Mens Daemonica: Guilt, Justice, and the Occult in South Africa.

In winter 2014, the town of Thohoyandou, South Africa was gripped with panic after a series of rapes and murders. In this area, notorious for its occult specialists and witchcraft, stories began to circulate attributing the violence to demonic forces. These stories were given credence by the young man who was charged with these crimes. In his testimony, he confirmed that he was possessed by evil forces. Taking this story as a point of departure, this article provides an empirical account of the ambivalent ways state sites of criminal justice grapple with the occult in South Africa. Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic fieldwork, I describe how spirit possession is not easily reconciled with legal methods of parsing criminal liability in courtrooms. And yet, when imprisoned people are paroled, the state entertains the possibility of bewitchment in public ceremonies of reconciliation. Abstracting from local stories about the occult, this article proposes mens daemonica ("demonic mind") to describe this state of hijacked selfhood and as an alternative to the mens rea ("criminal mind") observed in criminal law. While the latter seeks the cause of wrongdoing in the authentic will of the autonomous, self-governing subject, mens daemonica describes a putatively extra-legal idea of captured volition that implicates a vast and ultimately unknowable range of others and objects in what only appears to be a singular act of wrongdoing. This way of reckoning culpability has the potential to inspire new approaches to justice.

Do patients "like" good care? measuring hospital quality via Facebook.

With the growth of Facebook, public health researchers are exploring the platform's uses in health care. However, little research has examined the relationship between Facebook and traditional hospital quality measures. The authors conducted an exploratory quantitative analysis of hospitals' Facebook pages to assess whether Facebook "Likes" were associated with hospital quality and patient satisfaction. The 30-day mortality rates and patient recommendation rates were used to quantify hospital quality and patient satisfaction; these variables were correlated with Facebook data for 40 hospitals near New York, NY. The results showed that Facebook "Likes" have a strong negative association with 30-day mortality rates and are positively associated with patient recommendation. These exploratory findings suggest that the number of Facebook "Likes" for a hospital may serve as an indicator of hospital quality and patient satisfaction. These findings have implications for researchers and hospitals looking for a quick and widely available measure of these traditional indicators.

Falling short: recruiting elderly individuals for a fall study.

Despite the importance of movement and activity indicators in predicting the risk of falls in older adults, collection and analysis of such data are limited. The dearth may result from recruitment challenges faced by fall-related studies that capture data on movement and activity in older adults. This article addresses recruitment and sampling methodology issues and draws attention to the gap in best practices left by previous literature. Authors conducted a systematic review of methods used to recruit elderly individuals for "activity-related fall studies" that assessed subjects' movement and mobility, and investigated incidence of real falls. The review highlighted effective recruitment strategies and identified challenges across several settings. Literature review findings were compared to recruitment challenges encountered in an activity-related fall study from 2011, focused on enrolling a target group of older adults with both high risk of falling and the requisite cognitive capacity to adhere to activity protocols. The analysis yielded several recommendations for improving recruitment of older adults for activity-related fall studies, including: recruiting from community-based settings; utilizing short-term activity protocols to promote involvement among institutionalized elderly; establishing eligibility criteria that may include those with lower cognitive functioning, mobility restrictions, and co-morbidities; employing direct-mail recruitment methods; and utilizing intermediaries to recruit institutionalized elderly.

"Think different": a qualitative assessment of commercial innovation for diabetes information technology programs.

BACKGROUND: This study reviews the state of diabetes information technology (IT) initiatives and presents a set of recommendations for improvement based on interviews with commercial IT innovators. MATERIALS AND METHODS: Semistructured interviews were conducted with 10 technology developers, representing 12 of the most successful IT companies in the world. Average interview time was approximately 45 min. Interviews were audio-recorded, transcribed, and entered into ATLAS.ti for qualitative data analysis. Themes were identified through a process of selective and open coding by three researchers. RESULTS: We identified two practices, common among successful IT companies, that have allowed them to avoid or surmount the challenges that confront healthcare professionals involved in diabetes IT development: (1) employing a diverse research team of software developers and engineers, statisticians, consumers, and business people and (2) conducting rigorous research and analytics on technology use and user preferences. CONCLUSIONS: Because of the nature of their respective fields, healthcare professionals and commercial innovators face different constraints. With these in mind we present three recommendations, informed by practices shared by successful commercial developers, for those involved in developing diabetes IT programming: (1) include software engineers on the implementation team throughout the intervention, (2) conduct more extensive baseline testing of users and monitor the usage data derived from the technology itself, and (3) pursue Institutional Review Board-exempt research.