Evidence based medicine is founded upon an ideal—that decisions about the care of individual patients should involve the “conscientious, explicit and judicious use of current best evidence.” Several publications are dedicated to evidence based medicine, and, at an international level, the Cochrane Collaboration has been formed to gather, analyse, and disseminate evidence derived from published ...

In the last volume of the SJIS the problem of agency and dealing with it as proposed in social science theories such as Structuration Theory and ActorNetwork Theory was subject of the debate forum. This volume takes up another timely topic namely that of the concept of ontology and its foundation for conceptual modelling, in particular the appropriateness and influence of the so-called Bunge-Wa...

This article describes the academic debate about the usefulness of the capital asset pricing model (the CAPM) developed by Sharpe and Lintner. First the article describes the data the model is meant to explain—the historical average returns for various types of assets over long time periods. Then the article develops a version of the CAPM and describes how it measures the risk of investing in p...

In recent days The BMJ has been filled with commentary and debate about the future of the NHS. NHS England’s updated delivery plan calls for many changes in the way healthcare is provided and the priority attached to specific services. Without extra money, this is a zero sum game. More resources devoted to integrated care, extended hours for GPs, and improved mental health and cancer services m...

A spate of articles has recently appeared in the popular media with such intriguing titles as "Maybe It's All in Your Head," "Make-Believe Medicine," "New Study of Brain Illustrates the Power of Placebo," "Antidepressants: Hype or Help?" and "Misguided Medicine: A Stunning Finding about Antidepressants Is Being Ignored," to name but a few. Journalists have found a new public-interest story abou...

II. Focus on Innateness: a. Central issue: the relation of the mental items in question and experience. b. Broadly construed, how are mental items tied to experience? i. Are all relevant mental items derived from experience? That is, do all relevant mental items depend on experience? ii. Empiricist: All relevant mental items are derived from (depend on) experience. c. Notions of ‘Dependence’ i....

The debate forum in this volume addresses the relationship between information systems (IS) research and design science, a topic which has spurred increasing interest and debate in the IS community over the last decade. The opening essay of the debate forum is provided by Juhani Iivari, who has conducted influential work on IS development since the 1980s. His essay discusses ontological, episte...

Since the classic papers by Sir Ronald Ross, the need to consider phenomena from both the individual and collective perspectives at the same time has been key to understanding the dynamic of infectious diseases. Unfortunately, this double dimension of the epidemiology of infectious diseases has been too often disregarded/misinterpreted. In their paper, Vlahov & Celentano revive the challenge po...