Randomised trials vary in methodological quality, and flaws in trial conduct can lead to biased estimation of the intervention effect. If a meta-analysis makes no allowance for methodological flaws, there’s a danger that the results could be biased and over-precise, or that some lowerquality trials could be given too much influence in the meta-analysis. Cochrane review authors now use a specifi...

Intelligent Design Theory (ID) has been much maligned recently as Neo-Creationist pseudoscience. This paper looks briefly at the common arguments used against ID, including arguments from methodological naturalism (MN), falsifiability, productivity, and religious fundamentalism. Ultimately it goes on to explain why the theory could be beneficial to our society today and suggests a need for a me...

A formal proof is offered of the fact that Individualism and Ordinalism imply the controversial condition A3 used by Kemp and Ng (1976) to show the non-existence of an individualistic social welfare function based only on ordinal preferences but objected to by Samuelson (1977) as unreasonable. Mayston’s argument against our definition of ordinality is refuted; his notion of ‘true ordinality’ in...

In developed western nations, both sexes commit acts of physical aggression against their partners. Data from 16 nations showed that this pattern did not generalize to all nations. The magnitude and direction of the sex difference was highly correlated with national-level variations in gender empowerment and individualism-collectivism. As gender equality and individualism increased, the sex dif...