Mental health surveys are used extensively in epidemiological research worldwide. The ethical questions that arise regarding their risk of causing psychological distress or other potential harm have not been studied in the general population. We have investigated how study participants serving as controls in a population-based study perceived an anonymous postal questionnaire focusing on mental health and wellbeing. Parents were contacted from the Swedish Census Bureau as part of a larger follow-up study on palliative care conducted in 2001. Eligible parents (...) had a child of the same gender, year of birth and were from the same counties in Sweden as parents who had lost a child to cancer. Five percent reported being negatively affected. The principle negative effect on participants was that self-reflection reminded them of their difficulties. Of the 418 respondents, 52% reported that they were positively affected by study participation and 95% perceived the inquiry as valuable. These findings support the use of population-based controls in future research. (shrink)

This article revisits Jeffrey Tulis’s The Rhetorical Presidency in the age of Trump, discussing the debates to which it originally responded, its core thesis and empirical evidence, as well as its impact on political science in the last three decades. The article’s second half turns to a recent critique of Tulis’s thesis by Ann C. Pluta, which manifests many of the misunderstandings that have persisted since The Rhetorical Presidency’s original publication. Habits of thought revealed in Pluta’s misunderstandings, I argue, are (...) emblematic of the political culture that is amenable to the simplistic yet politically effective appeals characteristic of rhetorical presidents like Donald Trump. Elements of the broader political-science world that are on display in Pluta’s article are symptomatic of political pathologies sustained and aggravated by the culture of the polity that political scientists inhabit and purport to study—the culture of the rhetorical presidency. (shrink)

In the most of existing cosmological investigations, the isotropic space–time models have been considered. In the present work, we focus on beyond this limitation and discuss the influence of anisotropy from thermodynamical perspective. The main goal of this study is to discuss the first and the generalized second laws of thermodynamics in an expanding anisotropic inhomogeneous model of the cosmos from the teleparallel gravity perspective, which is filled with the baryonic matter interacting with the dark energy and the cold dark (...) matter by assuming the cosmos as a thermodynamical system, which is bounded by a dynamical horizon. (shrink)

Samtʻan Sŏnsaeng chip -- Tongguk changwŏnjip -- Sihak kyegyŏng.