Lovering and colleagues attempt to advance understanding of construction cost escalation risks inherent in building nuclear reactors and power plants, a laudable goal. Although we appreciate their focus on capital cost increases and overruns, we maintain in this critical appraisal that their study conceptualizes cost issues in a limiting way. Methodological choices in treating different cost ca...

The excitement about the application of mindfulness meditation in mental health settings has led to the proliferation of a literature pervaded by a lack of conceptual and methodological self-criticism. In this article we raise two major concerns. First, we consider the range of individual differences within the experience of meditation; although some people may benefit from its practice, others...

This bibliometric study describes the characteristics of letters to the editor published between 2006-2013 in biomedical journals indexed in SciELO-Peru.253 letters (10.3% of total publications) were collected. Most letters (139) were in the Peruvian Journal of Experimental Medicine and Public Health, with marked increase throughout those years. 25% of letters submitted included medical student...

This paper presents a critical appraisal of resilience, a construct connoting the maintenance of positive adaptation by individuals despite experiences of significant adversity. As empirical research on resilience has burgeoned in recent years, criticisms have been levied at work in this area. These critiques have generally focused on ambiguities in definitions and central terminology; heteroge...

In Darwin’s Black Box: The Biochemical Challenge to Evolution I argued that purposeful intelligent design, rather than Darwinian natural selection, better explains some aspects of the complexity that modern science has discovered at the molecular foundation of life. In the five years since its publication the book has been widely discussed and has received considerable criticism. Here I respond...

AUTHOR’S NOTE: Revised and expanded version of a paper read at a joint session of the Division of Experimental Psychology and the Society for Projective Techniques, seventy-fourth annual convention of the American Psychological Association at New York City, September 6, 1966 (see American Psychologist, 21 (1966), 701). The present version is appearing as part of a symposium in Psychological Iss...

This paper responds to the criticism that "observer effects" in ethnographic research necessarily bias and therefore invalidate research findings. Instead of aspiring to distance and detachment, some of the greatest strengths of ethnographic research lie in cultivating close ties with others and collaboratively shaping discourses and practices in the field. Informants' performances - however st...

In 2007, the World Health Organization (WHO) received a criticism for a lack of transparency and systematic methods in the development of guidelines, which were at that time perceived as substantially driven by expert opinion. In this paper we assessed the quality of maternal and perinatal health guidelines developed since then. We used the Appraisal of Guidelines for Research and Evaluation (A...

T splashy attention and criticism of neuroeconomics is a referendum on how curious economists are about how the brain makes economic decisions and whether new insights can tweak old models or inspire new ones. At one extreme is aggressive disinterest in brain activity. This disinterest is motivated by the methodological history and convention of economists working extra hard, and ingeniously, t...