Hasil untuk "Academies and learned societies"

Gregory N. Frank

Current alignment evaluation mostly measures whether models encode dangerous concepts and whether they refuse harmful requests. Both miss the layer where alignment often operates: routing from concept detection to behavioral policy. We study political censorship in Chinese-origin language models as a natural experiment, using probes, surgical ablations, and behavioral tests across nine open-weight models from five labs. Three findings follow. First, probe accuracy alone is non-diagnostic: political probes, null controls, and permutation baselines can all reach 100%, so held-out category generalization is the informative test. Second, surgical ablation reveals lab-specific routing. Removing the political-sensitivity direction eliminates censorship and restores accurate factual output in most models tested, while one model confabulates because its architecture entangles factual knowledge with the censorship mechanism. Cross-model transfer fails, indicating that routing geometry is model- and lab-specific. Third, refusal is no longer the dominant censorship mechanism. Within one model family, hard refusal falls to zero while narrative steering rises to the maximum, making censorship invisible to refusal-only benchmarks. These results support a three-stage descriptive framework: detect, route, generate. Models often retain the relevant knowledge; alignment changes how that knowledge is expressed. Evaluations that audit only detection or refusal therefore miss the routing mechanism that most directly determines behavior.

Swarna Buddha Nayok, Harsh Pathak

N/A

Petar Milovanovic, Ranka Stankovic, Vukan Ivanovic et al.

Background: Doctoral programmes are an important pillar of medical education, and although many universities award the best theses, the criteria for selection of awardees and the topics of their doctoral theses are seldom analysed.Objectives: To analyse the landscape of doctoral research through assessing the temporal trends in the criteria related to recognising the best theses.Methods: A total of 55 award-winning doctoral theses, from those submitted to the Faculty of Medicine, University of Belgrade, over 7 years (2016–2022), were examined, focusing on the number of awardees, publications based on the theses, research subfields, and keywords.Results: The awardees comprised 36 women (65%) and 19 men (35%). The number of award-winning theses per year in clinical medicine and public health increased over the years (P < .05 for both the fields). The awardees had published a total of 134 articles based on their theses before the thesis defence, and half of these were published in open-access journals. The journals that each published at least 4 of these articles were PLOS One, Experimental and Molecular Pathology, and Oxidative Medicine and Cellular Longevity. The cumulative impact factor of these publications showed no significant increase (P > .05). The subfields that accounted for at least 5 of the publi-cations were molecular medicine (13 publications) among the basic or translational fields, cardiology (5) among clinical medicine, and epidemiology (7) among public health. Mapping the co-occurrence of keywords from all the dissertations identified some research hotspots, which included cancer, oxidative stress, Parkinsonism, risk factors, genetic polymorphisms, and biomarkers.Conclusion: The increasing number of award-winning theses reflects the rising quality of doctoral research and the growing motivation of candidates to choose indexed journals as outlets for papers based on the theses. This approach can serve as a basis for strategic evaluation of the practices for evaluating PhD theses and for identifying strong and weak spots in the research landscape of medical schools to guide future doctoral research and the competitiveness of doctoral programmes.

Rachel Wexler, Patricia Knezek, Gregory Rudnick et al.

In a series of two papers, we provide a comprehensive agenda of actions the American Astronomical Society (AAS) can take to create a more diverse and inclusive professional system for astronomers, with a focus on women astronomers. This first paper of the series outlines the background and methods, while the recommendations are treated in the second companion paper (Paper II). We take the stance that since the 2020 Decadal Survey (Astro2020) was delivered in 2021, with its first-ever set of recommendations on the State of the Profession, now is the time for the AAS to take decisive action to transform astronomy into a diverse and inclusive profession. In the spring of 2019, the CSWA surveyed the astronomical community to assess the popularity and feasibility of actions that the AAS can take to reduce harassment and advance career development for women in astronomy. Here we present the quantitative results of that survey and a synopsis of the free response sections, which are publicly accessible. By combining the results of our survey, peer-reviewed academic literature, and findings from many of the white papers submitted to Astro2020, the CSWA has developed 26 specific actions that the AAS can take to help end harassment in astronomy, to advance career development for astronomers who are women and who are other members of historically marginalized groups, and intersections of these populations, and to improve the climate and culture of AAS and AAS-sponsored meetings. This paper presents the data we used to make these recommendations, and the recommendations themselves will be presented in Paper II.

