Benchmark Legislation: A Measured Approach in the Fight against Counterfeit Pharmaceuticals

Pharmaceutical counterfeiting is unique in the field of counterfeiting because criminals only attempt to copy the appearance of a drug, not its actual effect. Because such counterfeit drugs are cheap to make and ineffective or dangerous, counterfeiters see immense profits without regard for the potential for injury or death. Furthermore, the complexity of distribution channels and lax penalties result in little risk for criminals. One potential tool to address this problem is an electronic pedigree system that would track shipments of drugs and reduce the opportunity for counterfeiters to infiltrate the supply chain. Unfortunately, such a system is years away from being effectively implemented. To compound the problem, soaring drug prices and a dwindling economy have led to calls for free importation from countries that have less expensive drugs. Yet many of those countries have counterfeit problems of their own. Because of the risk to human life, safety must take priority over efforts to reduce costs. The best solution to pharmaceutical counterfeiting is a single bill that attacks the problem in steps that are implemented when certain objective criteria are met. First, criminal sanctions should be increased to at least match those of illicit drug trafficking. Next, e-pedigree should be implemented when technology advances to the point that it is affordable and reliable. Finally, once safety is assured, the bill should reconsider reimportation plans

Irenaeus, Joseph Smith, and the Sociology of Heresy

This thesis attempts to illustrate the salience of the concept ‘heresy’ for sociologically-informed studies of religious violence and opposition by removing it from its traditional moorings in historical theology and applying it to two religious movements: second-century Christians and nineteenth-century Mormons. Divided into two major sections, the study pursues its objective first by surveying available definitions of heresy (theological and sociological) and offering its own understanding of heresy as a Weberian ideal type of religious opposition. Part One of the study concludes with a look at the sociology of knowledge in general and the theory of identity adumbrated by Hans Mol in particular, appropriating each in order to outline the social process whereby religious groups facing opposition come to elaborate complex soteriologies capable of resolving the conflict. The second half of the thesis involves a close examination of early Christians and early Mormons, providing a detailed description of the types of social opposition each group faced and juxtaposing the two communities in an effort to illuminate unique historical patterns of social marginalisation. Following this investigation of each group’s religious milieu and corresponding persecution, the study engages the soteriologies articulated by Irenaeus and Joseph Smith, paying particular attention to the connections between specific forms of opposition and the way in which espousing deification helped resolve such ‘heresy’. The thesis concludes with thoughts on the relationship between adaptable belief systems (such as the forms of deification expressed by Irenaeus and Joseph Smith) and the future success of new religious movements

The Hearing Voices Movement as Postmodern Religion-Making: Meaning, Power, Sacralisation, Identity

Over the past 40 or 50 years, scholars of religion have frequently attempted to use the tools of social science to analyse, describe, and explain the relevance and persistence of religion in the modern world. With the bold predictions of the secularization thesis as their stimuli, many sociologists and anthropologists preferred to focus on the underexplored, marginalised, or otherwise unexpected expressions of religion within those ostensibly secularising contexts. Such studies have led to an abundance of theories and accompanying terms: ‘implicit religion’, ‘vernacular religion’, ‘vicarious religion’, ‘lived religion’, ‘popular religion’, and ‘folk religion’. Without choosing any one of these, but owing much to their shared – arguably postmodern – themes of commonplace sacrality and personal empowerment, this paper seeks to explore the possibility of the Hearing Voices Movement (HVM) as an example of religion-making. HVM is a growing force of ‘voice-hearers’ from at least 28 countries who have formed user-led networks for activism and mental health recovery. More importantly, it is argued that HVM blends meaning-making, postmodern notions of identity in relation to power structures, and ritual embodiment, resulting in a striking example of sociologist Hans Mol’s notion of religion as a sacralizing process

The Place of Identity Dissonance and Emotional Motivations in Bio-Cultural Models of Religious Experience: A Report from the 19th Century

Durham University’s ‘Hearing the Voice’ project involves a multi-disciplinary exploration of hallucinatorytype phenomena in an attempt to revaluate and reframe discussions of these experiences. As part of this project, contemporaneous religious experiences (supernatural voices and visions) in the United States from the first half of the nineteenth century have been analysed, shedding light on the value and applicability of contemporary bio-cultural models of religious experience for such historical cases. In particular, this essay outlines four historical cases, seeking to utilise and to refine four theoretical models, including anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s ‘absorption hypothesis’, by returning to something like William James’ concern with ‘discordant personalities’. Ultimately, the paper argues that emphasis on the role of identity dissonance must not be omitted from the analytical tools applied to these nineteenth-century examples, and perhaps should be retained for any study of religious experience generall

Examining the Nature and Consequences of Interfunctional Bias in a Corporate Setting

