Identifying risks for male street gang affiliation: a systematic review and narrative synthesis

Gang violence has increased in recent years. Individuals are becoming gang affiliated younger, and many have suffered historic maltreatment. Subsequent exposure to violence can result in profound consequences, including acute psychological harm. This review aims to identify predictive risk factors for male street gang affiliation. A systematic literature search was conducted utilising PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, Medline, the Cochrane Central Register of Controlled Trials, the Cochrane Database of Systematic Reviews and the Social Policy and Practice databases (from the databases’ inception to 03/04/15). From this search, n=244 peer-reviewed papers were included in an initial scoping review, and n=102 thereafter met criteria for a systematic review; a narrative synthesis follows. Gang members have typically faced numerous historic adversities across multiple domains; individual, family, peers, school and community. Cumulative factors generated an independent risk. The meta-narrative described an overarching failure to safeguard vulnerable individuals, with the motivation for gang affiliation hypothetically arising from an attempt to have their basic needs met. Clinical and research recommendations were made to inform early intervention policy and practice

Many Labs 5:Testing pre-data collection peer review as an intervention to increase replicability

Replication studies in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If these studies use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data-collection peer review by experts may address shortcomings and increase replicability rates. We selected 10 replication studies from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P; Open Science Collaboration, 2015) for which the original authors had expressed concerns about the replication designs before data collection; only one of these studies had yielded a statistically significant effect (p < .05). Commenters suggested that lack of adherence to expert review and low-powered tests were the reasons that most of these RP:P studies failed to replicate the original effects. We revised the replication protocols and received formal peer review prior to conducting new replication studies. We administered the RP:P and revised protocols in multiple laboratories (median number of laboratories per original study = 6.5, range = 3?9; median total sample = 1,279.5, range = 276?3,512) for high-powered tests of each original finding with both protocols. Overall, following the preregistered analysis plan, we found that the revised protocols produced effect sizes similar to those of the RP:P protocols (?r = .002 or .014, depending on analytic approach). The median effect size for the revised protocols (r = .05) was similar to that of the RP:P protocols (r = .04) and the original RP:P replications (r = .11), and smaller than that of the original studies (r = .37). Analysis of the cumulative evidence across the original studies and the corresponding three replication attempts provided very precise estimates of the 10 tested effects and indicated that their effect sizes (median r = .07, range = .00?.15) were 78% smaller, on average, than the original effect sizes (median r = .37, range = .19?.50)

Crowdsourcing hypothesis tests: Making transparent how design choices shape research results

To what extent are research results influenced by subjective decisions that scientists make as they design studies? Fifteen research teams independently designed studies to answer fiveoriginal research questions related to moral judgments, negotiations, and implicit cognition. Participants from two separate large samples (total N > 15,000) were then randomly assigned to complete one version of each study. Effect sizes varied dramatically across different sets of materials designed to test the same hypothesis: materials from different teams renderedstatistically significant effects in opposite directions for four out of five hypotheses, with the narrowest range in estimates being d = -0.37 to +0.26. Meta-analysis and a Bayesian perspective on the results revealed overall support for two hypotheses, and a lack of support for three hypotheses. Overall, practically none of the variability in effect sizes was attributable to the skill of the research team in designing materials, while considerable variability was attributable to the hypothesis being tested. In a forecasting survey, predictions of other scientists were significantly correlated with study results, both across and within hypotheses. Crowdsourced testing of research hypotheses helps reveal the true consistency of empirical support for a scientific claim.</div

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Cloning and variation of ground state intestinal stem cells

Stem cells of the gastrointestinal tract, pancreas, liver, and other columnar epithelia collectively resist cloning in their elemental states. Here we demonstrate the cloning and propagation of highly clonogenic, “ground state” stem cells of the human intestine and colon. We show that derived stem cell pedigrees sustain limited copy number and sequence variation despite extensive serial passaging and display exquisitely precise, cell-autonomous commitment to epithelial differentiation consistent with their origins along the intestinal tract. This developmentally patterned and epigenetically maintained commitment of stem cells likely enforces the functional specificity of the adult intestinal tract. Using clonally-derived colonic epithelia, we show that toxins A or B of the enteric pathogen C. difficile recapitulate the salient features of pseudomembranous colitis. The stability of the epigenetic commitment programs of these stem cells, coupled with their unlimited replicative expansion and maintained clonogenicity, suggests certain advantages for their use in disease modeling and regenerative medicine

Silicate Glasses

International audienc