Myths of a Near Past: Envisioning Finance Capitalism anno 2007

This paper seeks to extend earlier work on particular features and manifestations of capitalism (De Cock et al., 2001). Our 2001 Myths of a Near Future paper offered ephemera readers a large depository of images concerning the New Economy. Eight years later our focus has shifted to Finance Capitalism. Over the course of the year 2007 we cut out and scanned 81 ads placed by financial institutions in the Financial Times. Our analysis of these aims to provide a sense of how the financial world ?showed up? in this pivotal year, whilst illustrating how its representations were interwoven with fantasy throughout. We also hope that the ensemble of images associated with the paper will be creatively reassembled by its readers and possibly provide a useful teaching aid

Implementing clinical guidelines.

Clinical guidelines that support practice and improve care are essential in this era of evidence-based medicine. However, implementing this guidance often falls short in practice. Sharing knowledge and auditing practice are important, but not sufficient to implement change. This article brings together evidence from the study of behaviour, education and clinical practice and offers practical tips on how practising neurologists might bring about change in the healthcare environment. Common themes include the importance of team working, multidisciplinary engagement, taking time to identify who and what needs changing, and selecting the most appropriate tool(s) for the job. Engaging with the challenge is generally more rewarding than resisting and is important for the effective provision of care

Organization/Literature: Exploring the Seam

In this paper we develop a particular way of understanding literature and organization with the aim of drawing on and extending the relationship between the two. Hence our subtitle: exploring the seam. Although the use of literary concepts and theories within our discipline is now well established, the way in which such ideas are taken up often neglects debate and contestation by treating ?literature? as a relatively homogeneous field. By following some of the ardent debates relating to issues of representation, the relation between text and extra-textual reality, and literature?s disclosure of its status as fiction, we find a discussion of (social) organization at the heart of contemporary literary theory. It is the oscillation between literature and organization that structures this paper and gives us our argument: that ?organization? and ?literature? are mutually co-articulating and interdependent concepts and fields of enquiry

Using a gamified monitoring app to change adolescents' snack intake : the development of the REWARD app and evaluation design

Background: As the snacking pattern of European adolescents is of great concern, effective interventions are necessary. Till now health promotion efforts in children and adolescents have had only limited success in changing adolescents' eating patterns and anthropometrics. Therefore, the present study proposes an innovative approach to influence dietary behaviors in youth based on new insights on effective behavior change strategies and attractive intervention channels to engage adolescents. This article describes the rationale, the development, and evaluation design of the 'Snack Track School' app. The aim of the app is to improve the snacking patterns of Flemish 14- to 16-year olds. Methods: The development of the app was informed by the systematic, stepwise, iterative, and collaborative principles of the Intervention Mapping protocol. A four week mHealth intervention was developed based on the dual-system model with behavioral change strategies targeting both the reflective (i.e., active learning, advance organizers, mere exposure, goal-setting, monitoring, and feedback) and automatic processes (i.e., rewards and positive reinforcement). This intervention will be evaluated via a controlled pre-post design in Flemish schools among 1400 adolescents. Discussion: When this intervention including strategies focused on both the reflective and automatic pathway proves to be effective, it will offer a new scientifically-based vision, guidelines and practical tools for public health and health promotion (i.e., incorporation of learning theories in intervention programs)

Weakly supervised deep learning for the detection of domain generation algorithms

Domain generation algorithms (DGAs) have become commonplace in malware that seeks to establish command and control communication between an infected machine and the botmaster. DGAs dynamically and consistently generate large volumes of malicious domain names, only a few of which are registered by the botmaster, within a short time window around their generation time, and subsequently resolved when the malware on the infected machine tries to access them. Deep neural networks that can classify domain names as benign or malicious are of great interest in the real-time defense against DGAs. In contrast with traditional machine learning models, deep networks do not rely on human engineered features. Instead, they can learn features automatically from data, provided that they are supplied with sufficiently large amounts of suitable training data. Obtaining cleanly labeled ground truth data is difficult and time consuming. Heuristically labeled data could potentially provide a source of training data for weakly supervised training of DGA detectors. We propose a set of heuristics for automatically labeling domain names monitored in real traffic, and then train and evaluate classifiers with the proposed heuristically labeled dataset. We show through experiments on a dataset with 50 million domain names that such heuristically labeled data is very useful in practice to improve the predictive accuracy of deep learning-based DGA classifiers, and that these deep neural networks significantly outperform a random forest classifier with human engineered features

Financial phantasmagoria: corporate image-work in times of crisis

Our purpose in this article is to relate the real movements in the economy during 2008 to the ?image-work? of financial institutions. Over the period January?December 2008 we collected 241 separate advertisements from 61 financial institutions published in the Financial Times. Reading across the ensemble of advertisements for themes and evocative images provides an impression of the financial imaginaries created by these organizations as the global financial crisis unfolded. In using the term ?phantasmagoria? we move beyond its colloquial sense of a set of strange images designed to dazzle towards the more technical connotation used by Ranci�re (2004) who suggested that words and images can offer a trace of an overall determining set-up if they are torn from their obviousness so they become phantasmagoric figures. The key phantasmagoric figure we identify here is that of the financial institution as timeless, immortal and unchanging; a coherent and autonomous entity amongst other actors. This notion of uniqueness belies the commonality of thinking which precipitated the global financial crisis as well as the limited capacity for control of financial institutions in relation to market events. It also functions as a powerful naturalizing force, making it hard to question certain aspects of the recent period of ?capitalism in crisis?

Dose rationale and pharmacokinetics of dexmedetomidine in mechanically ventilated new-borns : impact of design optimisation

Purpose: There is a need for alternative analgosedatives such as dexmedetomidine in neonates. Given the ethical and practical difficulties, protocol design for clinical trials in neonates should be carefully considered before implementation. Our objective was to identify a protocol design suitable for subsequent evaluation of the dosing requirements for dexmedetomidine in mechanically ventilated neonates. Methods: A published paediatric pharmacokinetic model was used to derive the dosing regimen for dexmedetomidine in a first-in-neonate study. Optimality criteria were applied to optimise the blood sampling schedule. The impact of sampling schedule optimisation on model parameter estimation was assessed by simulation and re-estimation procedures for different simulation scenarios. The optimised schedule was then implemented in a neonatal pilot study. Results: Parameter estimates were more precise and similarly accurate in the optimised scenarios, as compared to empirical sampling (normalised root mean square error: 1673.1% vs. 13,229.4% and relative error: 46.4% vs. 9.1%). Most importantly, protocol deviations from the optimal design still allowed reasonable parameter estimation. Data analysis from the pilot group (n = 6) confirmed the adequacy of the optimised trial protocol. Dexmedetomidine pharmacokinetics in term neonates was scaled using allometry and maturation, but results showed a 20% higher clearance in this population compared to initial estimates obtained by extrapolation from a slightly older paediatric population. Clearance for a typical neonate, with a post-menstrual age (PMA) of 40 weeks and weight 3.4 kg, was 2.92 L/h. Extension of the study with 11 additional subjects showed a further increased clearance in pre-term subjects with lower PMA. Conclusions: The use of optimal design in conjunction with simulation scenarios improved the accuracy and precision of the estimates of the parameters of interest, taking into account protocol deviations, which are often unavoidable in this event-prone population