Jan M. Nordbotten, Martin A. Fernø, Bernd Flemisch et al.

The 11th Society of Petroleum Engineers Comparative Solution Project (shortened SPE11 herein) benchmarked simulation tools for geological carbon dioxide (CO$_2$) storage. A total of 45 groups from leading research institutions and industry across the globe signed up to participate, with 18 ultimately contributing valid results that were included in the comparative study reported here. This paper summarizes the SPE11. A comprehensive introduction and qualitative discussion of the submitted data are provided, together with an overview of online resources for accessing the full depth of data. A global metric for analyzing the relative distance between submissions is proposed and used to conduct a quantitative analysis of the submissions. This analysis attempts to statistically resolve the key aspects influencing the variability between submissions. The study shows that the major qualitative variation between the submitted results is related to thermal effects, dissolution-driven convective mixing, and resolution of facies discontinuities. Moreover, a strong dependence on grid resolution is observed across all three versions of the SPE11. However, our quantitative analysis suggests that the observed variations are predominantly influenced by factors not documented in the technical responses provided by the participants. We therefore identify that unreported variations due to human choices within the process of setting up, conducting, and reporting on the simulations underlying each SPE11 submission are at least as impactful as the computational choices reported.

Christopher J. Paciorek, Daniel Cooley

Weather extremes produce major impacts on society and ecosystems and are likely to change in likelihood and magnitude with climate change. However, very low probability events are hard to characterize statistically using observations or climate model output because of short records/runs. For precipitation, consideration of such events arises in quantifying Probable Maximum Precipitation (PMP), namely estimating extreme precipitation magnitudes for designing and assessing critical infrastructure. A recent National Academies report on modernizing PMP estimation proposed using huge climate model-based ensembles to estimate extreme quantiles, possibly through machine learning-based ensemble boosting. Here we assess such an approach for the contiguous United States using a huge ensemble (10560 years) from a state-of-the-art emulator (ACE2) trained on ERA5 reanalysis. The results indicate that one can practically estimate very extreme precipitation and temperature quantiles using appropriate statistical extreme value techniques. More specifically, the results provide evidence for (1) the use of threshold-exceedance methods with a sufficiently high threshold for reliable estimation (necessary for precipitation), (2) the robustness of results to variations in extremes by season and storm type, and (3) well-constrained statistical uncertainty. Our results also show that the emulator produces extremes outside the range of the ERA5 training data. While this suggests that such emulators have potential for quantifying the climatology of extremes, we do not extensively investigate if this particular emulator is fit for purpose. Our focus is on how to use huge ensembles to estimate very extreme statistics, and we expect the results to be relevant for future improved emulators.

Shicheng Liu, Minghui Zhu

Inverse reinforcement learning (IRL) aims to learn a reward function and a corresponding policy that best fit the demonstrated trajectories of an expert. However, current IRL works cannot learn incrementally from an ongoing trajectory because they have to wait to collect at least one complete trajectory to learn. To bridge the gap, this paper considers the problem of learning a reward function and a corresponding policy while observing the initial state-action pair of an ongoing trajectory and keeping updating the learned reward and policy when new state-action pairs of the ongoing trajectory are observed. We formulate this problem as an online bi-level optimization problem where the upper level dynamically adjusts the learned reward according to the newly observed state-action pairs with the help of a meta-regularization term, and the lower level learns the corresponding policy. We propose a novel algorithm to solve this problem and guarantee that the algorithm achieves sub-linear local regret $O(\sqrt{T}+\log T+\sqrt{T}\log T)$. If the reward function is linear, we prove that the proposed algorithm achieves sub-linear regret $O(\log T)$. Experiments are used to validate the proposed algorithm.

Paolo Ferragina, Mattia Odorisio

This paper aims to better understand the strengths and limitations of adopting learned-based approaches in sequential sorting numerical data, via two main research steps. First, we study different learned models for distribution-based sorting, starting from some known ones (i.e., two-layer RMI or simple linear models) and then introducing some novel models that either improve the two-layer RMI or are fully new in their algorithmic structure thus resulting space efficient, monotonic, and very fast in building balanced buckets. We test those models over 11 synthetic datasets drawn from different distributions of 200M 64-bit floating-point items, so deriving hints about their ultimate performance and usefulness in designing a sorting algorithm. Based on these findings, we select and plug the best models from above in a new learned-based algorithmic scheme and devise three new sorters that we will test against other 6 sequential sorters (5 classic and 1 learned, known and new ones) over 33 datasets (11 synthetic and 22 real), whose size will be up to 800M items. Our experimental figures will show that our learned sorters achieve superior performance on 31 out of all 33 datasets (synthetic and real). In conclusion, these experimental results provide, on the one hand, a comprehensive answer to the main question: Which algorithmic structure for distribution-based sorting is suited to leverage a learned model in order to achieve efficient performance? and, on the other hand, they leave open several other research and engineering questions about the design of a highly performing sequential sorter that is robust over different input distributions.

