[Editorial] Marketing as an integrator in integrated care

Purpose: Integrated care requires solutions that cannot be delivered without addressing the underlying multidisciplinary problems. Yet with a few notable exceptions, there is a lack of coordination between disciplines, to effectively integrate knowledge. The main aim of this special section is to provide a platform that explicitly coordinates and curates multidisciplinary research aimed at providing a shared understanding and knowledge base that directly addresses the fragmentation in this field, with an explicit focus on the role of Marketing as a key but often neglected partner. We identify four big challenges (Self, Society, Micro Systems and Macro Systems) to which Marketing can contribute, illustrating these potential contributions through the articles and accompanying practitioner commentaries of this special section. Methodology: Ferguson demonstrates how reflexive introspection can be used, beyond its therapeutic benefits, to bring a deeper understanding of the meaning of illness and treatments from a patient’s perspective. Orazi and Newton establish experimentally the positive impact of collaborative sources on health messaging receptivity. Taiminen, Saramieni and Parkinson survey physicians to evaluate acceptance of/barriers to incorporating digital self-services into overall care delivery. Cruz, Snuggs and Tsarenko utilise interviews to understand the patient’s negotiation of the service labyrinth and fragmentation. Findings: We demonstrate the scope and flexibility of marketing theories and methods and how these can be applied to the four main challenges of integrated care: Self; Society; Micro Systems; Macro Systems. Research Implications: We identify directions for future research as a means of stimulating fruitful multidisciplinary partnerships in the four key challenge areas. It is only by collaborating across disciplines that we can really develop and provide insights that inform policy, practitioners, society and consumers on how to future-proof our care services. Originality/Value: In addition to publishing new research, this special section directly encourages multidisciplinary collaboration between marketing, as a neglected partner, and health/social care disciplines by showcasing the theories and methods that can be used to address our identified four key challenges to integrated care. In a novel approach, practitioner commentaries evaluate the value of each study, placing them in the wider integrated care context and hence pointing out further directions for development

Why education in public schools should include religious ideals

This article aims to open a new line of debate about religion in public schools by focusing on religious ideals. The article begins with an elucidation of the concept ‘religious ideals’ and an explanation of the notion of reasonable pluralism, in order to be able to explore the dangers and positive contributions of religious ideals and their pursuit on a liberal democratic society. We draw our examples of religious ideals from Christianity and Islam, because these religions have most adherents in Western liberal democracies that are the focus of this article. The fifth and most important section "Reasonable pluralism and the inclusion of religious ideals in public secondary schools" provides three arguments for our claim that public schools should include religious ideals, namely that they are important to religious people, that they are conducive for the development of pupils into citizens of a liberal democracy, and that the flourishing of pupils as adults is advanced by encountering religious ideals. We also offer a more practical reason: religious ideals can more easily be included within public education than religious dogmas and rules

Cosmopolitanism and the Deeply Religious

In this paper we provide a defence of cosmopolitanism from a liberal perspective, examining its moral underpinnings, including moral obligations predicated on a belief in common humanity and the fundamental dignity of human people, cultural capacities that include an embrace of pluralism and a fallibilist disposition, and pragmatist resolve in finding humanitarian solutions to real problems that people face. We also scrutinise the ideal of cosmopolitanism by considering the ‘deeply religious’ as the sort of people about whom it may be said that irreconcilable tensions exist between certain types of commitment and/or belonging and what the demands of cosmopolitanism involve

Identifying Functional Bases for Multidimensional Neural Computations

Current dimensionality reduction methods can identify relevant subspaces for neural computations, but do not favor one basis over the other within the relevant subspace. Finding the appropriate basis can further simplify the description of the nonlinear computation with respect to the relevant variables, making it easier to elucidate the underlying neural computation and make hypotheses about the neural circuitry giving rise to the observed responses. Part of the problem is that, although some of the dimensionality reduction methods can identify many of the relevant dimensions, it is usually difficult to map out and/or interpret the nonlinear transformation with respect to more than a few relevant dimensions simultaneously without some simplifying assumptions. While recent approaches make it possible to create predictive models based on many relevant dimensions simultaneously, there still remains the need to relate such predictive models to the mechanistic descriptions of the operation of underlying neural circuitry. Here we demonstrate that transforming to a basis within the relevant subspace where the neural computation is best described by a given nonlinear function often makes it easier to interpret the computation and describe it with a small number of parameters. We refer to the corresponding basis as the functional basis, and illustrate the utility of such transformation in the context of logical OR and logical AND functions. We show that although dimensionality reduction methods such as spike-triggered covariance are able to find a relevant subspace, they often produce dimensions that are difficult to interpret and do not correspond to a functional basis. The functional features can be found using a maximum likelihood approach. The results are illustrated using simulated neurons and recordings from retinal ganglion cells. The resulting features are uniquely defined, non-orthogonal, and make it easier to relate computational and mechanistic models to each other