Rigor and reproducibility instruction in academic medical libraries

Background: Concerns over scientific reproducibility have grown in recent years, leading the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to require researchers to address these issues in research grant applications. Starting in 2020, training grants were required to provide a plan for educating trainees in rigor and reproducibility. Academic medical centers have responded with different solutions to fill this educational need. As experienced instructors with expertise in topics relating to reproducibility, librarians can play a prominent role in providing trainings, classes, and events to educate investigators and trainees, and bolstering reproducibility in their communities. Case Presentations: This special report summarizes efforts at five institutions to provide education in reproducibility to biomedical and life sciences researchers. Our goal is to expand awareness of the range of approaches in providing reproducibility services in libraries. Conclusions: Reproducibility education by medical librarians can take many forms. These specific programs in reproducibility education build upon libraries’ existing collaborations, with funder mandates providing a major impetus. Collaborator needs shaped the exact type of educational or other reproducibility support and combined with each library’s strengths to yield a diversity of offerings based on capacity and interest. As demand for and complexity of reproducibility education increases due to new institutional and funder mandates, reproducibility education will merit special attention

Biribi: disciplining and punishing in the French empire

This article discusses the infamous Bataillons d’Afrique to which French former criminals were sent to complete their duty of military service. The ‘Bat d’Af’ were created to prevent the young male bourgeoisie from having to mix with these ‘undesirables’ and ‘reprobates’, and they were stationed well away from the mainland in France’s North African colonies. This article discusses themes such as discipline, punishment, torture, homosexuality, interracial power relations, and delinquent ‘cultures’ in this imperial context

Priority assignment procedures in multi-level assembly job shop

This paper deals with the design of priority rules for job shops that process multi-level assembly jobs. Specifically, it explores the means by which the structural complexity of jobs can be incorporated explicitly into priority rules to reduce job lead times. The job lead time is viewed as consisting of two components: flow time and job staging delays. The primary focus of the paper is on the development of a class of priority rules that is aimed at reducing the staging delay. The class of priority rules that is developed is then used in combination with rules that are effective for the flow time component. The combined rule results in the improvement of the lead time performance. The paper also includes experimental results on sets of jobs of varying degrees of complexity. These results provide a comparative perspective on the performance of priority rules that have been examined in the earlier research literature as well as the rules specifically developed in this paper

Due date assignment procedures with dynamically updated coefficients for multi-level assembly job shops

This paper presents a study of due date assignment procedures in job shop environments where multi-level assembly jobs are processed and due dates are internally assigned. Most of the reported studies in the literature have focused on string type jobs. We propose a dynamic update approach (which makes use of Little's Law) to obtain the coefficients used in the traditional due date assignment procedures of constant allowance (CON), total work content (TWK) and critical path processing time (CPPT). The coefficient assigned to a given job reflects both the state of the shop at the time the job is processed and the characteristics of the job. The approach also provides the shop management with the ability to control the average job lateness. In the simulation experiments conducted in this study, we set the average lateness at zero. The analysis of simulation results shows that the proposed dynamic procedures provide overall better shop performance than their static counterparts, especially for less complex assembly job structures. A procedure for determining job due dates that extends the critical path concept of the CPPT procedure to critical path flow time (CPFT) is also proposed. Unlike the others, this procedure does not need the determination of any coefficients. The procedure uses estimates of waiting times at work centers that are determined dynamically based on shop work load information. In this paper, an adaptive adjustment approach is also suggested to bring average lateness for the CPFT procedure to a target value. Results of the simulation experiments show that the CPFT combined with the adaptive adjustment approach (CPFT-ADJ) provides overall improved performance compared to the dynamic and static versions of the CON, TWK, and CPPT procedures for less complex job structures. For more complex assembly job structures and string jobs the CPFT-ADJ procedure results in comparable performance to the dynamic versions of the CON, TWK, and CPPT procedures. The paper also provides an investigation of the interaction between the two priority rules: earliest job due date (JDD) and the earliest operation due date (OPNDD) and the four due date procedures: CON, TWK, CPPT, and CPFT-ADJ. In general, for multi-level assembly job structures JDD outperforms OPNDD in terms of average job lead time and tardiness

A Nuanced Examination of Primate Capture and Consumption and Human Socio-Economic Well-Being in Kirindy Mitea National Park, Madagascar

The futures of human and nonhuman primates are closely tied in protected areas. Understanding this interconnectedness is especially urgent in Madagascar, one of the world’s most impoverished biodiversity hotspots. Yet, no study has evaluated the relationship between poverty and lemur hunting and consumption using a composite poverty metric that includes health, education, and living standards. To address this gap, and to inform primate conservation practice and policy, we administered annual surveys to 81 households over six consecutive months (September 2018 to March 2019) in a village on the border of Kirindy Mitea National Park, Madagascar. We observed extreme deprivation scores across multiple dimensions of poverty and identified ninety-five percent of households as ‘impoverished’. Of these, three-quarters (77%) of households were identified as being in ‘severe poverty’. One-fifth (19%) of all households hunted lemurs and half (49%) of households consumed lemurs. While poverty eradication is an urgent need in communities around Kirindy Mitea National Park, our findings show no relationship between poverty and lemur hunting and consumption, perhaps due to the lack of variance in poverty. Our results highlight the need to investigate other contributory factors to lemur hunting and consumption locally. Because food insecurity is a known driver of lemur hunting and consumption among the study community, and because domestic meats can be preferred over protected species, we recommend testing the efficacy of livestock interventions near Kirindy Mitea National Park