Gus Kristiansen, Mark Sandler, Andrey Zhmoginov et al.

In modern deep learning, the models are learned by applying gradient updates using an optimizer, which transforms the updates based on various statistics. Optimizers are often hand-designed and tuning their hyperparameters is a big part of the training process. Learned optimizers have shown some initial promise, but are generally unsuccessful as a general optimization mechanism applicable to every problem. In this work we explore a different direction: instead of learning general optimizers, we instead specialize them to a specific training environment. We propose a novel optimizer technique that learns a layer-specific linear combination of update directions provided by a set of base optimizers, effectively adapting its strategy to the specific model and dataset. When evaluated on image classification tasks, this specialized optimizer significantly outperforms both traditional off-the-shelf methods such as Adam, as well as existing general learned optimizers. Moreover, it demonstrates robust generalization with respect to model initialization, evaluating on unseen datasets, and training durations beyond its meta-training horizon.

Deborah A. Levesque, M. Lunardini, Emma L Payne et al.

that two of the films I’ve been involved with, Extremis and End Game, were both Academy-award nominees. I was thrilled to recently learn that End Game has become an important educational film for television content creators as they seek to immerse themselves in the experience of end of life. That said, the cultural resistance is strong and we need to keep powerful stories like these out there. Our project with Hollywood, Health & Society will highlight all that happens along the life trajectory from diagnosis through to death as well as the experience of loved ones. Certainly, much of this experience is difficult but it is also tender, beautiful, surprising and, sometimes, just plain odd. Those very specific stories are the ones that tend to stick with people and affect them deeply. Sara Johnson: How do you use storytelling as a vehicle to convey your message? We’re storytellers —from medical professionals, caregivers, and those living with illness—who share the richness of the last phase of life, and can help any of us consider our values, get clear information about prognosis, and understand available choices for ourselves and our loved ones. At the same time, we work to influence the ways illness, dying, and death are portrayed in popular media, so more people and experiences are represented accurately, and a richer range of possibilities exists for everyone’s end of life. Sara Johnson: The endwellproject.org website offers resources for patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers. Which resources are most widely utilized, and where are there unmet needs? Dr. Shoshana Ungerleidger: Hands down, our videos are most widely utilized. We’ve had several of our long-form talks reach anywhere from 15,000 75,000 people. On social media, some of our shorter videos have reached as many as 500,000 people. Every day, we get inquiries about death doulas, pediatric palliative care, psychedelic-assisted therapies and advance care planning just to name a few. I wish we had more resources on the site to better serve people who learn about something from one of our videos and want to knowmore. Our goal is to build out more robust resource offerings on the site, but that takes money. Most people don’t know this, but we’re a very tiny group. There’s me, our ED who’s our only employee, some talented teams of consultants and our super dedicated Fellow. Sara Johnson: Should assisting people in creating a meaningful end-of-life care plan or facilitating the creation of plans by loved ones be a standard component of employer health and wellbeing initiatives? Dr. Shoshana Ungerleidger: Yes, absolutely end-of-life planning should be part of every workplace program. Just in terms of lost productivity, the time it takes people to sort out the practical things alone is huge. Helping employees with some guidance as to where to go for vetted advice and other resources would make a very big difference to their well-being and also to the workplace at large. If people have to sneak off to tend to the most important stuff then talking about that stuff becomes even more taboo. Sara Johnson: What other roles can employers play in improving the end-of-life care experience and how people navigate caregiving, death, dying, and grieving? Dr. Shoshana Ungerleidger: Offering time off for people taking care of or even just visiting with someone who is dying or to arrange and attend services as well as time after while they are grieving would be enormously beneficial. That said, in an ideal world, these benefits and resources wouldn’t be tied to employment. Sara Johnson: Are you aware of employers who are leaders/ positive role models for comprehensive advanced care planning/ end-of-life care benefits/programs? Dr. Shoshana Ungerleidger: I’ve learned that unfortunately, even with the more enlightened organizations, work-place policies change all the time. Sara Johnson: Are there best practices we should be aware of with regard to how we elicit people’s wishes? Dr. Shoshana Ungerleidger: I always bring it back to having endof-life planning conversations early and often and grounding these conversations in what are a person’s goals and values for not just their care but more importantly, the quality of the life they have left to live. For some people, that’s having every possible medical intervention, for others, it’s about being at home with their cat on their lap. Sara Johnson: Assisting individuals in clarifying their values and goals is often a central tenet of health promotion and wellbeing interventions. How does value and goal clarification facilitate end of life care planning? Dr. Shoshana Ungerleidger: Healthcare providers, family members and anyone else who might have some influence on where you are and what care you’re receiving at the end of life need to know what you care about. And, if you don’t know what that is, thinking about your ending now might help you answer some fundamental questions about who you want to be along the way.

