Over the last 50 years, access to new data and analytical tools has expanded the study of analytical paleobiology, contributing to innovative analyses of biodiversity dynamics over Earth's history. Despite—or even spurred by—this growing availability of resources, analytical paleobiology faces deep-rooted obstacles that stem from the need for more equitable access to data and best practices to guide analyses of the fossil record. Recent progress has been accelerated by a collective push toward more collaborative, interdisciplinary, and open science, especially by early-career researchers. Here, we survey four challenges facing analytical paleobiology from an early-career perspective: (1) accounting for biases when interpreting the fossil record; (2) integrating fossil and modern biodiversity data; (3) building data science skills; and (4) increasing data accessibility and equity. We discuss recent efforts to address each challenge, highlight persisting barriers, and identify tools that have advanced analytical work. Given the inherent linkages between these challenges, we encourage discourse across disciplines to find common solutions. We also affirm the need for systemic changes that reevaluate how we conduct and share paleobiological research.

Project HOPE, a global health and humanitarian assistance organization, has responded to some of the world’s largest natural disasters and humanitarian and health crises for more than 60 years. As natural disasters increase in frequency and intensity, otherwise effective health systems can become compromised, and - although less visible than traumatic injuries – populations with chronic diseases can be significantly impacted. Emergency preparedness and response efforts must adapt to address issues around continuity of care, access to pharmaceuticals, strengthening cold chain mechanisms, restoring supply chains, and educating patients with chronic illnesses on emergency preparedness. Project HOPE designs medical teams and supply donations to work alongside, rather than parallel to, existing health care infrastructure, laying the foundation for the long-term recovery of the health system.

Background. In psychosis, the prime indicator of outcome has been relapse, but hospital readmission can no longer be used for this purpose. Researchers now require methods for assessing relapse that are objective, blind, reliable and valid. We describe the reliability and validity of such a technique using case-notes.

Method. Information from routine clinical notes of participants in the Lambeth Early Onset (LEO) study (less all references that would unblind the assessor) were recorded on a form divided into 1-month sections. Operational definitions of remission and relapse enabled clinicians to identify remissions and relapses blindly from the summary information. We calculated reliability regarding both the fact and the timing of remission and relapse. PANSS ratings at 6 and 18 months provided a measure of validity.

Results. The kappa value for the identification of remission by individuals ranged from 0·64 to 0·82, while that for consensus between paired raters was 0·56. The corresponding values for relapse were 0·57–0·59 and 0·71. Intra-class correlations for time to remission and to relapse were very high. Raters guessed correctly whether the participants came from the intervention or control group on 60–75% of occasions. Independent PANSS ratings were strongly related to the remission/relapse status of participants.

Conclusions. The reliability of the technique described here was moderate to good, its validity was good, and it provides a useful and timely addition to methods of evaluating remission and relapse in psychosis. On the basis of our experience, we recommend consensus rather than individual ratings.

A pilot RCT of cognitive therapy (CT; based on Fowler, Garety, and Kuipers, 1995) for early psychosis adjunctive to treatment as usual (TAU) compared to TAU alone is presented. Recruitment is problematic and numbers are small. Levels of symptomatology are low at baseline; and both CT (n = 12) and TAU (n = 9) groups improve, with few significant group differences and high levels of individual variation. This pattern is common to other studies (Jackson et al., 1998; Lewis et al., 2002). The body of evidence to date seems to suggest that CT for early psychosis is not strongly indicated as an adjunctive treatment for all people with early psychosis, but should perhaps focus on the sub-group of patients whose recovery is incomplete.

As reactions to yet another initiative on Northern Ireland underlined the durability of traditional perspectives on both sides of the border, it was understandable that there should have been some nostalgic re-examination in the Irish media of the might-have-been of Gladstone’s first home rule initiative of a hundred years ago. Centenaries increasingly stimulate historians and publishers into action also, but the two major new studies of the home-rule ‘episode’ from Gill and Macmillan take a pessimistic, even jaundiced view of the 1886 scheme as unworkable, and incapable of satisfying Irish nationalists, much less unionists. Despite its precipitation of a major political realignment in British politics and its confirmation of Irish political polarisation, the crisis of 1885-6 has received relatively little attention from historians. In Britain, the only major study since Hammond’s romantic Gladstone and the Irish nation has been the decidedly anti-romantic and detailed dissection of the web of party intrigue and political calculation and infighting involved in Cooke and Vincent’s The governing passion.

In the early months of 1882 two of the writers who were to be prominent four years later in opposing Gladstone’s first Irish home-rule bill made similar complaints to correspondents about the state of British public opinion. ‘Less is thought of the Irish question than of the Australian cricketers’, wrote Goldwin Smith; while in characteristic vein, James Fitzjames Stephen waxed choleric about the ‘extravagant idiocy’ of a public obsessed with ‘Jumbo the elephant’, while ignoring ‘one of the most disgusting and brutally dangerous civil wars ever known in these islands’. Each had a particular reason to be preoccupied about Ireland. Smith’s pique was, in part at least, that of the ‘expert’ whose warnings and admonitions had gone unheeded, while Stephen lived part of each year on his small estate in County Louth. However, they also reflected a general concern among politicians and intellectuals which historians have tended to ignore or underestimate — a belief that trends and events in Ireland and the British response to them had serious implications for the future of Britain itself. The recent major study of the home-rule crisis of 1885-6 by Alistair Cooke and John Vincent is remarkable in British historiographical treatment of the Irish question only in the way in which the normal presuppositions are made explicit. Cooke and Vincent argue with admirable clarity, and in remarkable detail, that virtually none of the politicians involved in the crisis were concerned with the ostensible issues of the home-rule policy, each being exclusively concerned instead with exploiting the political crisis which Gladstone’s adoption of the policy (also purely for tactical political reasons) had created. This denial of any importance to ideological differences in political crises is a characteristic of the so-called ‘high politics’ school of historiography, and constitutes perhaps its most serious defect. It is reinforced in the case of the Irish home-rule crisis by theview that, as it was undoubtedly true that few among the political élite cared about Ireland as such, they were equally indifferent to the issues it raised. However, not alone can it be argued that there were important ideological dimensions to most political crises in late nineteenth-century Britain, there is considerable evidence to show that this was particularly true of those involving Irish questions, and of home rule above all.