Moderate drinking before the unit: medicine and life assurance in Britain and the US c.1860–1930

This article describes the way in which “Anstie’s Limit” – a particular definition of moderate drinking first defined in Britain in the 1860s by the physician Francis Edmund Anstie (1833–1874) – became established as a useful measure of moderate alcohol consumption. Becoming fairly well-established in mainstream Anglophone medicine by 1900, it was also communicated to the public in Britain, North America and New Zealand through newspaper reports. However, the limit also travelled to less familiar places, including life assurance offices, where a number of different strategies for separating moderate from excessive drinkers emerged from the dialogue between medicine and life assurance. Whilst these ideas of moderation seem to have disappeared into the background for much of the twentieth century, re-emerging as the “J-shaped” curve, these early developments anticipate many of the questions surrounding uses of the “unit” to quantify moderate alcohol consumption in Britain today. The article will therefore conclude by exploring some of the lessons of this story for contemporary discussions of moderation, suggesting that we should pay more attention to whether these metrics work, where they work and why

A novel palaeoaltimetry proxy based on spore and pollen wall chemistry

Understanding the uplift history and the evolution of high altitude plateaux is of major interest to a wide range of geoscientists and has implications for many disparate fields. Currently the majority of palaeoaltimetry proxies are based on detecting a physical change in climate in response to uplift, making the relationship between uplift and climate difficult to decipher. Furthermore, current palaeoaltimetry proxies have a low degree of precision with errors typically greater than 1 km. This makes the calculation of uplift histories and the identification of the mechanisms responsible for uplift difficult to determine. Here we report on advances in both instrumentation and our understanding of the biogeochemical structure of sporopollenin that are leading to the establishment of a new proxy to track changes in the flux of UV-B radiation over geological time. The UV-B proxy is based on quantifying changes in the concentration of UV-B absorbing compounds (UACs) found in the spores and pollen grains of land plants, with the relative abundances of UACs increasing on exposure to elevated UV-B radiation. Given the physical relationship between altitude and UV-B radiation we suggest that the analysis of sporopollenin chemistry, specifically changes in the concentration of UACs, may offer the basis for the first climate independent palaeoaltimetry proxy. Owing to the ubiquity of spores and pollen in the fossil record our proposed proxy has the potential to enable the reconstruction of the uplift history of high altitude plateaux at unprecedented levels of fidelity, both spatially and temporally

A Historiometric Examination of Machiavellianism and a New Taxonomy of Leadership

Although researchers have extensively examined the relationship between charismatic leadership and Machiavellianism (Deluga, 2001; Gardner & Avolio, 1995; House & Howell, 1992), there has been a lack of investigation of Machiavellianism in relation to alternative forms of outstanding leadership. Thus, the purpose of this investigation was to examine the relationship between Machiavellianism and a new taxonomy of outstanding leadership comprised of charismatic, ideological, and pragmatic leaders. Using an historiometric approach, raters assessed Machiavellianism via the communications of 120 outstanding leaders in organizations across the domains of business, political, military, and religious institutions. Academic biographies were used to assess twelve general performance measures as well as twelve general controls and five communication specific controls. The results indicated that differing levels of Machiavellianism is evidenced across the differing leader types as well as differing leader orientation. Additionally, Machiavellianism appears negatively related to performance, though less so when type and orientation are taken into account.Yeshttps://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/manuscript-submission-guideline

Human factors for capacity building : lessons learned from the OpenMRS implementers network

This article presents an overview of the Open Medical Record System (OpenMRS), and how human factors have influenced its trajectory, membership and outcomes. It investigates ways to strengthen the OpenMRS community by developing capacity and implementing a network that focuses on the needs of implementers. OpenMRS is a configurable, open source electronic medical record application, developed and maintained jointly by the Regenstrief Institute (RI) at Indiana University and Partners in Health (PIH) in collaboration with a large group of open source developer volunteers from around the world