Theory, 'truthers', and transparency: Reflecting on knowledge in the twenty-first century

The current era is often described in epistemic terms, as an ‘information age’ or ‘knowledge society’. Such claims reflect ideals that are deeply ingrained in modern societies. There is a widespread assumption that successful social and political interaction involves access to information and that political power is gained when knowledge replaces obscurity. Such assumptions reflect contemporary ‘epistemic folkways’, which are manifested in two widespread epistemic phenomena – faith in ‘transparency’ and conspiracy theorising International Relations (IR) theorists should be well-equipped to understand such developments. However, reflection concerning epistemic matters in IR is in under attack, increasingly presented as a distraction from the formulation of empirically grounded accounts of international politics. This article argues that reflexive theory can in fact play an important role in helping IR scholars to understand contemporary epistemic folkways. Drawing on the Critical Theory of Theodor Adorno, it is argued that the transparency ideal and conspiracy theorising reflect the efforts of individuals to increase their influence in a world in which they are both objects of technical knowledge and, in principle, epistemically empowered subjects. Reflection on the subject-object relationship suggests that the pursuit of increasingly unmediated access to information is in fact a key source of reification and disempowerment

The Concept of Transparency in International Relations: towards a critical approach

Transparency is an important concept in International Relations. The possibility of realizing transparency in practice operates as a central analytical axis defining distinct positions on core theoretical problems within the field, from the security dilemma to the function of international institutions and beyond. As a political practice the pursuit of transparent governance is a dominant feature of global politics, promoted by a wide range of actors across a vast range of issue areas, from nuclear proliferation to Internet governance to the politics of foreign aid. Yet, despite its importance, precisely what transparency means or how the concept is understood is frequently ill-defined by academics and policy-makers alike. As a result, the epistemological and ontological underpinnings of approaches to transparency in IR often sit in tension with their wider theoretical commitments. This article will examine the three primary understandings of transparency used in IR in order to unpack these commitments. It finds that while transparency is often explicitly conceptualized as a property of information, particularly within rationalist scholarship, this understanding rests upon an unarticulated set of sociological assumptions. This analysis suggests that conceptualizing ‘transparency-as-information’ without a wider sociology of knowledge production is highly problematic, potentially obscuring our ability to recognize transparent practices in global governance. Understanding transparency as dialogue, as a social practice rooted in shared cognitive capacities and epistemic frameworks, provides a firmer analytical ground from which to examine transparency in International Relations

Information is Power? Transparency and fetishism in International Relations

International actors, state and non-state, have embraced transparency as a solution to all manner of political problems. Theoretical analyses of these processes present transparency in a fetishtic manner, in which the social relations that generate transparency are misrecognized as the product of information itself. This paper will outline the theoretical problems that arise when transparency promotion is fetishized in International Relations theory. Examining the fetishism of transparency, we will note problematic conception of politics, the public sphere, and rationality they articulate. Confusing the relationship between data, information and knowledge, fetishized treatments of transparency muddy the historical dynamics responsible for the emergence of transparency as a political practice. This alters our understanding of the relationship between global governance institutions, their constituents, and the nature of knowledge production itself. Realizing the normative promise of transparency requires a reorientation of theoretical practice towards sociologically and historically sensitive approaches to the politics of knowledge

Post-transcriptional control of nuclear-encoded cytochrome oxidase subunits in Trypanosoma brucei: evidence for genome-wide conservation of life-cycle stage-specific regulatory elements