Haunani H. Kane, A. Choy, Barb Bruno et al.

In Hawai‘i and across much of Oceania, Pacific Islanders celebrate the connections between our islands and the ocean that surrounds us. Since the beginning of time, we have relied upon precise observations of marine and celestial realms to intentionally navigate thousands of miles across vast expanses of open ocean. Through our migrations, we have created—and continue to create—purposeful relationships by observing the movements of swells, weather patterns, celestial bodies, and marine life. In direct opposition to colonial Western thought, we view Oceania as a metaphorical road that connects rather than separates island people (Hau’ofa, 1994). As descendants of the ocean, the dearth of Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders (NHPIs) in ocean science seems inconsonant. We wonder, where are all our island people in the ocean sciences? In better defining the persistent, systemic, and collective barriers that NHPIs face within Western society and the academy, we identify gaps that conventional professional development programs aimed at minoritized groups in the geosciences have been unsuccessful in filling. We share lessons learned from building two wa‘a (canoes) in programs that center oceanic ways of knowing.

Rosangela de Almeida Pertile

Nos avanços tecnológicos e científicos descritos nos contos de terror do século XIX, a sociedade que ainda desconhecia os mecanismos de atuação da ciência, se assombra com a verossimilhança entre a ciência e os causadores dos males da época. Pestes, experiências desconhecidas, outras etnias, são causadores de medo por parte da sociedade. Comunidades invisíveis são impelidas para os guetos sujos e insalubres, são párias em contraponto de uma sociedade progressiva, abastada, branca e educada. Nestes guetos habitam os miseráveis, os monstros, ou seja, todos que podem representar, de alguma forma, o inimigo da sociedade que se delineia com as conquistas do progresso da ciência e da tecnologia.

Dikran Toroser, Muhammad Sarwar, Lisa DeTora et al.

Peer review is a crucial component of the scientific publication process, enabling validation of research, identification of errors, and removal of potential bias. However, there are some well-known limitations, including slow publication cycles and overstringent gatekeeping. Artificial intelligence and digital technology are revolutionizing peer review and publishing by addressing some of the limitations, and fostering closer collaboration among scholars worldwide.1-3 This paradigm shift aligns with the principles of open science, enhancing the reach and impact of scholarly work. Digital tools for peer review are already transforming many aspects of this process, by enhancing quality control, automation of routine tasks, and expediting laborious aspects of the peer review process, thereby enhancing speed and efficiency. Digital platforms are reducing publication times and potentially allowing for the promotion of diversity and inclusivity of the peer reviewer pool by vastly enhancing global connectivity. Selecting qualified and impartial global reviewers in the digital context is vital for the future of our rapidly evolving and increasingly diverse publication landscape. Editors play a key role in oversight while providing reviewers with clear guidelines and training. In conclusion, digital tools assisting peer review will inevitably play an increasingly useful role in enhancing the efficiency, and potentially the inclusivity and objectivity of the process.

