The Admissibility of Research in Emergency Medicine

The main goal in this paper is to present the legal rules connected with medical experiment on human beings in emergency medicine and to explain the scope, significance, and meaning of these rules, especially with regard to their interpretation. As the provisions about medical experiments truly make sense only if they can be observed by the whole "civilised" international community, they are presented in the context of international law with reference to Polish law. By considering the appropriate regulations of research contained in legal documents, it is possible to formulate a catalogue of doctors' duties and patients' rights. This general catalogue refers to all kinds of medical research involving human beings. In the field of emergency medicine, general provisions are sometimes involved, and they are sometimes limited. The main and most important conclusion is that a medical experiment in emergency medicine is admissible only if previously indicated conditions based on general rules of conducting research are fulfilled.     

E-mailed standardized cognitive behavioural treatment of work-related stress: a randomized controlled trial

The aim of this study was to assess the effects of a 7-week standardized cognitive behavioural treatment of work-related stress conducted via e-mail. A total of 342 people applied for treatment in reaction to a newspaper article. Initial screening reduced the sample to a heterogeneous (sub)clinical group of 239 participants. Participants were assigned randomly to a waiting list condition (n = 62), or to immediate treatment (n = 177). A follow-up was conducted 3 years after inception of the treatment. The outcome measures used were the Depression Anxiety Stress Scales (DASS-42) and the Emotional Exhaustion scale of the Maslach Burnout Inventory - General Survey (MBI-GS). Fifty participants (21%) dropped out. Both groups showed statistically significant improvements. Intention-to-treat analysis of covariance (ANCOVAs) revealed that participants in the treatment condition improved significantly more than those in the waiting control condition (0.001

or = d > or = 0.5 (anxiety)). The between-group effects ranged from d = 0.6 (stress) to d = 0.1 (anxiety). At follow-up, the effects were more pronounced, but this result requires replication in view of high attrition at follow-up. The results warrant further research on Internet-driven standardized cognitive behavioural therapy for work-related stress. Such research should include the direct comparison of this treatment with face-to-face treatment, and should address the optimal level of therapist contact in Internet-driven treatment.     

Uber die Regeln des Aussagenkalkuls

Ohne ZusammenfassungAllatum est die 21. Februarii 1952.     

Propositional discourse logic

A novel normal form for propositional theories underlies the logic pdl, which captures some essential features of natural discourse, independent from any particular subject matter and related only to its referential structure. In particular, pdlallows to distinguish vicious circularity from the innocent one, and to reason in the presence of inconsistency using a minimal number of extraneous assumptions, beyond the classical ones. Several, formally equivalent decision problems are identified as potential applications: non-paradoxical character of discourses, admissibility of arguments in argumentation networks, propositional satisfiability, and the existence of kernels of directed graphs. Directed graphs provide the basis for the semantics of pdl and the paper concludes by an overview of relevant graph-theoretical results and their applications in diagnosing paradoxical character of natural discourses.     

Randomized controlled trials versus rough set analysis: two competing approaches for evaluating clinical data

The present paper deals with the problem of evaluating empirical evidence for therapeutic decisions in medicine. The article discusses the views of Nancy Cartwright and John Worrall on the function that randomization plays in ascertaining causal relations with reference to the therapies applied. The main purpose of the paper is to present a general idea of alternative method of evaluating empirical evidence. The method builds on data analysis that makes use of rough set theory. The first attempts to apply the method show that it is an interesting alternative to randomized controlled trials.     

Do Attitudes Towards the Integration of Immigrants Change Over Time? A Comparative Study of Natives,Second-Generation Immigrants and Foreign-Born Residents in Luxembourg

The aim of this paper is to investigate attitudes toward the integration of immigrants in Luxembourg—the country with the highest proportion of immigrants in Europe. First, the paper examines how attitudes toward integration (consisting of two dimensions: attitudes toward assimilation and attitudes toward multiculturalism) vary among different groups of the country’s residents, i.e. natives and residents with a migratory background. Second, it examines how these attitudes have evolved over a period of nearly ten years. The Luxembourgish European Value Study data from 1999 and 2008 are used. The results of the analyses reveal that attitudes towards the integration of immigrants differ significantly among the resident groups analysed. Native residents are more supportive of the assimilation model compared to foreign-born residents and second-generation immigrants with two foreign-born parents, whereas the latter groups score higher on the multiculturalism scale than the other groups. With respect to trends in attitudes towards integration, the assimilation model gained popularity between 1999 and 2008 among all groups, whereas only a small decrease in popularity was found with respect to preferences for multicultural integration.     

Public Responses to Community Compensation: The Importance of Prior Consultations with Local Residents

A company that wants to implement an industrial project with adverse local impacts can offer the members of the affected community compensation for bearing the burdens associated with the project. In the current study, participants evaluated such a situation from the perspective of observer. Depending on experimental condition, they learned that a company either had or had not consulted members of the affected community prior to deciding on the compensation offer. The compensation offer was either public goods compensation or individual monetary compensation. We hypothesized and found that the decision‐making process was considered fairer and the company was perceived as more concerned with the local public interest when the company had consulted local residents prior to deciding on the compensation offer. Also, the company was believed to be more concerned with the local public interest when it offered public goods compensation instead of individual monetary compensation. Perceived concern and perceived fairness predicted the perceived trustworthiness of the company, and this, in turn, predicted how participants anticipated the members of the affected community to react to the compensation offered by the company. The study thus demonstrates the importance of consultations with local residents in the process of deciding on compensation measures. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.