Choices

A different feminism

Barbara Johnson, The Feminist Difference: Literature, Psychoanalysis, Race, and Gender, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998, £14.50.

Beats anonymous

Richard Peabody (ed.), A Different Beat: Writings by Women of the Beat Generation, London: Serpent's Tail, 1997, £8.99 pbk.

Representing native americans

Helen Carr, Inventing the American Primitive: Politics, Gender and the presentation of Traditions, 1789–1936 New York: New York University Press, 1996, $50, $20 pbk.

The limits of the postmodern

Joseph Bristow and Trev Lynn Broughton (eds), The Infernal Desires of Angela Carter: Fiction, Femininity, Feminism, Harlow: Longman, 1997, £42.

Aidan Day, Angela Carter: The Rational Glass, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998, £40, £11.99 pbk.

Sarah Gamble, Angela Carter: Writing from the Front Line, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1997, £12.95 pbk.     

Is Partial-Dimension Convergence a Problem for Inferences from MCMC Algorithms?

e-mail: jgill{at}wustl.edu Increasingly, political science researchers are turning to Markovchain Monte Carlo methods to solve inferential problems withcomplex models and problematic data. This is an enormously powerfulset of tools based on replacing difficult or impossible analyticalwork with simulated empirical draws from the distributions ofinterest. Although practitioners are generally aware of theimportance of convergence of the Markov chain, many are notfully aware of the difficulties in fully assessing convergenceacross multiple dimensions. In most applied circumstances, everyparameter dimension must be converged for the others to converge.The usual culprit is slow mixing of the Markov chain and thereforeslow convergence towards the target distribution. This workdemonstrates the partial convergence problem for the two dominantalgorithms and illustrates these issues with empirical examples.     

From Research Evidence to “Evidence by Proxy”? Organizational Enactment of Evidence‐Based Health Care in Four High‐Income Countries

Drawing on multiple qualitative case studies of evidence‐based health care conducted in Sweden, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, the authors systematically explore the composition, circulation, and role of codified knowledge deployed in the organizational enactment of evidence‐based practice. The article describes the “chain of codified knowledge,” which reflects the institutionalization of evidence‐based practice as organizational business as usual, and shows that it is dominated by performance standards, policies and procedures, and locally collected (improvement and audit) data. These interconnected forms of “evidence by proxy,” which are informed by research partly or indirectly, enable simplification, selective reinforcement, and contextualization of scientific knowledge. The analysis reveals the dual effects of this codification dynamic on evidence‐based practice and highlights the influence of macro‐level ideological, historical, and technological factors on the composition and circulation of codified knowledge in the organizational enactment of evidence‐based health care in different countries.     

Fatalities temporally associated with the ingestion of ibogaine

Ibogaine is a naturally occurring psychoactive plant alkaloid that is used globally in medical and nonmedical settings for opioid detoxification and other substance use indications. All available autopsy, toxicological, and investigative reports were systematically reviewed for the consecutive series of all known fatalities outside of West Central Africa temporally related to the use of ibogaine from 1990 through 2008. Nineteen individuals (15 men, four women between 24 and 54 years old) are known to have died within 1.5-76 h of taking ibogaine. The clinical and postmortem evidence did not suggest a characteristic syndrome of neurotoxicity. Advanced preexisting medical comorbidities, which were mainly cardiovascular, and/or one or more commonly abused substances explained or contributed to the death in 12 of the 14 cases for which adequate postmortem data were available. Other apparent risk factors include seizures associated with withdrawal from alcohol and benzodiazepines and the uninformed use of ethnopharmacological forms of ibogaine.