Mike Huisman, Aske Plaat, Jan N. van Rijn

Deep neural networks can yield good performance on various tasks but often require large amounts of data to train them. Meta-learning received considerable attention as one approach to improve the generalization of these networks from a limited amount of data. Whilst meta-learning techniques have been observed to be successful at this in various scenarios, recent results suggest that when evaluated on tasks from a different data distribution than the one used for training, a baseline that simply finetunes a pre-trained network may be more effective than more complicated meta-learning techniques such as MAML, which is one of the most popular meta-learning techniques. This is surprising as the learning behaviour of MAML mimics that of finetuning: both rely on re-using learned features. We investigate the observed performance differences between finetuning, MAML, and another meta-learning technique called Reptile, and show that MAML and Reptile specialize for fast adaptation in low-data regimes of similar data distribution as the one used for training. Our findings show that both the output layer and the noisy training conditions induced by data scarcity play important roles in facilitating this specialization for MAML. Lastly, we show that the pre-trained features as obtained by the finetuning baseline are more diverse and discriminative than those learned by MAML and Reptile. Due to this lack of diversity and distribution specialization, MAML and Reptile may fail to generalize to out-of-distribution tasks whereas finetuning can fall back on the diversity of the learned features.

T. Rowse

EDITOR– Congratulations on reproducing the Aboriginal artwork by Tan Martin (A Bird'sEye View of Aboriginal inclusion and knowledge sharing within the Australian Cerebral Palsy Register) in your journal.1 I doubt that anyone can say, with authority, what social and therapeutic functions such art actually exerts in the context of a scientific journal such as Developmental Medicine & Child Neurology. However, I believe that to recognize Indigenous Australians in terms that they wish to be recognized is the essence of what Australians call reconciliation. This is what I feel you are attempting. Your readers may know that in Australia a frequently used metaphor for reconciliation is ‘healing’. It is as if the nation, sickened by the brutal processes of its formation, is amenable to therapy and needs thoughtful care in the form of institutional reform and changes in Australians' basic assumptions. Reconciliation/healing is what many nonIndigenous Australians have been attempting, in good faith, without the comfort of knowing – with scientific certainty – the nature and extent of its therapeutic effect. It is a work in progress – a clinical trial of a new civics (if one wished to push the metaphor). In Australia it has become increasingly common for nonIndigenous authorities of various kinds (governmental, academic, corporate) to use Indigenous art gesturally – that is, to attach it in some way to themselves as insignia of respectful inclusiveness. I respect the good intentions of such gestures. In the world of knowledge production, in particular, it has become important to acknowledge that there are traditions of Indigenous knowledge that must be honoured and included. Australia's Learned Academies have recently resolved to find practical ways to do that, in all their fields of research and scholarship (https://acola.org/media relea seoctob er2021acola andaiats iscolla borat ion/). I expect that your decision to include the painting is based on thinking along these lines: your affirmation that Indigenous knowledge (that may include visual symbols) is integral to the production of knowledge about Indigenous society and health. Whatever may be the substance of each Indigenous knowledge contribution, the general point being made is that we (Western, colonialist authorities) must try to reconcile with those who have been colonized and marginalized epistemically. The gesture that makes this point may be said to have a healing effect, in itself, on the wider relationship of colonizers and colonized. Symbolic action is potentially problematic as well. These gestures of inclusion and respect are sometimes criticized as merely gestural and as not making a substantive difference. I am not implying that in this case. Reconciliation is a sincere project for many Australians – at all levels of society – but it is also in danger of promising more than it can deliver and of being something that nonIndigenous Australians do to make themselves feel good.