Interfunctional bias is examined in this dissertation as a potential barrier to interfunctional cooperation. Interfunctional cooperation is desirable in modern corporate organizations as a contributor to effective service delivery, operations planning, and sales performance. Interfunctional stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination are hypothesized to relate positively, and together provide the bias-based theoretical basis through which barriers to interfunctional cooperation can be more thoroughly understood. Based on the extant literature in marketing and psychology, competing models of interfunctional bias are developed and hypothesized. In the first of three studies a questionnaire-based survey of supply chain employees’ perceptions of salespeople permitted the examination of the hypothesized antecedent relationships of interfunctional stereotyping strength, including functional identification, organizational identification, trait negative affect, and conditions of bias-reducing contact. The results of study one suggest that employees’ organizational identification, trait negative affect of the employee, and an equal status between the functional groups directly relate with interfunctional stereotyping strength. Furthermore, interfunctional prejudice is positively related with interfunctional stereotyping strength and negatively related with employees’ internal motivation to respond without prejudice. Studies 2 and 3 employed experiments designed to examine the relationships between interfunctional stereotyping strength, prejudice, and discriminatory behavioral intentions, and included the following predicted moderating factors: internal motivation to respond without prejudice, monetary incentives to cooperate, and positive social norms. The positive relationship between interfunctional stereotyping, prejudice and discrimination was confirmed in both studies. As well, a hypothesized three-way interaction resulted between stereotyping strength, internal motivation, and external motivators when predicting prejudiced attitudes. There are several managerial and theoretical implications. First, the superordinate identity and equal status between functional groups should be considered in attempts to reduce interfunctional stereotyping. Second, the influence that individual-level variables such as internal motivation and trait negative affect can have on interfunctional stereotyping and prejudice provides insights into hiring considerations. Third, monetary incentives and positive social norms can be a positive influence toward reducing prejudice for those who are not internally motivated to be non-prejudiced. Finally, interfunctional bias as a barrier to interfunctional cooperation is empirically supported

Perspectives on Firm Decision Making During Risky Technology Acquisitions

A novel survey dataset on computed tomography (CT) machine acquisition is used to explore which theories best answer two questions from the decision making literature. First, what determines how much uncertainty a firm has when investing in updated technology? Second, what determines the value of the acquisition? In answering these questions, two theoretical comparisons are conducted. In the first, economic theory, behavioral theory (the Behavioral Theory of the Firm and Prospect Theory), and Bounded Rationality are tested as potential determinants of acquisition uncertainties. In the second, economic theory and Prospect Theory are tested as potential determinants of the value of the machine acquired. To answer these questions, hospitals were surveyed about the acquisition of their most valuable computed tomography machine. From the survey data, support was found for the Bounded Rationality hypothesis; firms have less uncertainty about an acquisition’s performance on attributes that correspond to more strongly held objectives. Support was also found for the behavioral theory hypothesis; firms whose prior machines perform below aspiration levels seek more uncertainty in their subsequent acquisitions, while firms whose machines perform above aspiration levels seek less uncertainty. No support was found for the normative hypothesis; acquisition uncertainty is determined by economic attributes. In the second comparison, partial support was found for the normative theory hypothesis and no support was found for Prospect Theory hypothesis. The value of the acquisition increased as the minimum lifespan of the acquisition increased. Perceived revenue, operating cost, and financial factor uncertainty did not significantly influence acquisition value, providing no support for Prospect Theory. However, greater uncertainty over the acquisition’s ability to fulfill customer desires was associated with the acquisition of a less expensive machine. Studies of the influence of uncertainty on capital investment decision making have traditionally focused on financial forms of uncertainty. The results of this study suggest that the influence of uncertainty related to an acquisition’s ability to fulfill customer desires may have an even stronger influence on the value of an acquisition than variables related to the non-perceptual characteristics of the acquirer

Moving to personalized medicine requires personalized health plans

When individuals, families, and employers select health plans in the United States, they are typically only shown the financial structure of the plans and their provider networks. This variation in financial structure can lead patients to have health plans aligned with their financial needs, but not with their underlying nonfinancial preferences. Compounding the challenge is the fact that managed care organizations have historically used a combination of population-level budget impact models, cost-effectiveness analyses, medical necessity criteria, and current medical consensus to make coverage decisions. This approach to creating and presenting health plan options does not consider heterogeneity in patient and family preferences and values, as it treats populations as uniform. Similarly, it does not consider that there are some situations in which patients are price-insensitive. We seek to highlight the challenges posed by presenting health plans to patients in strictly financial terms, and to call for more consideration of nonfinancial patient preferences in the health plan design and selection process

Promoting open scholarship in Africa: benefits and best library practices

Knowledge, as a prerequisite for development, is contingent on information. The main value of information is in its ability to be used, reused, and shared. Open access (OA) allows for the easy dissemination and preservation of information by providing all scholarly communication and knowledge at no cost to the end user. In the rapidly expanding, global knowledge-based economy, Africa’s steady progress from the peripheral to the epicenter of knowledge production is not to be ignored, not least because of its reliance on OA. Such access environments and institutional repositories throughout the continent are playing significant roles in maximizing the impact of research output. This paper reveals that OA content is more citable, not simply because of the quality of the output, but instead of the advantage that OA brings in maximizing accessibility and increased citation. It goes on to show that OA will enhance the research community’s existing system for evaluating and rewarding research productivity. Ultimately, OA has the ability to elevate (South) Africa, its universities and institutions, to the status of knowledge producers rather than mere knowledge consumers.published or submitted for publicationOpe

