The Role of Individual Variables, Organizational Variables and Moral Intensity Dimensions in Libyan Management Accountants’ Ethical Decision Making

This study investigates the association of a broad set of variables with the ethical decision making of management accountants in Libya. Adopting a cross-sectional methodology, a questionnaire including four different ethical scenarios was used to gather data from 229 participants. For each scenario, ethical decision making was examined in terms of the recognition, judgment and intention stages of Rest’s model. A significant relationship was found between ethical recognition and ethical judgment and also between ethical judgment and ethical intention, but ethical recognition did not significantly predict ethical intention—thus providing support for Rest’s model. Organizational variables, age and educational level yielded few significant results. The lack of significance for codes of ethics might reflect their relative lack of development in Libya, in which case Libyan companies should pay attention to their content and how they are supported, especially in the light of the under-development of the accounting profession in Libya. Few significant results were also found for gender, but where they were found, males showed more ethical characteristics than females. This unusual result reinforces the dangers of gender stereotyping in business. Personal moral philosophy and moral intensity dimensions were generally found to be significant predictors of the three stages of ethical decision making studied. One implication of this is to give more attention to ethics in accounting education, making the connections between accounting practice and (in Libya) Islam. Overall, this study not only adds to the available empirical evidence on factors affecting ethical decision making, notably examining three stages of Rest’s model, but also offers rare insights into the ethical views of practising management accountants and provides a benchmark for future studies of ethical decision making in Muslim majority countries and other parts of the developing world

Safety and Tolerability of SRX246, a Vasopressin 1a Antagonist, in Irritable Huntington\u27s Disease Patients-A Randomized Phase 2 Clinical Trial.

SRX246 is a vasopressin (AVP) 1a receptor antagonist that crosses the blood-brain barrier. It reduced impulsive aggression, fear, depression and anxiety in animal models, blocked the actions of intranasal AVP on aggression/fear circuits in an experimental medicine fMRI study and demonstrated excellent safety in Phase 1 multiple-ascending dose clinical trials. The present study was a 3-arm, multicenter, randomized, placebo-controlled, double-blind, 12-week, dose escalation study of SRX246 in early symptomatic Huntington\u27s disease (HD) patients with irritability. Our goal was to determine whether SRX246 was safe and well tolerated in these HD patients given its potential use for the treatment of problematic neuropsychiatric symptoms. Participants were randomized to receive placebo or to escalate to 120 mg twice daily or 160 mg twice daily doses of SRX246. Assessments included standard safety tests, the Unified Huntington\u27s Disease Rating Scale (UHDRS), and exploratory measures of problem behaviors. The groups had comparable demographics, features of HD and baseline irritability. Eighty-two out of 106 subjects randomized completed the trial on their assigned dose of drug. One-sided exact-method confidence interval tests were used to reject the null hypothesis of inferior tolerability or safety for each dose group vs. placebo. Apathy and suicidality were not affected by SRX246. Most adverse events in the active arms were considered unlikely to be related to SRX246. The compound was safe and well tolerated in HD patients and can be moved forward as a candidate to treat irritability and aggression

Clinical-Genetic Associations in the Prospective Huntington at Risk Observational Study (PHAROS): Implications for Clinical Trials

Importance: Identifying measures that are associated with the cytosine-adenine-guanine (CAG) expansion in individuals before diagnosis of Huntington disease (HD) has implications for designing clinical trials. Objective: To identify the earliest features associated with the motor diagnosis of HD in the Prospective Huntington at Risk Observational Study (PHAROS). Design, Setting, and Participants: A prospective, multicenter, longitudinal cohort study was conducted at 43 US and Canadian Huntington Study Group research sites from July 9, 1999, through December 17, 2009. Participants included 983 unaffected adults at risk for HD who had chosen to remain unaware of their mutation status. Baseline comparability between CAG expansion (\u3e/=37 repeats) and nonexpansion (repeats) groups was assessed. All participants and investigators were blinded to individual CAG analysis. A repeated-measures analysis adjusting for age and sex was used to assess the divergence of the linear trend between the expanded and nonexpanded groups. Data were analyzed from April 27, 2010, to September 3, 2013. Exposure: Huntington disease mutation status in individuals with CAG expansion vs without CAG expansion. Main Outcomes and Measures: Unified Huntington\u27s Disease Rating Scale motor (score range, 0-124; higher scores indicate greater impairment), cognitive (symbol digits modality is the total number of correct responses in 90 seconds; lower scores indicate greater impairment), behavioral (score range, 0-176; higher scores indicate greater behavioral symptoms), and functional (Total Functional Capacity score range, 0-13; lower scores indicate reduced functional ability) domains were assessed at baseline and every 9 months up to a maximum of 10 years. Results: Among the 983 research participants at risk for HD in the longitudinal cohort, 345 (35.1%) carried the CAG expansion and 638 (64.9%) did not. The mean (SD) duration of follow-up was 5.8 (3.0) years. At baseline, participants with expansions had more impaired motor (3.0 [4.2] vs 1.9 [2.8]; P \u3c .001), cognitive (P \u3c .05 for all measures except Verbal Fluency, P = .52), and behavioral domain scores (9.4 [11.4] vs 6.5 [8.5]; P \u3c .001) but not significantly different measures of functional capacity (12.9 [0.3] vs 13.0 [0.2]; P = .23). With findings reported as mean slope (95% CI), in the longitudinal analyses, participants with CAG expansions showed significant worsening in motor (0.84 [0.73 to 0.95] vs 0.03 [-0.05 to 0.11]), cognitive (-0.54 [-0.67 to -0.40] vs 0.22 [0.12 to 0.32]), and functional (-0.08 [-0.09 to -0.06] vs -0.01 [-0.02 to 0]) measures compared with those without expansion (P \u3c .001 for all); behavioral domain scores did not diverge significantly between groups. Conclusions and Relevance: Using these prospectively accrued clinical data, relatively large treatment effects would be required to mount a randomized, placebo-controlled clinical trial involving premanifest HD individuals who carry the CAG expansion

Versatile thinking and the learning of statistical concepts

Statistics was for a long time a domain where calculation dominated to the detriment of statistical thinking. In recent years, the latter concept has come much more to the fore, and is now being both researched and promoted in school and tertiary courses. In this study, we consider the application of the concept of flexible or versatile thinking to statistical inference, as a key attribute of statistical thinking. Whilst this versatility comprises process/object, visuo/analytic and representational versatility, we concentrate here on the last aspect, which includes the ability to work within a representation system (or semiotic register) and to transform seamlessly between the systems for given concepts, as well as to engage in procedural and conceptual interactions with specific representations. To exemplify the theoretical ideas, we consider two examples based on the concepts of relative comparison and sampling variability as cases where representational versatility may be crucial to understanding. We outline the qualitative thinking involved in representations of relative density and sample and population distributions, including mathematical models and their precursor, diagrammatic forms