Folkways Records and the Ethics of Collecting: Some Personal Reflections

In this article, anthropologist Michael Asch recounts fascinating histories surrounding the genesis of Folkways Records, focusing on aspects of diversity, selection, and ethics. He illustrates the discussion by invoking pertinent anthropological and folklore paradigms

Bloch Theory and Quantization of Magnetic Systems

Quantizing the motion of particles on a Riemannian manifold in the presence of a magnetic field poses the problems of existence and uniqueness of quantizations. Both of them are settled since the early days of geometric quantization but there is still some structural insight to gain from spectral theory. Following the work of Asch, Over & Seiler (1994) for the 2-torus we describe the relation between quantization on the manifold and Bloch theory on its covering space for more general compact manifolds.Comment: 20 page

De père en fils ? Moses Asch et la collection Folkways

La collection Folkways est une référence pour l’amateur de musique populaire américaine : la majeure partie des quelque deux mille albums publiés par Folkways entre la fin des années 1940 et le milieu des années 1980 est consacrée à certaines figures marquantes de cette musique, dont Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Mary Lou Williams et Pete Seeger. Mais Folkways est aussi une « archive publique des sonorités du monde », comme l’a dit Moses Asch, fondateur de cette collection extraordinaire dont il ..

Bewunderer, Verehrer, Zuschauer: Die Helden und ihr Publikum

Im Fokus dieses Bandes steht das Publikum von Helden und ihren Taten, das anders als die vielfältigen Strategien der Heroisierung bisher nur sehr wenig wissenschaftliche Aufmerksamkeit erfahren hat. Genauso nämlich wie Held(inn)en nicht ohne Erzählungen existieren, existieren sie nicht ohne Publikum. Jede heroische Figur benötigt eine Interpretationsgemeinschaft, in der Heldenerzählungen einen Resonanzraum finden und für die sie als Held(in) fungiert. Ein Held ist immer ein Held für jemanden und benötigt ein zumindest zur (vielleicht auch widerwilligen) Akzeptanz, wenn nicht sogar Bewunderung oder Verehrung bereites Publikum. Der Held oder die Heldin schreibt sich im Fall der Selbstheroisierung (oft im wörtlichen Sinne) in einen politischen, sozialen oder kulturellen Erwartungshorizont, eine soziale Figuration im Sinne Norbert Elias', ein, oder wird im Fall der Fremdheroisierung in solch einen Erwartungshorizont eingeschrieben. Fehlt ein solcher Erwartungshorizont, laufen alle Versuche der heroisierenden Selbst- und Fremdinszenierung ins Leere: Die Figur ist dann kein Held, weil es niemanden gibt, der sie als solchen akzeptiert. Ist der Erwartungshorizont aber gegeben, werden die Figuren für ihre Interpretationsgemeinschaften zu Held(inn)en

De père en fils ? Moses Asch et la collection Folkways

La collection Folkways est une référence pour l’amateur de musique populaire américaine : la majeure partie des quelque deux mille albums publiés par Folkways entre la fin des années 1940 et le milieu des années 1980 est consacrée à certaines figures marquantes de cette musique, dont Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Mary Lou Williams et Pete Seeger. Mais Folkways est aussi une « archive publique des sonorités du monde », comme l’a dit Moses Asch, fondateur de cette collection extraordinaire dont il ..

