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Evaluation of drug toxicity in clinical trials

An increasing number of drugs removed from the market because of unacceptable toxicity raises concerns regarding preapproval testing of drug safety. In the present paper it is postulated that the non-inferiority type of trial should be abandoned in favor of the superiority trial with active controls and less stringent (p<0.1, both for efficacy and toxicity) statistics. This approach will increase sensitivity of detection of drug-induced adverse effects at the expense of increasing false positive results regarding the difference in efficacy between the tested and reference drug. Such a move will increase the protection of future patients. In addition, the proposed design is far more acceptable from the clinical (e.g. no need to specify the statistically expected “unimportant” number of deaths) and ethical points of view, as well as being favored by the strong incentive of involved parties. In the second part of this paper arguments are presented in favor of the hypothesis that placebo (still used in some superiority trials) does not induce adverse effects. The assertion that placebo may induce adverse effects is probably biased by the nature of the clinical experiment. Such a conclusion is supported by studies indicating that placebo-induced adverse effects are disease — and treatment — specific. The modification of clinical trials according to the proposed changes may increase the trials’ sensitivity at detecting adverse effects of drugs. A lecture on the subject of this paper was presented at the 6th International Bioethics Conference on the subject of ‘The Responsible Conduct of Basic and Clinical Research’, held in Warsaw, Poland, 3–4 June 2005.     

Tscope: A C library for programming cognitive experiments on the MS Windows platform

Tscope is a C/C11 programming library designed for programming experiments that run on Windows 2000/XP. It is intended for a public of experimental psychologists with moderate programming skills, who are accustomed to writing their own experimental programs for DOS but have not made the step to Windows-based programming yet. It provides molecular functions for graphics, sound, timing, randomization, and response registration. Together with ANSI-C standard library functions and the powerful C syntax, this set of functions gives the experimenter the opportunity to program virtually any experiment one can come up with. Tscope is completely based on free software, is distributed under the GNU General Public License, and is available at expsy.ugent.be/tscope. An integrated development environment for compiling and running Tscope programs is also freely available.     

The effects of meritocracy beliefs on women's well-being after first-time gender discrimination

This study examined how meritocracy beliefs may buffer women from the negative psychological effects of an acute situation of gender discrimination. Although some research indirectly suggests that believing that meritocracy exists may increase wellbeing, group consciousness theories suggest that disbelieving that meritocracy exists will enhance psychological adjustment to gender discrimination. Women who reported little past experience with discrimination, and either believed or disbelieved that meritocracy exists, were exposed to either a laboratory situation of discrimination or a nondiscrimination failure (control) condition. Consistent with group consciousness theories, women experiencing discrimination reported greater well-being if they disbelieved that meritocracy exists than if they were believers. In contrast, women in the control condition reported greater wellbeing if they believed that meritocracy exists than if they were disbelievers. Implications for coping with discrimination are discussed.     

Letter visibility and the viewing position effect in visual word recognition

The ease with which printed words are recognized depends on the position at which the eyes initially fixate the word. In this study, we examined to what extent recognition performance for each fixation position depends on the average visibility of the word's constituent letters. Experiment 1 measured recognition performance to single letters embedded in strings of Xs (lengths of 5 and 7) for all combinations of letter position and initial fixation position in the string. In Experiment 2, recognition performance was measured for five-letter and seven-letter words as a function of initial fixation position in the word. Whereas average letter visibility showed a symmetric function in Experiment 1, the word recognition data of Experiment 2 showed the typical asymmetric curve. Combining the letter visibility data with measures of lexical constraint using absolute letter-in-string positions failed to capture the pattern in the word data. An alternative measure of constraint based on relative position coding of letters generated more accurate predictions.     

On field's argument for substantivalism

In this article I subject to criticism Field's argument, according to which field theory takes space‐time to be à substance since it ascribes field properties to space‐time points. There is petitio principii error made in this reasoning because Field does not give any justification for his controversial assumption that fields are properties of space‐time points. What is more, I suggest, Field's interpretation of field theory is incompatible with the way this theory is understood and utilized by its users, namely scientists. My criticism is based on the assumption that one cannot propose an ontology of a given scientific theory, at the same time imposing on it an interpretation which clashes with the interpretation current among its users. I also suggest that in order to establish the ontology of a scientific theory one should also take into account the way it has been constructed. According to this criterion, field theory does indeed take space‐time to be a substance.     

Approximative truth of fact-statements,laws, and theories

Summary The paper is a sketch of a conception of approximative truth (or verisimilitude). The concepts of relative error, and degree of inadequacy are introduced. By means of them the concept of truth-content of quantitative facts-statements, laws and theories is defined. Laws and theories accepted in science have a high truth-content, i.e. they are approximately true.     

A processing model for children's sentence comprehension: A discussion of two studies by Janellen Huttenlocher

Huttenlocher and coworkers studied children's comprehension of sentences by looking at the times required by these children to put an object in the place specifiec by the sentence. The explanations offered by these investigators for their data are discussed. A model which assumes that three processing stages are involved in comprehension is proposed to explain Huttenlocher's data. In these stages, the experimenter's sentence is transformed so as to derive an active sentence in which the to-be-moved object is the grammatical subject, and which specifies the relative position to which this object has to be moved. The model yields reaction time predictions which seem to fit the data well.     

The lattice of strengthenings of a strongly finite consequence operation

First, we prove that the lattice of all structural strengthenings of a given strongly finite consequence operation is both atomic and coatomic, it has finitely many atoms and coatoms, each coatom is strongly finite but atoms are not of this kind — we settle this by constructing a suitable counterexample. Second, we deal with the notions of hereditary: algebraicness, strong finitisticity and finite approximability of a strongly finite consequence operation. Third, we formulate some conditions which tell us when the lattice of all structural strengthenings of a given strongly finite consequence operation is finite, and subsequently we give some applications of them.This paper was read at the Third Autumn School on Strongly Finite Sentential Calculi organized by the Section of Logic, Polish Academy of Sciences, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, in Ustronie (Poland), November 1979.