Trust, professionalism and regulation: a critical comparison of Medicine and Law

Background & Aims: Trust, professionalism and regulation are complex social phenomena, which are contextually dependent and dynamic. This project aims to explore the concept of ‘trust’ in Law and Medicine - questioning what it means to be a ‘trustworthy’ professional and how these understandings relate to ideas of professionalism and regulation. Methods: This study draws on a comprehensive review of the literature and interviews with thirty participants from within, or related to, the UK legal and medical professions. Participants included practitioners, those creating and implementing policy, and public representatives. Data was analysed using the ‘logics approach’ from Political Discourse Theory (PDT). This helped us draw out taken-for-granted ideas and beliefs about trust, professionalism and regulation and expose these to critique. Results: Participants highly valued patient/client trust, seeing it as fundamental to the functioning of their professional ‘service’. Trust was seen as attributed primarily to the individual practitioner and maintained through demonstrating measurable ‘professionalism’. Practitioners were understood to be individually responsible for preserving their image as a ‘good professional’, via evidencing their ‘professionalism’ to the patient/client and the regulator. Discussion: Current ways-of-thinking about trust permitted trust in individuals to be maintained, even when trust in the professions as a whole was challenged. However, for medical professionals particularly, this was predicated on a need to ‘evidence’ that one was a ‘good professional’ through intensive and continual regulation. This created an increased dependency on a ‘trust-industry’ of regulatory bodies and systems. This project critically questions how regulation shapes and impacts trust in the professions. It is a problem-driven approach, which seeks to break with current patterns of thinking and question: ‘what might be possible instead?’ This opens up an ideological space and new viewpoints, whereby audiences are encouraged to consider future change

Examining Factors Influencing Use of a Decision Aid in Personnel Selection

In this research, two studies were conducted to examine factors influencing reliance on a decision aid in personnel selection. Specifically, this study examined the effect of feedback, validity of selection predictors, and presence of a decision aid on the use of the aid in personnel selection. The results demonstrate that when people are provided with the decision aid, their predictions were significantly more similar to the predictions made by the aid than people who were not provided with the aid. This suggests that when people are provided with an aid, they will use it to some degree. This research also shows that when provided with a decision aid with high cue validity, people will increase their reliance on the decision aid over multiple decisions

An improved Greengenes taxonomy with explicit ranks for ecological and evolutionary analyses of bacteria and archaea

Reference phylogenies are crucial for providing a taxonomic framework for interpretation of marker gene and metagenomic surveys, which continue to reveal novel species at a remarkable rate. Greengenes is a dedicated full-length 16S rRNA gene database that provides users with a curated taxonomy based on de novo tree inference. We developed a ‘taxonomy to tree' approach for transferring group names from an existing taxonomy to a tree topology, and used it to apply the Greengenes, National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and cyanoDB (Cyanobacteria only) taxonomies to a de novo tree comprising 408 315 sequences. We also incorporated explicit rank information provided by the NCBI taxonomy to group names (by prefixing rank designations) for better user orientation and classification consistency. The resulting merged taxonomy improved the classification of 75% of the sequences by one or more ranks relative to the original NCBI taxonomy with the most pronounced improvements occurring in under-classified environmental sequences. We also assessed candidate phyla (divisions) currently defined by NCBI and present recommendations for consolidation of 34 redundantly named groups. All intermediate results from the pipeline, which includes tree inference, jackknifing and transfer of a donor taxonomy to a recipient tree (tax2tree) are available for download. The improved Greengenes taxonomy should provide important infrastructure for a wide range of megasequencing projects studying ecosystems on scales ranging from our own bodies (the Human Microbiome Project) to the entire planet (the Earth Microbiome Project). The implementation of the software can be obtained from http://sourceforge.net/projects/tax2tree/

Synergies for Improving Oil Palm Production and Forest Conservation in Floodplain Landscapes