Trypanosomes represent an excellent model for the post-transcriptional regulation of gene expression because their genome is organized into polycistronic transcription units. However, few signals governing developmental stage-specific expression have been identified, with there being no compelling evidence for widespread conservation of regulatory motifs. As a tool to search for common regulatory sequences we have used the nuclear-encoded components of the cytochrome oxidase (COX) complex of the trypanosome respiratory chain. Components of this complex represent a form of post-transcriptional operon because trypanosome mitochondrial activity is unusual in being developmentally programmed. By genome analysis we identified the genes for seven components of the COX complex. Each mRNA exhibits bloodstream stage-specific instability, which is not mediated by the RNA silencing pathway but which is alleviated by cycloheximide. Reporter assays have identified regulatory regions within the 3′-untranslated regions of three COX mRNAs operating principally at the translational level, but also via mRNA stability. Interrogation of the mapped regions via oligonucleotide frequency scoring provides evidence for genome-wide conservation of regulatory sequences among a large cohort of procyclic-enriched transcripts. Analysis of the co-regulated subunits of a stage-specific enzyme is therefore a novel approach to uncover cryptic regulatory sequences controlling gene expression at the post-transcriptional level

Overview of the interactive task in BioCreative V

Fully automated text mining (TM) systems promote efficient literature searching, retrieval, and review but are not sufficient to produce ready-to-consume curated documents. These systems are not meant to replace biocurators, but instead to assist them in one or more literature curation steps. To do so, the user interface is an important aspect that needs to be considered for tool adoption. The BioCreative Interactive task (IAT) is a track designed for exploring user-system interactions, promoting development of useful TM tools, and providing a communication channel between the biocuration and the TM communities. In BioCreative V, the IAT track followed a format similar to previous interactive tracks, where the utility and usability of TM tools, as well as the generation of use cases, have been the focal points. The proposed curation tasks are user-centric and formally evaluated by biocurators. In BioCreative V IAT, seven TM systems and 43 biocurators participated. Two levels of user participation were offered to broaden curator involvement and obtain more feedback on usability aspects. The full level participation involved training on the system, curation of a set of documents with and without TM assistance, tracking of time-on-task, and completion of a user survey. The partial level participation was designed to focus on usability aspects of the interface and not the performance per se. In this case, biocurators navigated the system by performing pre-designed tasks and then were asked whether they were able to achieve the task and the level of difficulty in completing the task. In this manuscript, we describe the development of the interactive task, from planning to execution and discuss major findings for the systems tested

The association of functional status with mortality and dialysis modality change : results from the Peritoneal Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study (PDOPPS)

BACKGROUND: Little is known about the prevalence of functional impairment in peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients, its variation by country, and its association with mortality or transfer to hemodialysis. METHODS: A prospective cohort study was conducted in PD patients from 7 countries in the Peritoneal Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study (PDOPPS) (2014 - 2017). Functional status (FS) was assessed by combining self-reports of 8 instrumental and 5 basic activities of daily living, using the Lawton-Brody and the Katz questionnaires. Summary FS scores, ranging from 1.25 (most dependent) to 13 (independent), were based on the patient's ability to perform each activity with or without assistance. Logistic regression was used to estimate the odds ratio (OR; 95% confidence interval [CI]) of a FS score < 11 comparing each country with the United States (US). Cox regression was used to estimate the hazard ratio (HR; 95% CI) for the effect of a low FS score on mortality and transfer to hemodialysis, adjusting for case mix. RESULTS: Of 2,593 patients with complete data on FS, 48% were fully independent (FS = 13), 32% had a FS score 11 to < 13, 14% had a FS score 8 to < 11, and 6% had a FS score < 8. Relative to the US, low FS scores (< 11; more dependent) were more frequent in Thailand (OR = 10.48, 5.90 - 18.60) and the United Kingdom (UK) (OR = 3.29, 1.77 - 6.08), but similar in other PDOPPS countries. The FS score was inversely and monotonically associated with mortality but not with transfer to hemodialysis; the HR, comparing a FS score < 8 vs 13, was 4.01 (2.44 - 6.61) for mortality and 0.91 (0.58 - 1.43) for transfer to hemodialysis. CONCLUSION: Regional differences in FS scores observed across PDOPPS countries may have been partly due to differences in regional patient selection for PD. Functional impairment was associated with mortality but not with permanent transfer to hemodialysis