Could not complete log in. Possible causes and solutions are:
Cookies are not set, which might happen if you've never visited this website before.
Please open https://media.dlib.indiana.edu/ in a new window, then come back and refresh this page.
An ad blocker is preventing successful login.
Please disable ad blockers for this site then refresh this page.
This session will cover the essential tasks of designing case study research (specifying the puzzle, identifying alternative explanations, specifying the variables and measuring them, selecting cases, and formulating questions to ask of each case). It draws on the lecturer's experience reviewing hundreds of grant proposals for the National Science Foundation and the US Institute of Peace to identify ten common flaws in case study research designs.
Shells, bones, tracks, and trails record a history of animal evolution more than 600 million years long. Earth, however, is some four and a half billion years old. What kinds of life characterized our planet's youth and middle age? Genealogical relationships among living organisms, inferred from molecular sequence comparisons, suggest that the deep history of life is microbial, and over the past three decades, paleontologists have discovered a rich record of microbial life in rocks that long predate the earliest animals. Geochemical research has established a complementary record of environmental change, with major transitions that parallel those found among fossils. The general pattern that emerges is one of long-term co-evolution between life and environments throughout our planetary history.
The Founders designed a polity almost fated to become a world power.
Tocqueville's sense of democracy as a force of history was accompanied by his conclusion that democracies are "decidedly inferior" in the conduct of foreign affairs. Despite America's nineteenth-century reluctance to engage fully with world diplomacy, the U.S., as democracy's standard-bearer, emerged as "the leader of the Free World" in the course of twentieth-century wars waged by ideologically-driven powers seeking to overturn the established international state system.
In this new century, democracy has emerged as problematic in new ways, affecting the bond between it and the U.S. role in maintaining world order, with special reference to challenges in the Middle East and Asia.
This week: We take a look at a pair of energy bills making their way through the Indiana General Assembly and one bill that seeks to make the state public retirement system another front in the right wing culture war.
This week: Indiana joins a legal challenge against the Biden administration's expansion of federal protection for waterways, and Peru, Indiana residents brace for the results of an investigation into toxic TCE migrating from former Schneider Electric Square D manufacturing plant.
This week: We talked to a former Russian army soldier who survived the Chernobyl nuclear accident in 1986 and eventually made his way to the U.S. He thought his first brush with environmental disaster would be his last. He was wrong. Plus, a federal report found that half of Indiana's toxic Superfund sites could be affected by flooding due to climate change.
Digitization has completely changed the literary archive. Historians of the novel used to work on a few hundred nineteenth-century novels; today, we work on thousands of them; tomorrow, hundreds of thousands. This new size has had a major effect on literary history, obviously enough, but also on critical methodology; because, when we work on 200,000 novels instead of 200, we are not doing the same thing, 1,000 times bigger; we are doing a different thing. The new scale changes our relationship to the object of study, and in fact it changes the object itself, by making it entirely abstract. And the question arises: what does it mean to study literature as an abstraction and by means of abstractions? We clearly lose some important aspects of the literary experience. Do we gain anything?
In modern high-tech health care, patients appear to be the stumbling block: an uninformed, anxious, noncompliant folk with unhealthy lifestyles who demand treatments advertised by celebrities, insist on unnecessary but expensive imaging, and may eventually turn into plaintiffs. Patients’ lack of health literacy has received much attention. But what about their physicians? I show that the majority of doctors are innumerate, that is, they do not understand basic health statistics. An estimated 70%–80% of them do not understand what the results of screening tests mean. This engenders superfluous treatment, anxiety, and healthcare costs. As a consequence, the ideals of informed consent and shared decision-making remain a pipedream; both doctors and patients are habitually misled by biased information in health brochures and advertisements. I argue that the problem is not simply in the minds of doctors, but in the way health statistics are framed in journals and brochures. A quick and efficient cure is to teach efficient risk communication that fosters transparency as opposed to confusion. I report studies with doctors, medical students, and patients that show how transparent framing helps them understand health statistics in an hour or two. Raising taxes or rationing care is often seen as the only viable alternative to exploding health care costs. Yet there is a third option: by promoting health literacy, better care is possible for less money.