Lowland tropical forests are increasingly threatened with conversion to oil palm as global demand and high profit drives crop expansion throughout the world’s tropical regions. Yet, landscapes are not homogeneous and regional constraints dictate land suitability for this crop. We conducted a regional study to investigate spatial and economic components of forest conversion to oil palm within a tropical floodplain in the Lower Kinabatangan, Sabah, Malaysian Borneo. The Kinabatangan ecosystem harbours significant biodiversity with globally threatened species but has suffered forest loss and fragmentation. We mapped the oil palm and forested landscapes (using object-based-image analysis, classification and regression tree analysis and on-screen digitising of high-resolution imagery) and undertook economic modelling. Within the study region (520,269 ha), 250,617 ha is cultivated with oil palm with 77% having high Net-Present-Value (NPV) estimates ($413/ha?yr–$637/ha?yr); but 20.5% is under-producing. In fact 6.3% (15,810 ha) of oil palm is commercially redundant (with negative NPV of $-299/ha?yr-$-65/ha?yr) due to palm mortality from flood inundation. These areas would have been important riparian or flooded forest types. Moreover, 30,173 ha of unprotected forest remain and despite its value for connectivity and biodiversity 64% is allocated for future oil palm. However, we estimate that at minimum 54% of these forests are unsuitable for this crop due to inundation events. If conversion to oil palm occurs, we predict a further 16,207 ha will become commercially redundant. This means that over 32,000 ha of forest within the floodplain would have been converted for little or no financial gain yet with significant cost to the ecosystem. Our findings have globally relevant implications for similar floodplain landscapes undergoing forest transformation to agriculture such as oil palm. Understanding landscape level constraints to this crop, and transferring these into policy and practice, may provide conservation and economic opportunities within these seemingly high opportunity cost landscapes

Late-time post-merger modeling of a compact binary: effects of relativity, r-process heating, and treatment of transport effects

Detectable electromagnetic counterparts to gravitational waves from compact binary mergers can be produced by outflows from the black hole-accretion disk remnant during the first ten seconds after the merger. Two-dimensional axisymmetric simulations with effective viscosity remain an efficient and informative way to model this late-time post-merger evolution. In addition to the inherent approximations of axisymmetry and modeling turbulent angular momentum transport by a viscosity, previous simulations often make other simplifications related to the treatment of the equation of state and turbulent transport effects. In this paper, we test the effect of these modeling choices. By evolving with the same viscosity the exact post-merger initial configuration previously evolved in Newtonian viscous hydrodynamics, we find that the Newtonian treatment provides a good estimate of the disk ejecta mass but underestimates the outflow velocity. We find that the inclusion of heavy nuclei causes a notable increase in ejecta mass. An approximate inclusion of r-process effects has a comparatively smaller effect, except for its designed effect on the composition. Diffusion of composition and entropy, modeling turbulent transport effects, has the overall effect of reducing ejecta mass and giving it a speed with lower average and more tightly-peaked distribution. Also, we find significant acceleration of outflow even at distances beyond 10,000\,km, so that thermal wind velocities only asymptote beyond this radius and at somewhat higher values than previously reported.Comment: 19 pages, 7 figures, submitted to Classical and Quantum Gravit

Taxon-Specific Aerosolization of Bacteria and Viruses In an Experimental Ocean-Atmosphere Mesocosm

Ocean-derived, airborne microbes play important roles in Earth’s climate system and human health, yet little is known about factors controlling their transfer from the ocean to the atmosphere. Here, we study microbiomes of isolated sea spray aerosol (SSA) collected in a unique ocean–atmosphere facility and demonstrate taxon-specific aerosolization of bacteria and viruses. These trends are conserved within taxonomic orders and classes, and temporal variation in aerosolization is similarly shared by related taxa. We observe enhanced transfer into SSA of Actinobacteria, certain Gammaproteobacteria, and lipid-enveloped viruses; conversely, Flavobacteriia, some Alphaproteobacteria, and Caudovirales are generally under-represented in SSA. Viruses do not transfer to SSA as efficiently as bacteria. The enrichment of mycolic acid-coated Corynebacteriales and lipid-enveloped viruses (inferred from genomic comparisons) suggests that hydrophobic properties increase transport to the sea surface and SSA. Our results identify taxa relevant to atmospheric processes and a framework to further elucidate aerosolization mechanisms influencing microbial and viral transport pathways