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Mere civility : disagreement and the limits of toleration
Civility is often treated as an essential virtue in liberal democracies that promise to protect diversity as well as active disagreement in the public sphere. Yet the fear that our tolerant society faces a crisis of incivility is gaining ground. Politicians and public intellectuals call for \"more civility\" as the solution--but is civility really a virtue? Or is it something more sinister--a covert demand for conformity that silences dissent? Mere Civility sheds light on this tension in contemporary political theory and practice by examining similar appeals to civility in early modern debates about religious toleration. In seventeenth-century England, figures as different as Roger Williams, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke could agree that some restraint on the wars of words and \"persecution of the tongue\" between sectarians would be required; and yet, they recognized that the prosecution of incivility was often difficult to distinguish from persecution.-- Provided by publisher
Book
Men of Letters in the Early Republic
In the aftermath of the Revolutionary War, after decades of intense upheaval and debate, the role of the citizen was seen as largely political. But as Catherine O'Donnell Kaplan reveals, some Americans saw a need for a realm of public men outside politics. They believed that neither the nation nor they themselves could achieve virtue and happiness through politics alone. Imagining a different kind of citizenship, they founded periodicals, circulated manuscripts, and conversed about poetry, art, and the nature of man. They pondered William Godwin and Edmund Burke more carefully than they did candidates for local elections and insisted other Americans should do so as well.Kaplan looks at three groups in particular: the Friendly Club in New York City, which revolved around Elihu Hubbard Smith, with collaborators such as William Dunlap and Charles Brockden Brown; the circle around Joseph Dennie, editor of two highly successful periodicals; and the Anthologists of the Boston Athenaeum. Through these groups, Kaplan demonstrates, an enduring and influential model of the man of letters emerged in the first decade of the nineteenth century.
eBook
Soteriology in ‘Abd al-Karīm al-Jīlī‘s Islamic Humanism
This essay offers a brief examination of 'Abd al-Karīm al-Jīlī's Sufi soteriology in light of his Islamic Humanism—a religious anthropocentric doctrine dedicated to the promotion of human equality, freedom, and human potential. The human being is at the center of Jīlī's soteriological view. For Jīlī, the human being is a macanthropos—a model for all creatures, including Heaven and Hell. Although Jīlī's thought is widely accepted as a continuation of an earlier influential Sufi Muḥyīddīn Ibn 'Arabī (d.1240 CE), there are crucial differences between the two Sufi thinkers, especially with regards to Jīlī's embrace of non-Muslims, and promotion of humanistic ideas; Jīlī should be considered a Muslim humanist, and his intellectual heritage can help us better understand Muslim relations with non-Muslims today.
Journal Article
Creating Engaging Discussions
If you have ever been apprehensive about initiating classroom discussion because you fear silence, the domination of a couple of speakers, superficial contributions, or off-topic remarks, this book provides strategies for creating a positive learning experience.
You'll never again have to suffer a silence so profound that you can, as described by contributors to this book, hear the crickets chirping outside.
eBook
Validation of a method for synthesizing public consultations to inform decision-making in health technology assessment (HTA) in Brazil: a Delphi consensus
Background
Public consultations (PCs) are a form of public engagement used to inform decision-making on the incorporation of new technologies into health systems. Although widely employed by health technology assessment (HTA) agencies, there is no consensus on the best methods for analyzing and synthesizing PCs. This study proposes a novel method for analyzing and synthesizing PCs, using elements of content analysis,
Interface de R pour les Analyses Multidimensionnelles de Textes et de Questionnaires (IRaMuTeQ)
software, and guiding questions specific to HTA. The goal is to offer a streamlined, systematic and transparent approach that ensures reproducible and reliable analyses. The aim of this study is to validate the proposed method for analyzing PCs in HTA through face and content validity.
Methods
The Delphi technique was applied to validate the method. A group of 20 Brazilian experts with experience in HTA, social participation, IRaMuTeQ, or qualitative research, was invited to participate. Consensus was defined as 70% “agree” or “strongly agree” responses or an interquartile range ≤ 1. Comments were summarized and categorized by theme. A pilot study was conducted before the Delphi panel.
Results
Fifteen experts participated in the face validity, and 14 in the content validity. Both validations achieved over 80% consensus in the first round. The face validity confirmed five methodological steps, including corpus analysis, corpus preparation and organization, data mining using IRaMuTeQ software, systematization, interpretation, and synthesis of the findings. The content validity results were deemed adequate, confirming the method provided sufficient information to understand PCs.
