Master narratives and narratives as told by people with mental health and drug problems

This article examines the role of master narratives in self-narratives told by people with both mental health and drug problems. It is based on stories told by people who have both mental health and drug problems. However, their substance abuse has become their most dominant characteristic in their lives. The storytellers or the interviewees attempt to describe their background, their experience and what they call churning thoughts, while their stories are also infiltrated and dominated by master narratives about the drug abuser

The Effect of Transcranial Temporal Interference Stimulation (tTIS) on Pavlovian Bias

In life, humans often approach the outcomes deemed valuable and avoid those that are harmful. This is known as the Pavlovian system. This default system is often adaptive, but it can also interfere with the more flexible instrumental system in pursuit of a goal. Research has indicated that the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) plays a role in the arbitration process between these two systems. Due to the location of the dACC it has been difficult to focally stimulate it. Recently, transcranial temporal interference stimulation (tTIS) has been proposed as a new non-invasive brain stimulation technique to focally stimulate areas deeper in the cortex. In a preregistered, repeated measures, double-blinded study, we tested the effect of tTIS on the dACC. The participants (N = 21) completed a value-based Go/NoGo task designed to induce a conflict between the Pavlovian and instrumental system. We found no statistically significant results, leading us to speculate on whether this was due to tTIS not having its proposed effect or the dACC not responding to stimulation the way we hypothesized. These findings might have implications for better understanding the role of the dACC in decision making and for the future feasibility of tTIS

Decoding of concatenated codes with interleaved outer codes

Recently Bleichenbacher et al. proposed a decoding algorithm for interleaved (N, K) Reed-Solomon codes, which allows close to N-K errors to be corrected in many cases. We discuss the application of this decoding algorithm to concatenated codes

Validating the Danish adaptation of the World Health Organization's International Classification for Patient Safety classification of patient safety incident types

OBJECTIVES: Validation of a Danish patient safety incident classification adapted from the World Health Organizaton's International Classification for Patient Safety (ICPS-WHO). DESIGN: Thirty-three hospital safety management experts classified 58 safety incident cases selected to represent all types and subtypes of the Danish adaptation of the ICPS (ICPS-DK). OUTCOME MEASURES: Two measures of inter-rater agreement: kappa and intra-class correlation (ICC). RESULTS: An average number of incident types used per case per rater was 2.5. The mean ICC was 0.521 (range: 0.199–0.809) and the mean kappa was 0.513 (range: 0.193–0.804). Kappa and ICC showed high correlation (r = 0.99). An inverse correlation was found between the prevalence of type and inter-rater reliability. Results are discussed according to four factors known to determine the inter-rater agreement: skill and motivation of raters; clarity of case descriptions; clarity of the operational definitions of the types and the instructions guiding the coding process; adequacy of the underlying classification scheme. CONCLUSIONS: The incident types of the ICPS-DK are adequate, exhaustive and well suited for classifying and structuring incident reports. With a mean kappa a little above 0.5 the inter-rater agreement of the classification system is considered ‘fair’ to ‘good’. The wide variation in the inter-rater reliability and low reliability and poor discrimination among the highly prevalent incident types suggest that for these types, precisely defined incident sub-types may be preferred. This evaluation of the reliability and usability of WHO's ICPS should be useful for healthcare administrations that consider or are in the process of adapting the ICPS