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Prosody and information status in typological perspective - Introduction to the Special Issue
(2015)
One of the fundamental challenges in anti-doping is identifying athletes who use, or are at risk of using, prohibited performance enhancing substances. The growing trend to employ a forensic approach to doping control aims to integrate information from social sciences (e.g., psychology of doping) into organised intelligence to protect clean sport. Beyond the foreseeable consequences of a positive identification as a doping user, this task is further complicated by the discrepancy between what constitutes a doping offence in the World Anti-Doping Code and operationalized in doping research. Whilst psychology plays an important role in developing our understanding of doping behaviour in order to inform intervention and prevention, its contribution to the array of doping diagnostic tools is still in its infancy. In both research and forensic settings, we must acknowledge that (1) socially desirable responding confounds self-reported psychometric test results and (2) that the cognitive complexity surrounding test performance means that the response-time based measures and the lie detector tests for revealing concealed life-events (e.g., doping use) are prone to produce false or non-interpretable outcomes in field settings. Differences in social-cognitive characteristics of doping behaviour that are tested at group level (doping users vs. non-users) cannot be extrapolated to individuals; nor these psychometric measures used for individual diagnostics. In this paper, we present a position statement calling for policy guidance on appropriate use of psychometric assessments in the pursuit of clean sport. We argue that, to date, both self-reported and response-time based psychometric tests for doping have been designed, tested and validated to explore how athletes feel and think about doping in order to develop a better understanding of doping behaviour, not to establish evidence for doping. A false 'positive' psychological profile for doping affects not only the individual 'clean' athlete but also their entourage, their organisation and sport itself. The proposed policy guidance aims to protect the global athletic community against social, ethical and legal consequences from potential misuse of psychological tests, including erroneous or incompetent applications as forensic diagnostic tools in both practice and research. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
The role of knowledge in the policy process remains a central theoretical puzzle in policy analysis and political science. This article argues that an important yet missing piece of this puzzle is the systematic exploration of the political use of policy knowledge. While much of the recent debate has focused on the question of how the substantive use of knowledge can improve the quality of policy choices, our understanding of the political use of knowledge and its effects in the policy process has remained deficient in key respects. A revised conceptualization of the political use of knowledge is introduced that emphasizes how conflicting knowledge can be used to contest given structures of policy authority. This allows the analysis to differentiate between knowledge creep and knowledge shifts as two distinct types of knowledge effects in the policy process. While knowledge creep is associated with incremental policy change within existing policy structures, knowledge shifts are linked to more fundamental policy change in situations when the structures of policy authority undergo some level of transformation. The article concludes by identifying characteristics of the administrative structure of policy systems or sectors that make knowledge shifts more or less likely.
The conservation of rare plant species as living collections in botanic gardens and arboreta has become an established tool in the battle against worldwide species' extinctions. However, the establishment of ex situ collections with a high conservation value requires a sound understanding of the evolutionary processes that may reduce the suitability of these collections for future reintroductions. Particularly, risks such as fitness decline of cultivated plants over time, trait shifts and loss of adaptation to the original habitat due to changes in selection regimes have rarely been addressed so far. Based on a literature review and results of our own project we show that genetic drift can lead to fitness decline in ex situ cultivated plants, but these drift effects strongly depend on the conditions and cultivation history in the ex situ facility. Furthermore, we provide evidence that shifts in traits such as germination and flowering time, and a decrease in stress tolerance to drought and competition can reduce the conservation value of ex situ collections. These threats associated with ex situ conditions require more attention by researchers, curators and conservationists. We need to increase knowledge on traits that are subject to novel selection pressures in ex situ collections, and to define population sizes that prevent genetic drift. Establishing conservation networks with replicated collections across gardens and balancing the seed contribution of mother plants to the next generation within a collection are suggested as first steps to increase the conservation value of ex situ plant collections. (C) 2015 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.