Joseph A. Scimecca

THE NOT SO OUTRAGEOUS IDEA OF A CHRISTIAN SOCIOLOGY by Joseph A. Scimecca. Routledge, 2023. 153 pages. Paperback; $54.99. ISBN: 9781032360171. *There have been a plethora of books touting the outrageousness of Christian academic endeavors in a secular age, and this book, while building on the theme, takes the opposite tack. The trend began with Christian historian George Marsden's short The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship (1996), a supplement to his magisterial The Soul of the American University: From Protestant Establishment to Established Nonbelief (1994), which is now in a 25th anniversary edition with the subtitle From Protestant to Post-Secular (2021). Another example is Paul Gould's The Outrageous Idea of the Missional Professor (2019). Scimecca inserts a negative into his title ("not so outrageous") because he argues that, not unlike the university itself, the origins of sociology have deeply Christian roots. Thus, the idea of Christian sociology ought not to be so outrageous. *However, it is outrageous to many in the dominant culture, as Scimecca's book has not been reviewed by the mainstream sociological journals, even though it's published by Routledge academic. Similar works have been published in the past decades advocating for a Christian sociology and they, too, remain marginal to the discipline.1 While Scimecca does not mention these other books, he does give ample evidence that, historically speaking, Christianity has not been marginal to sociology and, in fact, has been the source of its roots and has inspired some of its best thinkers over the centuries. *One advantage to this book is its brevity, as it is at once shorter and more comprehensive than his more historically specific Christianity and Sociological Theory: Reclaiming the Promise (Routledge, 2018). Students will welcome it for other reasons: it has a strong theme that decries the meaninglessness of an age closed to transcendence and left with only materialistic explanations for human life. Scimecca uses the concept of "shadow nihilism" to describe social science without bearings beyond behaviorism, empiricism, quantification, and the machinations of power. He argues that a holistic view of the human being must include the quest for meaning and an understanding of the moral order that sits at the core of social life. *The structure of the book is clearly chronological, summarizing the prehistory of sociology through Aristotle, various clergymen, theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and key Enlightenment philosophers (chap. 2), then describing the secular turn in the classical European sociologists of Comte, Marx, Durkheim and Weber (chap. 3). These are contrasted with the American social gospel thinkers (chap. 4) whose ethical commitments were rejected by the mid-century positivists bent on imitating the natural sciences (chap. 5). The final chapters push back on the atheistic assumptions of positivistic scientism (chap. 6), offer the basics of a Christian understanding of personhood following the works of George Herbert Mead, Charles Horton Cooley, and Christian Smith (chap. 7), and then lay out broader frames for a Christian sociology by using some concepts from the likes of Dorothy Smith, Roy Bhaskar, Margaret Archer, and Peter Berger (chap. 8). *A strength of the book is how it describes the waning of Christian influence and the gradual rise of a narrow scientism supposedly without ethics, values, or concern for social problems. He offers concise summaries of the work of numerous sociologists in his historical survey, including many Christians. Albion Small (1854-1926) is one illustration: the son of a Baptist minister, he went to seminary at Yale and then studied at the University of Berlin until 1881, where he learned about the new discipline of sociology. He received his PhD in history and political economy from Johns Hopkins University and went on to found the Department of Sociology at the University of Chicago. His goal was to "institutionalize sociology (‘the science of society') as a mechanism for spreading the Social Gospel" and so "pave the way for the Kingdom of God" (p. 63). Due to Small's efforts, the American Journal of Sociology was established, in which he hoped to see theology, morality, and science come together. *Scimecca brings other important Christian sociologists into the foreground, such as Charles Ellwood (1873-1946) at the University of Missouri, men who have either been forgotten by mainstream sociology texts or whitewashed of their Christian commitments. He could have included those beyond American boundaries--Christian social thinkers such as Jacques Ellul and Ivan Illich, for example. More contemporary examples, such as David Lyon in Canada and David Martin and Grace Davie in the UK, would suggest that there are more sociological prophets still left in the discipline. *Another reason the idea of a Christian sociology ought not be so outrageous is that numerous ideologies--feminist, neo-Marxist, and critical race theory, etc.--have all found some legitimation in the academy. They are deeply value-laden and point out the non-neutral and failed objectivity of the positivist paradigm. While this is mentioned in passing, it is curious that, while Scimecca surveys Christian Smith and a variety of his books, he skips over Smith's The Sacred Project of American Sociology (Oxford, 2014). Here Smith contends that modern scientism and objectivity is not so much the problem in American sociology as is a new sacred project--the emancipation project of liberal individualism (what some today would call "woke" scholarship). *While Scimecca points to the social location of sociologists and their atheistic milieu, Smith does a more thorough "sociology of sociology" that shows the link between the objective modern pretense and the postmodern political bias. This is similar to what George Marsden does in his anniversary edition of The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship, as well as what Christian philosopher Nicholas Wolterstorff argues for in his apologetical work, Religion in the University (2019); they describe the postmodern moment as a crack in the secular, opening up a postsecular option that is potentially more friendly to religion. *This seems like a better strategy to me. Scimecca's history is a valuable addition to the conversation about Christian faith and sociology. His description of shadow nihilism and the imperative of a moral core for sociological analysis tied to some notion of transcendence is vital for the common good. What we need is an articulate Christian sociology that is primed for a pluralistic academy, where Muslim, Jew, feminist, and LatCrit theorists can all have a place at the public academic table. This needs to be done not only with the American sociological network in mind, but also with intentional reference to sociologists in the global church and partners beyond. *Note *1E.g., David A. Fraser and Anthony Campolo, Sociology Through the Eyes of Faith (HarperOne, 1992); Russel Heddendorf and Matthew Vos, Hidden Threads: A Christian Critique of Sociological Theory (University Press of America, 2009); David Lyon, Christians and Sociology (InterVarsity Press, 1976); and Matthew Vos, Strangers and Scapegoats: Extending God's Welcome to Those on the Margins (Baker Academic, 2022). *Reviewed by Peter J. Schuurman, executive director of Global Scholars Canada, Guelph, ON.

