Sociology in Ireland: Some random reflections

2021 has been a year for looking back as well as forwards. In this article, I reflect on the state of languishing induced by lockdown, and the intensification of uncertainty in our everyday lives. I offer some biographical details of the early years of my career, which has largely been within a single institution, Maynooth University. The late Professor Liam Ryan was my boss and later my friend from 1990 until his death in 2015. His (typically) acerbic insights on the state of Irish sociology were recorded in 1984 for an issue of the Sociological Association of Ireland Bulletin. Re-visiting his prognosis today, I reflect on North–South relations in the discipline, on the challenge of forging a public role for Irish sociology, and on the growth of a precariat within the academic discipline. I conclude with some comments on the enduring relevance of sociology as we come to terms with post-pandemic life.

Nineteenth-Century American Newspapers

Though political scientists and historians of the 19th-century United States have always turned to newspapers as an important source, there has in recent years been a growing interest in newspapers as a distinct object of study among historians, communications scholars, and literary critics. Newspapers were not only publishers and promoters of important literature but also central to the culture of literary production and consumption. All the scholarship, by various disciplines, produced on newspapers is relevant to the ongoing project to historicize, interpret, contextualize, and theorize 19th-century American literature in all its varied relations to its readership and to the nation generally. Though circulation grew rapidly over the century, the reach of newspapers was not limited to official subscription lists or, later, to street sales. As both scholars and contemporary observers have noted, various mechanisms—formal exchanges between newspapers hundreds of miles apart, reading rooms, coffee houses, and the general cultural practice of reusing and sharing newspapers—meant that the readership for newspapers extended beyond their paying subscribers throughout the century, but especially in the antebellum years. Although in some senses newspapers may in the 19th century have ceded to magazines their 18th-century function of presenting a miscellany of material, for all practical purposes throughout the 19th century many newspapers, most often only four pages long, continued to play that role—they included poems, reviews, serialized novels, orations and lectures, cultural laments, letters from abroad, and reports on scientific discoveries along with the more expected news, random reflections or anecdotes, and editorial opinion. Through most of the century, however, the majority of newspapers devoted at least a quarter of their space to advertising. In the first third of the 19th century, party organs and commercial papers for the mercantile class grew to the point where they came to be seen as representing the two primary functions of the American newspaper. From the 1830s to the Civil War, various developments, including the penny press, the reform press, the religious press, and the African-American press, changed the character of newspapers, even though their party functions remained uppermost. After the war, urban newspapers gradually grew in length and in the range of their coverage. Commercialization and the first steps toward professionalization began to change the mission of journalism, so that by the 1890s many urban papers more closely resembled newspapers of the next fifty years than they did newspapers of the previous generation.

An ergodic algorithm for generating knots with a prescribed injectivity radius

The first provably ergodic algorithm for sampling the space of thick equilateral knots off-lattice, as a function of thickness, will be described. This algorithm is based on previous algorithms of applying random reflections. It is an off-lattice generalization of the pivot algorithm. This move to an off-lattice model provides a huge improvement in power and efficacy in that samples can have arbitrary values for parameters such as the thickness constraint, bending angle, and torsion, while the lattice forces these parameters into a small number of specific values. This benefit requires working in a manifold rather than a finite or countable space, which forces the use of more novel methods in Markov–Chain theory. To prove the validity of the algorithm, we describe a method for turning any knot into the regular planar polygon using only thickness non-decreasing moves. This approach ensures that the algorithm has a positive probability of connecting any two knots with the required thickness constraint which is used to show that the algorithm is ergodic. This ergodic sampling allows for a statistically valid method for estimating probability distributions of arbitrary functions on the space of thick knots.

Medisinsk kunnskap før og nå:Fra teori til systematiske oversikter

<p>Teorien om balansen mellom de fire kroppsvæskene – humoralpatologien – dominerte sykdomsforståelse og dermed også medisinsk behandling i 2000 år. Brekkmidler, årelating og avføringsmidler var hyppig brukte virkemidler for å rette opp i ”ubalanse” mellom kroppsvæskene, som var regnet som årsak til sykdom.</p><p>Det var ikke før på 1700-tallet at faktisk empirisk kunnskap ble etterspurt som begrunnelse for valg av behandlingsmetoder. Det å telle opp hvordan det gikk med pasienter som fikk en behandling, og sammenlikne med pasienter som ikke fikk behandlingen, var en ny måte å presentere behandlingseffekter på. Fra 1800-tallet av er det mange eksempler på at behandlingsmetoder ble prøvet ut ved å la annenhver pasient motta behandlingen.</p><p>Streptomycinstudien til UK Medical Research Council (1946) regnes for å være det første randomiserte kontrollerte forsøket innen medisinsk forskning, og for å ha satt standarden for hvordan kliniske utprøvninger bør utføres.</p><p>I boka ”Effectiveness and Efficiency. Random Reflections on Health Services” (1972) kritiserte Archie Cochrane mangelen på dokumentasjon for mange av tiltakene som utføres i helsetjenesten. Han ønsket seg langt flere randomiserte studier. Dessuten tok han til orde for at alle randomiserte studier burde samles, og at resultatene burde oppsummeres jevnlig. Iain Chalmers tok utfordringen og påbegynte et omfattende arbeid med å utarbeide en database over randomiserte kontrollerte forsøk. Med utgangspunkt i denne databasen ble det så utarbeidet systematiske oversikter over gjeldende kunnskap om effekt av tiltak i helsetjenesten. Dette ble starten på Cochrane-samarbeidet.</p><p>Fretheim A. <strong>Medical knowledge then and now: From theory to systematic reviews.</strong> <em>Nor J Epidemiol</em> 2013; <strong>23</strong> (2): 113-118.</p><p><strong>ENGLISH SUMMARY</strong></p><p>The humoral medicine-theory dominated the understanding of diseases and thus also medical treatments over 2,000 years. Purgatives, bloodletting and laxatives were frequently used to correct ”imbalances” between body fluids, which were seen as the cause of disease.</p><p>It was not until the 18th century that actual empirical knowledge was seen as important as a basis for making decisions about choice of treatment. At this time, the idea of counting the outcomes among patients receiving a treatment and compare with patients who did not, was a new approach for presenting treatment effects. As of the 19th century there are many examples of treatments being tested by the use of alternation, i.e. allocating every other patient to the treatment under evaluation.</p><p>The UK Medical Research Council’s streptomycin-trial (1946) is regarded as the first randomised controlled trial in medicine, and for having set the standard for clinical trials.</p><p>In his book, ”Effectiveness and Efficiency. Random Reflections on Health Services” (1972), Archie Cochrane criticised the lack of evidence for many of the interventions being performed in the health services. He called for far more randomised trials. He also proposed that findings from randomised trials should be collated, and that the results should be summarised on a regular basis. Iain Chalmers took the challenge and engaged in the huge task of developing a database of randomised controlled trials. With the database as a starting point, several systematic reviews of current evidence on the effects of interventions in the health services were produced. This was the start of the Cochrane Collaboration.</p>