After the unconditional surrender of the Third Reich in May 1945, Germany no longer existed as a sovereign, independent nation. It was occupied by the four Allied powers: France, Great Britain, the United States and the Soviet Union. When it came to the postwar European recovery, the biggest obstacle was that the economy in Germany, the dominant continental economic power before the Second World War, was at an almost complete standstill. This not only had severe consequences for Germany itself, but also had strong economic repercussions for surrounding countries, especially the Netherlands. As Germany had been the former’s most important trading partner since the middle of the nineteenth century, it was clear that the Netherlands would be unable to recover economically without a healthy Germany. However, Allied policy, especially that of the British and the Americans, made this impossible for years. This article therefore focuses on the early postwar Dutch-German trade relations and the consequences of Allied policy. While much has been written about the occupation of Germany, far less attention has been paid to the results of this policy on neighbouring countries. Moreover, the main claim of this article is that it was not Marshall Aid which was responsible for the quick and remarkable Dutch economic growth as of 1949, but the opening of the German market for Dutch exports that same year. https://doi.org/10.1515/jbwg-2018-0009 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/martijn-lak-71793013/
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Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron’s The Californian Ideology, originally published in 1995 by Mute magazine and the nettime mailinglist, is the iconic text of the first wave of Net criticism. The internet might have fundamentally changed in the last two decades, but their demolition of the neoliberal orthodoxies of Silicon Valley remains shocking and provocative. They question the cult of the dot-com entrepreneur, challenging the theory of technological determinism and refuting the myths of American history. Denounced as the work of ‘looney lefties’ by Silicon Valley’s boosters when it first appeared, The Californian Ideology has since been vindicated by the corporate take-over of the Net and the exposure of the NSA’s mass surveillance programmes.Published in 1999 at the peak of the dot-com bubble, Richard Barbrook’s Cyber-Communism offers an alternative vision of the shape of things to come, inspired by Marshall McLuhan’s paradoxical ‘thought probes’. With the Californian Ideology growing stronger, the Net was celebrated as the mechanical perfection of neoliberal economics. Barbrook shows how this futurist prophecy is borrowed from America’s defunct Cold War enemy: Stalinist Russia. Technological progress was the catalyst of social transformation. With copyright weakening, intellectual commodities were mutating into gifts. Invented in capitalist America, the Net in the late-1990s had become the first working model of communism in human history.In an introduction written specially for this 20th anniversary edition, Richard Barbrook takes a fresh look at the hippie capitalists who shaped Silicon Valley and explains how their influence continues to this day. These thought probes are still relevant in understanding the contradictory impact of ubiquitous social media within the modern world. As McLuhan had insisted, theoretical provocation creates political understanding.Richard Barbrook is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Westminster, London, England. He is a trustee of Cybersalon and a founder member of Class Wargames. He has written about the politics of the Net and gaming in his books Media Freedom: The Contradictions of Communications in the Age of Modernity; The Class of the New; Imaginary Futures: From Thinking Machines to the Global Village; and Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism.
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BACKGROUND: Prediction models and prognostic scores have been increasingly popular in both clinical practice and clinical research settings, for example to aid in risk-based decision making or control for confounding. In many medical fields, a large number of prognostic scores are available, but practitioners may find it difficult to choose between them due to lack of external validation as well as lack of comparisons between them.METHODS: Borrowing methodology from network meta-analysis, we describe an approach to Multiple Score Comparison meta-analysis (MSC) which permits concurrent external validation and comparisons of prognostic scores using individual patient data (IPD) arising from a large-scale international collaboration. We describe the challenges in adapting network meta-analysis to the MSC setting, for instance the need to explicitly include correlations between the scores on a cohort level, and how to deal with many multi-score studies. We propose first using IPD to make cohort-level aggregate discrimination or calibration scores, comparing all to a common comparator. Then, standard network meta-analysis techniques can be applied, taking care to consider correlation structures in cohorts with multiple scores. Transitivity, consistency and heterogeneity are also examined.RESULTS: We provide a clinical application, comparing prognostic scores for 3-year mortality in patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease using data from a large-scale collaborative initiative. We focus on the discriminative properties of the prognostic scores. Our results show clear differences in performance, with ADO and eBODE showing higher discrimination with respect to mortality than other considered scores. The assumptions of transitivity and local and global consistency were not violated. Heterogeneity was small.CONCLUSIONS: We applied a network meta-analytic methodology to externally validate and concurrently compare the prognostic properties of clinical scores. Our large-scale external validation indicates that the scores with the best discriminative properties to predict 3 year mortality in patients with COPD are ADO and eBODE.
