Social sciences face a well-known problem, which is an instance of a general problem faced as well by psychological and biological sciences: the problem of establishing their legitimate existence alongside physics. This, as will become clear, is a problem in metaphysics. I will show how a new account of structural explanations, put forward by Frank Jackson and Philip Pettit, which is designed t...

Globalization has emerged as the defining conceptual and contextual socioeconomic framework of analysis for the early 21st century. Throughout Latin America, globalization has become a buzzword for profound structural change, as well as the focus of vociferous and rigorous criticism by those sectors of society disadvantaged, damaged, or bypassed by the forces of global restructuring. This artic...

In response to criticism of ethical review of a South African clinical trial, we contrast aspects of the United States Common Rule with South African research ethics requirements. In the USA the Common Rule does not apply to all health research and allows many exemptions from ethics review and waivers of informed consent. At a structural level research ethics review in South Africa is in many c...

Incumbent malfeasance is a major challenge in many developing democracies. Our model suggests that electoral accountability requires a media market structure incentivizing local media to report incumbent malfeasance. We test the model’s implications in Mexico, leveraging plausibly exogenous variation in the pre-election release of municipal audits revealing misallocated spending and greater acc...

OBJECTIVE To increase understanding of the internal processes of recovery in psychosis, with particular consideration given to self-compassion and self-criticism. METHOD Qualitative data were collected by semistructured interviews, from 10 participants with psychosis, and analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis. RESULTS Five superordinate themes emerged: (a) "my mind can't t...

The risk premium in the US stock market has fallen far below its historic level, which Shiller (2000) attributes to a bubble driven by psychological factors. As an alternative explanation, we point out that the observed risk premium may be reduced by one-sided intervention policy on the part of the Federal Reserve which leads investors into the erroneous belief that they are insured against dow...

Source and information evaluation is identified as being a critical element of the analytical process and production of intelligence products. However there is concern that in reality evaluation is being carried out in a cursory fashion involving limited intellectual rigour. Poor evaluation is also thought to be a causal factor in the failure of intelligence. This study examined the process of ...

The multistage model, introduced by Armitage and Doll, was very successful at describing many features of cancer development. Doll and Peto noted a significant departure below the prediction of the model and suggested that this could be due to undercounting of cases at older ages, or to the 'biology of extreme old age.' Moolgavkar pointed out that it could also be due to the approximation used....

This article responds to arguments made in a recent paper by Bucholtz and Hall (Bucholtz, M., Hall, K., 2004. Theorizing identity in language and sexuality research. Language in Society 33, 469–515), in which two contrasting approaches to language and sexuality, dubbed ‘‘identity-based’’ and ‘‘desire-centered’’, are identified, and the latter is critiqued. As well as seeking to correct some ina...

OBJECTIVES Research on unipolar depression has found that life events that are congruent with an individual's personality style increase vulnerability to depression (event congruency hypothesis). We tested whether the interaction of personality style and congruent life events predicted prospective increases in depressive and hypomanic symptoms among bipolar spectrum individuals over a 4-month f...