. We successfully identified contemporaneous faculty with different NIH K Awards to use as comparison groups. The pilot culminated in university-specific and aggregate reporting to all participating hubs. Conclusions: This pilot demonstrates that substantive evaluations of early career programs are possible using administrative data from universities with low additional burden. Integration of research on career development outcomes offer new means to examine the effects of increasingly diverse funding, team, and collaborative network structures, advancing both knowledge about the workings of science and practices to support early career faculty. This approach could be extended to support rigorous multi-institutional evaluation and research on a range of student and faculty training mechanisms.

Disclosure of personal identifying information in studies of neighborhood contexts and patient outcomes. (Preprint)

UNSTRUCTURED Clinical epidemiology and patient-oriented health care research that incorporates neighborhood-level data is becoming increasingly common. A key step in conducting this research is converting patient address data to longitude and latitude data, a process known as geocoding. Several commonly used approaches to geocoding (e.g. the tidygeocoder R package) send patient addresses over the internet to online third party geocoding services. Here we describe how these approaches to geocoding disclose patient’s Personal Identifying Information (PII) and then how subsequent publication of the research findings discloses these same patient’s Protected Heath Information (PHI). We describe how these disclosures can occur and strategies to maintain patient privacy while studying neighborhood effects on patient outcomes.

Development of an in situ Acoustic Anemometer to Measure Wind in the Stratosphere for SENSOR

The Stratospheric Environmental respoNses to Solar stORms (SENSOR) campaign investigates the influence of solar storms on the stratosphere. This campaign employs a long-duration zero-pressure balloon as a platform to carry multiple types of payloads during a series of flight experiments in the mid-latitude stratosphere from 2019 to 2022. This article describes the development and testing of an acoustic anemometer for obtaining in situ wind measurements along the balloon trajectory. Developing this anemometer was necessary, as there is no existing commercial off-the-shelf product, to the authors' knowledge, capable of obtaining in situ wind measurements on a high-altitude balloon or other similar floating platform in the stratosphere. The anemometer is also equipped with temperature, pressure, and humidity sensors from a Temperature-Pressure-Humidity measurement module, inherited from a radiosonde developed for sounding balloons. The acoustic anemometer and other sensors were used in a flight experiment of the SENSOR campaign that took place in the Da chaidan District (95.37° E, 37.74° N) on 4 September 2019. The zonal and meridional wind speed observations, which were obtained during level flight at an altitude exceeding 20 km, are presented. This is the first time that in situ wind measurements were obtained during level flight at this altitude. In addition to wind speed measurements, temperature, pressure, and relative humidity measurements during ascent are compared to observations from a nearby radiosonde launched four hours earlier. Further analysis of the wind data will presented in a subsequent publication. The problems experienced by the acoustic anemometer during the 2019 experiment show that the acoustic anemometer must be improved for future experiments in the SENSOR campaign.

Single- or double-blind review? A field study of system preference, reliability, bias, and validity

Many scientists experience a practice-preference gap about peer review. Single-blind review---where authors' identities are revealed to reviewers---is often used for evaluation. Yet, double-blind review---where authors' identities are concealed---is seen as more fair. To understand this gap, we compared both systems in a high-stakes field study: submissions to the Society for Judgment and Decision Making’s annual conference, the leading international conference on this topic. Each submission received both review types. Reviewers were randomly assigned to the review system and submissions. Selected conference talks were evaluated for quality, popularity, and subsequent publication status. We assessed the two systems on reliability, bias, and validity. On reliability, while both systems had moderate reliability, agreement was higher on what constituted a poor submission than a strong one (Anna Karenina Principle). On bias, double-blind reviews showed a slight bias against submission by women (Matilda Effect), while single-blind reviews showed a preference for submissions with senior co-authors (Matthew Effect). On validity, neither system predicted talk quality or popularity, but both predicted publication status. Author characteristics did not consistently predict outcomes. Thus, we suggest the costs of single-blind review do not outweigh its benefits. Yet, double-blind review is also not a perfect solution. We propose an equitable approach for selecting scientific work may be an informed lottery: use double-blind review to identify submissions of merit, then randomly choose from this set.

The courtship dance of a lesser bird of paradise figured in J. E. Gray's Illustrations of Indian zoology (1830–1835)

Thomas Hardwicke's acquisition of drawings of the lesser bird of paradise ( Paradisaea minor) and the subsequent publication of his painting of the male bird performing its elaborate courtship ritual in J. E. Gray's Illustrations of Indian zoology are described.

The Procedure before the Court of Justice

Chapter 10 contains an analysis of the procedure before the Court of Justice and discusses how written and oral observations may be presented. The chapter examines and explains the following stages: (i) translation of the reference into all the official languages, and the subsequent publication of a summary of the reference in the Official Journal of the European Union, (ii) notification of the reference to the parties to the main proceedings, the Member States, the EU institutions, the EFTA Surveillance Authority, Norway, Iceland, and Liechtenstein as well as, in some cases, other third countries, (iii) submission of written observations, (iv) translation of the written observations into French (working language of the Court of Justice) and appointment of a Judge-Rapporteur Advocates General, (v) notification of the written observations in their original language, in French and in the language of the case, (vi) drawing up of a Preliminary Report (rapport préalable), (vii) oral procedure, (viii) deliberation and voting by the judges and preparation of the judgment, and (ix) translation of the judgment.