Conclusions
This study provides evidence for the validation of a method for the analysis and systematization of PCs. By incorporating key HTA characteristics, such as systematic and transparent processes, while still preserving the qualitative aspects of the data, the method can help make HTA more participatory, streamlined, and transparent, processes that include societal perspectives. The validated method is an initial strategy for systematizing PC analyses within HTA.
Journal Article
Selecting and implementing overview methods: implications from five exemplar overviews
Background
Overviews of systematic reviews are an increasingly popular method of evidence synthesis; there is a lack of clear guidance for completing overviews and a number of methodological challenges. At the UK Cochrane Symposium 2016, methodological challenges of five overviews were explored. Using data from these five overviews, practical implications to support methodological decision making of authors writing protocols for future overviews are proposed.
Methods
Methods, and their justification, from the five exemplar overviews were tabulated and compared with areas of debate identified within current literature. Key methodological challenges and implications for development of overview protocols were generated and synthesised into a list, discussed and refined until there was consensus.
Results
Methodological features of three Cochrane overviews, one overview of diagnostic test accuracy and one mixed methods overview have been summarised. Methods of selection of reviews and data extraction were similar. Either the AMSTAR or ROBIS tool was used to assess quality of included reviews. The GRADE approach was most commonly used to assess quality of evidence within the reviews.
Eight key methodological challenges were identified from the exemplar overviews. There was good agreement between our findings and emerging areas of debate within a recent published synthesis. Implications for development of protocols for future overviews were identified.
Conclusions
Overviews are a relatively new methodological innovation, and there are currently substantial variations in the methodological approaches used within different overviews. There are considerable methodological challenges for which optimal solutions are not necessarily yet known. Lessons learnt from five exemplar overviews highlight a number of methodological decisions which may be beneficial to consider during the development of an overview protocol.
Journal Article
Quality dimensions features for identifying high-quality user replies in text forum threads using classification methods
The Text Forum Threads (TFThs) contain a large amount of Initial-Posts Replies pairs (IPR pairs) which are related to information exchange and discussion amongst the forum users with similar interests. Generally, some user replies in the discussion thread are off-topic and irrelevant. Hence, the content is of different qualities. It is important to identify the quality of the IPR pairs in a discussion thread in order to extract relevant information and helpful replies because a higher frequency of irrelevant replies in the thread could take the discussion in a different direction and the genuine users would lose interest in this discussion thread. In this study, the authors have presented an approach for identifying the high-quality user replies to the Initial-Post and use some quality dimensions features for their extraction. Moreover, crowdsourcing platforms were used for judging the quality of the replies and classified them into high-quality, low-quality or non-quality replies to the Initial-Posts. Then, the high-quality IPR pairs were extracted and identified based on their quality, and they were ranked using three classifiers i.e., Support Vector Machine, Naïve Bayes, and the Decision Trees according to their quality dimensions of relevancy, author activeness, timeliness, ease-of-understanding, politeness, and amount-of-data. In conclusion, the experimental results for the TFThs showed that the proposed approach could improve the extraction of the quality replies and identify the quality features that can be used for the Text Forum Thread Summarization.
Journal Article
Public consultation in the evaluation of animal research protocols
One response to calls for increased openness in animal research is to make protocols publicly accessible, but it is unclear what type of input the public would provide if given this opportunity. In this study we invited public responses to five different research projects, using non-technical summaries intended for lay audiences. Our aim was to assess the potential for this type of public consultation in protocol review, and a secondary aim was to better understand what types of animal research people are willing to accept and why. US participants ( n = 1521) were asked (via an online survey) “Do you support the use of these (insert species) for this research”, and responded using a seven-point scale (1 = “No”, 4 = “Neutral”, and 7 = “Yes”). Participants were asked to explain the reasons for their choice; open-ended text responses were subjected to thematic analysis. Most participants (89.7%) provided clear comments, showing the potential of an online forum to elicit feedback. Four themes were prevalent in participant reasoning regarding their support for the proposed research: 1) impact on animals, 2) impact on humans, 3) scientific merit, and 4) availability of alternatives. Participant support for the proposed research varied but on average was close to neutral (mean ± SD: 4.5 ± 2.19) suggesting some ambivalence to this animal use. The protocol describing Parkinson’s research (on monkeys) was least supported (3.9 ± 2.17) and the transplant research (on pigs) was most supported (4.9 ± 2.02). These results indicate that public participants are sensitive to specifics of a protocol. We conclude that an online forum can provide meaningful public input on proposed animal research, offering research institutions the opportunity for improved transparency and the chance to reduce the risk that they engage in studies that are out of step with community values.
Journal Article