Why hydroxyethyl starch solutions should NOT be banned from the operating room

This review summarises the new insights into the physiology of perioperative fluid therapy and analyses recent studies of the safety of the use of HES solutions in the fluid management of critically ill patients. This analysis reveals a number of methodological issues in the three major studies that have initiated the recommendation of the European Medicine Agency to ban hydroxyethyl starches from clinical practice. It is concluded that, when used in the proper indication, and taking into account the recommended doses, hydroxyethyl starches continue to have a place in perioperative fluid management

Masculinities that matter: reading Hemingway and Lawrence with Judith Butler

This dissertation researches the applicability of Judith Butler's early work to literary texts dealing with masculinities, particularly the work of Ernest Hemingway and David Herbert Lawrence. The dissertation focuses on Hemingway's texts "Soldier's home", "Big two-hearted river", "The sun also rises", and "A farewell to Arms", and on Lawrence's non-fictional writing on the subconscious as well as his "Women in love" and "Lady Chatterley's lover". This dissertation sets out to provide innovative and relevant readings of aforementioned texts based on a careful interpretation of Butler's work

A contribution to our understanding of the psychological effects underlying the budgeting process and its outcomes

Budgeting plays an important role in organizations as it is the cornerstone of the majority of management control systems. It refers to both the budget as a set of numbers and the budgeting process, which refers to an interactive process in which future activities and deliverables are translated into quantitative, financial terms. Given its central role in organizations, much research effort has been devoted to budgeting in general and its functioning as a motivation and performance evaluation tool in particular. Despite the vast amount of research, some loose ends remain. How budgeting can exactly motivate employees is still a black box. This dissertation aims to open this black box by clarifying the psychological mechanisms underlying the budgeting process and its outcomes. In particular, we focus on budget participation and budgetary slack. After all, organizations spend large amounts of money in attempts to ‘make their budgeting process work’ and manage the amount of slack created within this process. A better understanding of budget participation’s motivational effects and budgetary slack’s antecedents will be useful for efficient resource allocation. The first study explores how and when budget participation motivates managers to work toward budget attainment. The findings of prior research regarding the relationship between budget participation and budget motivation are inconsistent. We untangle these mixed effects by providing evidence of diverse forms of budget participation and multiple types of budget motivation. We also shed light on the role of basic psychological need satisfaction as the underlying mechanism in the participation-motivation relationship. Moreover, we identify three boundary conditions that add to the complexity of budget participation for motivational purposes: true participation, participation congruence, and strategic alignment. As such, we enrich prior budgeting studies that implicitly ignored the existence of multiple forms of budget participation and types of budget motivation. Given our focus on budgeting as a motivation-tool, it is also important to examine budgetary slack. Inspired by the results from the first study that illustrated the importance of strategy in a budgeting context, we examine in our second study the relationship between participation in strategic planning and budgetary slack. Building on self-determination and organizational commitment theory, we develop a model and gather data through a survey. This study reveals that a higher degree of participation in strategic planning decreases budgetary slack through the full mediation effect of affective organizational commitment. Moreover, budget participation also decreases budgetary slack through the mediating effect of autonomous budget motivation. Taken together, this study illustrates the importance of studying the broader internal organizational planning process when examining budgetary slack. The third study goes another step further and looks at the impact of the external organizational context. In particular, we examine the relationship between perceived environmental uncertainty and budgetary slack. We combine insights from psychology-based (i.e., role theory) and economics-based (i.e., agency theory and information-processing framework) theories to develop our model and gather data through a survey. Our results indicate that managers create budgetary slack as a response to role ambiguity and job-related tension, caused by environmental uncertainty. The psychological variables role ambiguity and job-related tension explain a significantly larger proportion of the variance in budgetary slack than the economics-based explanation which builds on the number of exceptions a manager is confronted with. This study illustrates the importance of individual psychological variables for understanding the budgetary slack process. The three studies in this dissertation show that budgeting, its characteristics, and outcomes are no uniform processes but are deeply embedded in human complexities

Cosmology: The Impossible Integration?

My dissertation introduces a new account of how empirical methods and lines of evidence can come to bear on cosmological model-building. Through a careful study of the recent history of cosmology and dark matter research, I explicate a new type of justification for experiments, a `method-driven logic'. This structure of justification underlies terrestrial experiments researching dark matter and dark energy, but it is more generally prevalent in cases of an underdescribed target. Using a method-driven logic comes with a cost, however. Specifically, interpreting the empirical results of experiments justified through a method-driven logic is non-trivial: negative results warrant secure constraints on the space of possibilities for the target, whereas significant positive results remain ambivalent. While this ambivalence can be resolved through the amalgamation of multiple lines of evidence, this solution is sometimes faced with conflicts between those lines of evidence. I propose that, under specific circumstances, restricting the relevant empirical evidence can be warranted. Finally, I discuss the use of cosmological evidence as a constraint in other subfields of physics. This brings me full-circle on the integration of disciplines in cosmology|an integration driven by experimental practice

Short communications: Red-necked Falcons Falco chicquera hunting at a roost of African Palm Swifts Cypsiurus parvus

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