Kayla M. Vasilko

In the American silent movie era, women were not associated with the ability to perform stunt work, drive an automobile without a man present, or be much more than a supporting face in a film, despite the fact that there were more female film writers, directors and producers than male in that era, the importance of “automotive citizenship,” and the added difficulty of women’s stunt work (women performed high risk stunts like jumping from buildings, etc., but they had to do it in gowns, and bikinis); today, women and minorities are highly under-represented in boardrooms, director’s chairs, and a startling number of fields across the country, impacting everything from human rights, to mental health, to the percentage of a dollar earned. Community programs that demonstrate anyone is capable of achieving their goals in the fields of their choice are imperative. For two semesters, I worked with multiple community and national partners (the LaPorte County Historical Society (IN), the Barker Mansion (IN), the Henry Ford Museum (MI), the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (CA), and more), to learn about the need for representation, research the life of silent movie actress Anita King, uncover artifacts connected to her, bring her to life in a new museum exhibit in LaPorte County Indiana (her hometown), and create community programming. In addition to the museum exhibit that was created, a historical monument was placed, a traveling exhibit was started, original Anita King silent films were restored, and public learning activities were initiated (e.g., grade school viewings of the restored films, public reflections, community celebrations). From these experiences, and the resulting reflection, I learned about the importance of promoting ideas of competency, independence, and endurance for all people, and continue to carry this through my work as a graduate instructor, volunteer, and organization leader.

M. L. Krook

In September 2022, I had the opportunity to organize a roundtable at the Annual Meeting of the American Political Science Association (APSA), connected to my 2021 APSA Distinguished Award for Civic and Community Engagement. First conferred in 2020, the award honors “significant civic or community engagement activity by a political scientist which merges knowledge and practice and has an impact outside of the profession or the academy.” In my case, it recognized work I had been doing since 2015 with the National Democratic Institute and other global practitioners to recognize and combat violence against women in politics as a distinct form of violence aimed at preventing and undermining women’s political participation. Working on this topic has been one of the most challenging, and exhilarating, periods of my academic career. In my research on gender quotas, I listened to many positive stories about how quotas had created opportunities for women to enter and have a voice in political spaces. However, I also heard deeply disturbing accounts of violence, intimidation, and harassment, pointing to ongoing resistance and rising backlash against women as political actors. Through informal conversations, I learned that practitioner colleagues were observing similar patterns in their work on the ground and, like me, were grappling in search of language and a framework to understand this problem. Over a series of workshops and collaborative projects, a growing global network—consisting of politicians, activists, democracy practitioners, academics, and journalists—began theorizing and documenting this phenomenon (Krook 2019). Reflecting on what we could add to these debates as scholars, my then graduate student Juliana Restrepo Sanín and I drafted academic papers, but also presented at practitioner events, helped research and write policy reports, gave feedback on civil society toolkits, and wrote opinion pieces for popular audiences. Inspired by the productive nature of these dialogues across

M. Pentenero, Samuele Sutera, G. Lodi et al.

The management of oral potentially malignant disorders (OPMD) including oral leukoplakia (OL) is not currently structured according to agreed guidelines. The current report presents survey data gathered from Oral Medicine Practitioners (OMPs) in Europe and Australia and is aimed to investigate attitudes and practice in the diagnosis, risk stratification and treatment of OL. In the presence of a clinical provisional diagnosis of OL, respondents reported always undertaking biopsy in 83% of cases, with most OMPs also relying on diagnostic adjuncts. The potential for malignant transformation is almost invariably assessed through epithelial dysplasia status, with other biomarkers described in the literature used less often. Active treatment of OL was considered mandatory by 20% of OMPs, while others reserve treatment for selected cases only. OMPs are mostly driven to active treatment by lesion-related features which are frequently jointly considered including lesion site, clinical appearance, and dysplasia status. Inconsistent assessment was observed regarding mild dysplasia, lesion size, presence of unavoidable trauma, exposure to tobacco, and patient age. Frequently observed geographical variations were seldom statistically significant. In agreement with previous surveys, a lack of consensus around the management of OL was observed, supporting claims from learned academies and societies for treatment guidelines aiming to reduce inter-practitioner variability.