Emergent SO(5) symmetry at the columnar ordering transition in the classical cubic dimer model

The classical cubic-lattice dimer model undergoes an unconventional transition between a columnar crystal and a dimer liquid, in the same universality class as the deconfined quantum critical point in spin-1/2 anti-ferromagnets but with very different microscopic physics and microscopic symmetries. Using Monte Carlo simulations, we show that this transition has emergent SO(5) symmetry relating quantities characterizing the two phases. While the low-temperature phase has a conventional order parameter, the defining property of the Coulomb liquid on the high-temperature side is deconfinement of monomers, and so SO(5) relates fundamentally different types of objects. Studying linear system sizes up to = 96, we find that this symmetry applies with an excellent precision, consistently improving with system size over this range. It is remarkable that SO(5) emerges in a system as basic as the cubic dimer model, with only simple discrete degrees of freedom. Our results are important evidence for the generality of the SO(5) symmetry that has been proposed for the NCCP 1 field theory. We describe an interpretation for these results in terms of a consistent hypothesis for the renormalization-group flow structure, allowing for the possibility that SO(5) may ultimately be a near-symmetry rather than exact. The classical dimer model on the cubic lattice illustrates three key mechanisms in three-dimensional (3D) critical phenomena. Two of these are the appearance of artificial gauge fields, and unconventional phase transitions where topologi-cal effects play a key role. The third, which we demonstrate here, is the emergence in the infrared (IR) of unusual non-abelian symmetries that would be impossible at a conventional Wilson–Fisher-like critical point. The close-packed dimer model has a power-law correlated 'Coulomb' phase [1, 2], governed by an emergent U(1) gauge field whose conserved flux arises from a 'magnetic field' defined in terms of dimers. A remarkable phase transition [3] separates this liquid from a 'columnar' phase, illustrated in Fig. 1(a), in which the dimers form a crystal, spontaneously breaking lattice symmetries. Despite being entirely classical, this transition is not described by Ginzburg–Landau theory, but is instead a Higgs transition of the U(1) gauge theory [4– 6]. The effective field theory is the noncompact CP 1 model (NCCP 1), in which the gauge field couples to a two-component bosonic matter field that condenses at the transition. NCCP 1 is also the effective field theory for the 'decon-fined' Néel–valence-bond solid (VBS) phase transition [7, 8] in 2+1D quantum antiferromagnets [9–18] and a related lattice loop model [19]. This raises the possibility that the dimer model exhibits a surprising emergent symmetry: Simulations of the loop model show SO(5) symmetry emerging at large scales [20]—either exactly or to an extremely good approximation. Earlier work on topological sigma models for decon-fined critical points [21, 22] revealed that SO(5) is a consistent possibility in the IR, despite the fact that it cannot be made manifest in the gauge theory [38]. The Néel–VBS transition involves a three-component antiferromagnetic order parameter and a two-component VBS order parameter; SO(5) allows all five components to be rotated into each other. This symmetry can be understood through a set of dualities for NCCP 1 and related theories [23]. Here we use Monte Carlo simulations to demonstrate emergent SO(5) at the dimer ordering transition. This large symmetry is particularly striking in a discrete classical model with no internal symmetries at all, only spatial symmetries together with a local constraint that is equivalent to U(1) symmetry in a dual representation. SO(5) furthermore unifies operators of conceptually distinct types, rotating the crystal order parameter—a conventional observable in terms of dimers— into 'monopole' operators that insert or remove monomers, and cannot be measured in the ensemble of dimer configurations. Together these yield a five-component SO(5) super-spin. The emergent symmetry group is therefore identical to that of the Néel–VBS transition. But it should be noted that the microscopic symmetries of the latter—roughly speaking , SO(3) × (lattice symmetries)—are very different from the (lattice symmetries) × U(1) in the dimer model. Previously, SO(5) has been demonstrated directly only in a single lattice model [20], and is also supported by level de-generacies in the JQ model [24], both realizations of the Néel– VBS transition. Its presence in the dimer model is particularly important because the IR behaviour of NCCP 1 is subtle and remains controversial [11, 12, 15–19, 23, 25–27]. The simplest explanation for SO(5) would be flow to a fixed point where FIG. 1. Dimer model phases and interactions. (a) Columnar phase (one of six symmetry-related ground states). (b) Disordered configuration , typical of high-temperature Coulomb phase. (c) Pairs of nearest-neighbor parallel dimers (back face of cube) contribute energy − 2. (d) Four parallel dimers around a cube contribute 4