Preference-Adaptive Randomization in Comparative Effectiveness Studies

Background Determination of comparative effectiveness in a randomized controlled trial requires consideration of an intervention’s comparative uptake (or acceptance) among randomized participants and the intervention’s comparative efficacy among participants who use their assigned intervention. If acceptance differs across interventions, then simple randomization of participants can result in post-randomization losses that introduce bias and limit statistical power. Methods We develop a novel preference-adaptive randomization procedure in which the allocation probabilities are updated based on the inverse of the relative acceptance rates among randomized participants in each arm. In simulation studies, we determine the optimal frequency with which to update the allocation probabilities based on the number of participants randomized. We illustrate the development and application of preference-adaptive randomization using a randomized controlled trial comparing the effectiveness of different financial incentive structures on prolonged smoking cessation. Results Simulation studies indicated that preference-adaptive randomization performed best with frequent updating, accommodated differences in acceptance across arms, and performed well even if the initial values for the allocation probabilities were not equal to their true values. Updating the allocation probabilities after randomizing each participant minimized imbalances in the number of accepting participants across arms over time. In the smoking cessation trial, unexpectedly large differences in acceptance among arms required us to limit the allocation of participants to less acceptable interventions. Nonetheless, the procedure achieved equal numbers of accepting participants in the more acceptable arms, and balanced the characteristics of participants across assigned interventions. Conclusions Preference-adaptive randomization, coupled with analysis methods based on instrumental variables, can enhance the validity and generalizability of comparative effectiveness studies. In particular, preference-adaptive randomization augments statistical power by maintaining balanced sample sizes in efficacy analyses, while retaining the ability of randomization to balance covariates across arms in effectiveness analyses

Bodies, technologies and action possibilities: when is an affordance?

Borrowed from ecological psychology, the concept of affordances is often said to offer the social study of technology a means of re-framing the question of what is, and what is not, ‘social’ about technological artefacts. The concept, many argue, enables us to chart a safe course between the perils of technological determinism and social constructivism. This article questions the sociological adequacy of the concept as conventionally deployed. Drawing on ethnographic work on the ways technological artefacts engage, and are engaged by, disabled bodies, we propose that the ‘affordances’ of technological objects are not reducible to their material constitution but are inextricably bound up with specific, historically situated modes of engagement and ways of life

Randomized Trial of Four Financial-Incentive Programs for Smoking Cessation

Background Financial incentives promote many health behaviors, but effective ways to deliver health incentives remain uncertain. Methods We randomly assigned CVS Caremark employees and their relatives and friends to one of four incentive programs or to usual care for smoking cessation. Two of the incentive programs targeted individuals, and two targeted groups of six participants. One of the individual-oriented programs and one of the group-oriented programs entailed rewards of approximately $800 for smoking cessation; the others entailed refundable deposits of$150 plus $650 in reward payments for successful participants. Usual care included informational resources and free smoking-cessation aids. Results Overall, 2538 participants were enrolled. Of those assigned to reward-based programs, 90.0% accepted this assignment, as compared with 13.7% of those assigned to deposit-based programs (P Conclusions Reward-based programs were much more commonly accepted than deposit-based programs, leading to higher rates of sustained abstinence from smoking. Group-oriented incentive programs were no more effective than individual-oriented programs

The science of clinical practice: disease diagnosis or patient prognosis? Evidence about "what is likely to happen" should shape clinical practice.

BACKGROUND: Diagnosis is the traditional basis for decision-making in clinical practice. Evidence is often lacking about future benefits and harms of these decisions for patients diagnosed with and without disease. We propose that a model of clinical practice focused on patient prognosis and predicting the likelihood of future outcomes may be more useful. DISCUSSION: Disease diagnosis can provide crucial information for clinical decisions that influence outcome in serious acute illness. However, the central role of diagnosis in clinical practice is challenged by evidence that it does not always benefit patients and that factors other than disease are important in determining patient outcome. The concept of disease as a dichotomous 'yes' or 'no' is challenged by the frequent use of diagnostic indicators with continuous distributions, such as blood sugar, which are better understood as contributing information about the probability of a patient's future outcome. Moreover, many illnesses, such as chronic fatigue, cannot usefully be labelled from a disease-diagnosis perspective. In such cases, a prognostic model provides an alternative framework for clinical practice that extends beyond disease and diagnosis and incorporates a wide range of information to predict future patient outcomes and to guide decisions to improve them. Such information embraces non-disease factors and genetic and other biomarkers which influence outcome. SUMMARY: Patient prognosis can provide the framework for modern clinical practice to integrate information from the expanding biological, social, and clinical database for more effective and efficient care